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Imperial Tobacco destroyed at least 60 reports on smoking, researchers say

Provided by: Canadian Press
Written by: Nelson Wyatt, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Oct. 15, 2009

MONTREAL - Imperial Tobacco Canada destroyed decades' worth of scientific research that demonstrated the devastating effects of smoking, a new medical journal article alleges.

The University of Waterloo researchers said they examined 60 scientific studies that had been conducted between 1967 and 1984, and published their findings in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

They said one of the studies showed tobacco company researchers exposing hamsters to cigarette smoke, and concluding that they developed cancerous lesions as a result.

They also said the studies demonstrated how second-hand smoke was worse than first-hand smoke.

The researchers said the documents were destroyed in Canada in 1992 at the request of Imperial's British head office, but copies remained stored at British American Tobacco headquarters in the United Kingdom.

They said the studies were conducted by the tobacco conglomerate under a project codenamed Janus - the two-faced god of Roman mythology.

The studies were ordered destroyed to avoid "exposing the company to liability or embarrassment," alleges the article published Wednesday.

"(These documents are) a unique source of evidence on addiction, nicotine product design, and often they far outstrip what we've done outside the industry," said Dr. David Hammond, who led the University of Waterloo analysis.

Researchers say they were able to inspect the reports after seven million pages of documents from British American Tobacco and its subsidiaries - including Imperial Tobacco - were released by a U.S. court.

While the document destruction has been the subject of persistent allegations, the journal article offers an unprecedented look at the documents' purported details.

Imperial Tobacco had no immediate comment, but spokesmen have said in the past that no original documents were ever destroyed.

A company spokesman responding to a 1998 report about destroyed documents said only copies were trashed and the originals remain on file in England.

Imperial Tobacco Canada spokesman Michel Descoteaux also said at that time that the health hazards of smoking had been known since the last century, but he denied there was any proven cause-and-effect between tobacco and cancer.

The province of Ontario recently filed a $50 billion lawsuit against a dozen Canadian firms and their parent companies, including Imperial Tobacco Co., over smoking-related health costs.

Other suits have been filed by the British Columbia and New Brunswick governments. Quebec is also considering legal action but has not gone to court yet.

Hammond said the article makes it difficult for the tobacco companies to argue that the public and government were fully informed about the dangers of smoking tobacco.

Hammond said in an interview that he was constantly surprised and impressed by "the amount of evidence, the sophistication of their methods and in some ways the creativity" in the studies.

"One document sticks out where they used guinea pigs and they used microphones and they would blow smoke over the guinea pig and then register how loud it coughed," he said.

Hammond said he believes the research was originally done in good faith but tobacco companies kept running into a problem: "They kept getting the wrong answer."

Hammond said he wasn't going to ascribe motives to the destruction of the documents, but said it's clear that the companies collected evidence on the addictiveness of nicotine and smoking, the cancerous effects of tobacco smoke and the risks of second-hand smoke.

Hammond said his team learned of the documents after the release of millions of pages of material by a U.S. court during litigation in the United States.

"Originally we found a document from Imperial Tobacco to British American Tobacco, their parent company, saying, 'We've destroyed the 60 sensitive documents as you requested,"' Hammond said, adding there was a list of internal codes indicating a number for each destroyed document.

Copies of the documents were then located in the British American Tobacco files in England.

The University of Waterloo researchers who examined the documents say they demonstrate "that British American Tobacco had collected evidence that cigarette smoke was carcinogenic and addictive."

"The destroyed documents reveal a vast body of scientific evidence on the health effects of smoking," the journal article states. "Forty of the 60 documents pertain to carcinogenicity and 'biological activity' of cigarettes."

Much of the destroyed research concerns Project Janus, a long-term program which took place between 1965 and 1978 to examine possible cancerous components of cigarette smoke.

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