Tobacco companies involve colleges in lawsuit

By Jenny Blake
Daily Bruin Contributor

Sifting through decades of research, the UCLA records department
has its hands full, trying to fulfill the demands of seven tobacco
industry moguls.

Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, among a defense council of
five other companies, has issued subpoenas to four UC campuses and
six other universities across the country demanding the release of
50 years worth of smoking and tobacco-related research.

The subpoenas are part of a larger legal battle involving a
federal lawsuit issued by former President Bill Clinton in
September 1999, in which the Justice Department claims the tobacco
companies misled the public by failing to disclose what they know
about the harmful effects of their product.

As part of their defense, the tobacco companies turned to
institutions that have conducted government-funded research, thus
targeting schools like UCLA and three other UCs: San Diego, San
Francisco and Berkeley.

The companies issued the subpoenas to determine how the
universities’ research relates to the tobacco
companies’ defense, said John Sorrells, director of
communications for Phillip Morris. He would not disclose specific
information relating to the company’s strategy for defending
the case.

A representative for R.J Reynolds was also contacted, but said
company policy would not allow him to make comments to a student
publication. Though tobacco companies would not offer information
about their reasons for requesting documents, UC attorney
Christopher Patti said the subpoenas probably stemmed in part from
the companies’ argument that the government was not misled;
that even if they were hiding information about their own research,
the government had that same information through other
resources.

The subpoena, issued in December, orders each school to produce
any and all research related to “tobacco, tobacco products,
cigarettes and/or smoking.” It lists more than 40 possible
forms for such information, spanning from original research
documents to diaries and tape recordings.

“The way that the subpoena was originally phrased, it
would be virtually impossible for us to collect all of the
documents,” Patti said. “We need them to narrow the
scope so that we can get our hands on the documents in a reasonable
amount of time and effort.”

Negotiations to narrow these searches among the UC campuses are
underway and should be completed in a few weeks, Patti said.

“We are hopeful that we will come to some agreement on a
reasonable scope for the subpoena,” Patti said.

More recent documents will not be as hard to produce as some of
the older records, many of which are difficult to track down or not
kept at all.

“It may well be that at the end of the day we have few
documents that they will be interested in,” Patti said.

Other schools subpoenaed include Harvard University, New York
University School of Medicine, the University of Arizona, North
Carolina State University, Johns Hopkins University and the
University of Kentucky.