From a 15-foot industrial ladder, in the dim light of the warehouse, the bankers boxes resemble coffins — 28,455 stacked in rows up to 12 high, four wide, 70 deep, boxes containing 93 million pages of paper — in a mausoleum to cigarette smoking. Here, in the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository, lie the remains of 27 years of legal cases against Big Tobacco. There are trial transcripts, exhibits, images of the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, a diseased lung in preserving liquid, stories of smokers’ deaths, and secrets that, once revealed, helped end the tobacco industry’s dominance in the cultural landscape of the United States. The warehouse, open to the public for 23 years, will close on Tuesday, ending an unprecedented court-ordered, industry-funded central collection of the legacy of a product that, according to the surgeon general, has killed more than 20 million Americans and continues to kill more than 400,000 a year. Most of the documents have been put online by the University of California at San Francisco, which used software to lift them from company websites, and the physical copies will be destroyed. I spent years researching some of the history that’s stored there, looking for the Marlboro Man models and Western landscapes used in one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history for a book I’m writing. So I thought it was important to visit the archive before it closed. I wanted to look behind the billboards. I wanted to see the evidence that it was more than the cowboy that made the brand a legend. I wanted to understand why, in their first 50 years, Marlboro cigarettes killed 2.4 million Americans. What I found in the warehouse was a quite different Marlboro Country, scattered across a million pages. Here was Marlboro’s real legacy, buried in an impressive hard-copy testament to the power of courts to regulate corporations. The documents here informed more than 500 peer-reviewed studies and hundreds of subsequent trials, and they continue to influence tobacco policy worldwide. In these boxes, Minnesota lawyers found evidence that tobacco companies had known for decades that smoking caused cancer, that nicotine was addictive and could be manipulated, and that filter and “light” cigarettes were not safer. The files revealed that tobacco companies targeted children and conspired to hide damaging evidence in ways that a federal court declared to be racketeering. Though the original documents dated to Minnesota’s 1994 lawsuit, they were released to the public in 1998 under a settlement between the state and five tobacco companies just before the case went to a jury. The archive helped change the course of medical and legal history.“I can tell you that juries, when they see this stuff laid out, there’s no doubt there was a conspiracy intended to defraud the American public,” said Michael Cummings, a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, who has testified in more than 100 trials.
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Article Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/minnesota-tobacco-document-depository/2021/08/25/cdc1ecfc-050c-11ec-a654-900a78538242_story.html
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