I’m going to be publishing online my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” chapter by chapter, with the plans of officially compiling it into a book and publishing it down the road.
RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. This was a major part of the US Organized Crime Control Act passed in 1970. While it was designed to be able to take down the mafia, RICO has since been used against big businesses.
Sadly, many big businesses operate similarly as organized crime. It is organized. And it is criminal. Big Tobacco was no different. The defendants in this case included the companies, Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, Lorillard, Liggett, American Tobacco, Altria, and British American Tobacco. The defendants also include the Council for Tobacco Research and the Tobacco Institute which were essentially an industry PR/Scientific front group and lobbying group respectively.
Judge Gladys Kessler oversaw the RICO case. In 2003 she issued her decision in the RICO case finding in a 1,683-page opinion.
“[O]ver the course of 50 years, defendants lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public, including smokers and the young people they avidly sought as ‘replacement smokers,’ about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke.”
The companies “suppressed research, they destroyed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction…and they abused the legal system in order to achieve their goal—to make money with little if any regard for individual illness or suffering, soaring health care costs, or the integrity of the legal system.”
There is a 68-page report from Tobacco Control Legal Consortium summarizing these findings. This gives you a 50,000 ft. overview of the crimes, most of which we’ll dive into the details of in this part of the book. I’ve summarized the key seven areas.
Armed with this knowledge we can then dive into the set of strategies and tactics described often as the “Tobacco Playbook” from which this section of the book takes its name. Quite simply, this was because Big Tobacco were the ones that pioneered many of the methods.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, the group that I first saw sharing that this practice was engaged in widely, instead refers to it as the “Disinformation Playbook.” That’s because one of the main overall strategies involved, to put out information with intent to deceive.
But it does go beyond disinformation, which is why I’ve gone with the term industry playbook. Why do industries use it? Simply because this playbook is profitable. Despite some awareness of the strategies in the playbook, they still continue to work.
It is also because it is not a static playbook. Strategies that don’t work are thrown out. Strategies that do work are used again and again. Furthermore, they are updated for new technology.
Just think, all of Big Tobacco’s crimes as covered in the RICO case came from pretty much exclusively in the pre-internet world.
Besides profits for the companies, what are the results of this? The stat is a bit old from 1995, but relevant. “[T]he number of people killed by tobacco in the United States was 502,000 of whom 214,000 were aged between thirty-five and sixty-nine. On average, each of these could have expected to live twenty-three years longer. In view of these alarming numbers, it seems to me that the still-prospering tobacco industry poses a proven threat to health and life that is many thousand times greater than the potential of bio-terrorism,” said Max F. Perutz, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry.
A 2014 US Department of Human Health and Services report shared that 20,830,000 people were killed prematurely by tobacco related disease in the fifty years since the Surgeon General’s original report on tobacco. The annual costs of smoking on disease are estimated around $300 billion.
Only with more knowledge and awareness can these strategies possibly stop working. Closing legal loopholes and more will be discussed later as well but in any case, it is more awareness and knowledge that would lead to such possible changes.
In this first part, I’ll discuss the following areas, including how they overlap:
- Monopoly Power
- Advertising
- Public Relations
- Smear Campaigns
- Weaponization of Values
- Advocacy Front Groups
- Infiltrating Institutions
- Influencing Science
- Ideological Allies
- Destroying Evidence
- Lobbying and Buying Politicians
- Controlling Regulation
- Legal Defense
- Influencing Journalism
- Going Worldwide
- Leverage through Diversification
- Up to Old (and New) Tricks
The vast majority of this section of this book is based on The Cigarette Century by Allan M. Brandt, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The Times Literary Supplement called this, “A masterpiece of medical history.” It features a whopping 1550 references and thus is a very deep look into what is one of the most important case studies of history.
I highly recommend reading The Cigarette Century if you’d like to go even deeper. While the purpose of Brandt’s book is to cover the entire history of the cigarette industry up until it was published in 2007, our purposes here are somewhat different.
The aim here is not just to cover the history, though you’ll get plenty of that, but show you how these strategies and tactics are purposefully used. Some of the dates and events that occurred will be repeated across chapters as those are relevant to different playbook strategies. Understanding their genesis with Big Tobacco helps you to spot them used everywhere else.
Key Takeaways on Big Tobacco’s Crimes and The Playbook Metaphor
- The tobacco companies, including their industry fronts, lost a RICO case meaning that they functioned as organized crime, similar to the mafia.
- For over fifty years the tobacco companies denied, distorted and minimized the health consequences, that their own research showed existed.
- They attacked and discredited scientific links between cigarettes and disease.
- For over forty years they were aware of tobacco’s addictiveness due to nicotine, but they denied cigarette smoking was addictive.
- Not only did they downplay nicotine’s addictiveness, but they were manipulating nicotine levels through a variety of means, while lying saying they did no such thing.
- They promoted light and low tar cigarettes as healthier options with false and misleading claims.
- They specifically targeted young people through a variety of marketing campaigns as these were a highly sought-after demographic.
- Their research showed that secondhand smoke, also known as environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), was hazardous to non-smokers. They suppressed and undermined this research.
- They even destroyed documents, or shielding documents through legal means, to protect their profits and PR agenda.
- Over fifty years, throughout which Big Tobacco denied and distorted harms, an estimated 20 million people died prematurely from tobacco-related diseases.
- The playbook is a metaphor that is used to describe the plays that an industry engages in to disinform, protect profits, and obtain more power. In the coming pages seventeen specific strategies are described.
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Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.
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Love the article. Contains a lot of great information. But, I don’t think this statement found in the article can possibly be accurate: “Over fifty years, throughout which Big Tobacco denied and distorted harms, an estimated 20 billion people died prematurely from tobacco-related diseases.”
Correct me if I’m wrong please, but I don’t think 20 billion people have even lived on the earth in the last 50 years. If I remember correctly, there were around 2.5 billion people on the earth in the early 1950s and around 8 billion now.
You are correct! It should be million and has been updated to reflect that. Thanks for the catch.