Operation Berkshire
Millions of pages of declassified tobacco industry internal documents reveal a decades-long international campaign of disinformation. In 2000, a jury awarded $145 billion in punitive damages in a class action lawsuit against U.S. cigarette manufacturers (Ciresi et al).
In November 1998, as part of the Master Settlement Agreement between the U.S. tobacco industry and various states' attorneys general, U.S. tobacco companies were compelled to publicly disclose approximately 40 million pages of previously confidential documents. During the course of the Minnesota Attorney General litigation (State of Minnesota, et al) the district court ordered the domestic parties to establish a document depository in Minnesota for the documents produced in that action.
These internal tobacco industry documents disclose collusion among the major tobacco companies with the primary objectives of 1) promoting false controversy over the issue of smoking and disease, 2) reassuring smokers, and 3) distorting and discrediting valid scientific research on the adverse effects of smoking. The tobacco archive provides clear and irrefutable evidence of the implementation and objectives of this international conspiracy, referred to by former tobacco industry executives as “Operation Berkshire.”
Operation Berkshire was created as a unified defensive strategy among international tobacco companies.[1] The code name was initially suggested in a confidential memorandum to the then President of Phillip Morris International, Hugh Cullman, by the then Chairman of Imperial Tobacco in the UK, A. G. (Tony) Garrett. A similar scheme, which served as the model for Operation Berkshire, was implemented within the United States in 1954 at a now well known meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York City (Glantz et al, 2000).
References
Other links
- Glantz, Stanton A., John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, and Deborah E. Barnes, editors The Cigarette Papers. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8489p25j/
- Ciresi MV, Walburn RB, Sutton TD. Decades of deceit: Document discovery in the Minnesota tobacco litigation. William Mitchell Law Review 1999;25:477–566.
- State of Minnesota, et al. v. Philip Morris, Inc., et al., No. C1-94-8565 (2d Dist. Minn.) (Ramsey County).
- Glantz SA. The truth about big tobacco in its own words. BMJ 2000;321:313–4.
- Tobacco Archives [1]