[Intl-tobacco] BAT Guildford documents go on line

[robert weissman]

Slow struggle to clear the smokescreen
Financial Times
October 26, 2004

By Lisa Urquhart

It could be one of athousand anonymous industrial estates tacked carelessly
on to the outskirts of town, but the unfortunately named Slyfield estate in
Guildford is home to the secrets of British American Tobacco's internal
workings and policies.

Alive with security cameras, the plain two-storey glass and concrete
building holds an estimated 8m internal pages and memos stretching all the
way from the 1950s to 1995.

The welcome for the few curious visitors is cordial but controlled. There i=
s
no dropping in just to look at the files. Appointments must be booked in
advance.

On arriving, visitors are carefully escorted into a room that has a two-way
mirror at one end, complete with a person sitting behind it. To add further
discomfort, three security cameras are permanently trained on the users of
the archive.

The archive itself is hard to search, as the 41,000 files are not organised
in any systematic way and are often catalogued according to title rather
than any meaningful subject matter.

Once files are requested from a database they are brought up in boxes and
have to be sifted by hand. Copying files is not permitted, and instead user=
s
have to make requests, which BAT says takes between four and six weeks.

Kelley Lee, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, said it was this difficulty in using the archive that provided th=
e
impetus for the Guildford Archiving Project. GAP is a joint project between
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of
California, San Francisco and the Mayo Clinic, a medical research charity.

It was set up in 1999 to provide the public with access to the documents in
BAT's Guildford depository.

"It was such an important resource that the public needed to see, and we
were aware that it was only available for 10 years [the depository is
scheduled to close in 2009]," Ms Lee said.

BAT was originally asked to provide public access to the archive in 1998
until 2009, following a ruling by the State of Minnesota as part of a court
judgment to recover costs the state had spent on tobacco-related diseases.

But the archive was not opened until 1999 after BAT spent a year reviewing
the documents for privilege.

The scanning technique GAP has employed now means that users are able to
search topics by word from all of the available documents, rather than
having to read entire files.

"Before, if you really wanted a comprehensive search on a topic you would
have to search all 8m pages. Now you can't hide anything in there, and that
is one really important advance," said Ms Lee.

So far, GAP has managed to scan 1m of the estimated 8m pages of the archive=
,
and is adding 40,000 pages a week. Most of the scanning has been carried ou=
t
in India to save costs.

One of the reasons the process has taken so long, GAP says, is the speed of
access that BAT has allowed. GAP complains that it has taken up to a year t=
o
get documents.

Another complaint has been that a number of documents has not been released
because of BAT claiming legal privilege.

GAP now estimates that all the documents will have been received by October
next year at the latest and the final online archive will be complete by
October 2006.

At present, the archive goes up to only 1995, but the group is planning to
add new documents from Minnesota from fresh litigation.

GAP first put in funding proposals for the archive in 1999. It was given a
significant boost by a =A31m donation from the Wellcome Trust. But, given t=
hat
BAT charges 10p for copies of individual pages, this just about secured the
archive. Another donor was the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute,
which gave $1m.

After almost five years of labour, Ms Lee believes the real work has just
begun. The group intends to spend the next few years looking at BAT's
activities in 20 countries, including China, the former Soviet Union and
Africa. "There is a lot coming out, and this is only the beginning," she
added.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/16e316ce-26ed-11d9-9157-00000e2511c8.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------------=
-
---------------------------------

Website to lift lid on inside story at BAT - Financial Times
October 26, 2004

By Lisa Urquhart

A website launched today will allow members of the public to examine the
internal workings of British American Tobacco down to the smallest detail.

The site's organisers say it includes evidence of BAT's efforts to thwart
anti-smoking initiatives, and has documents relating to international
smuggling.

The information is being published to coincide with the release of BAT's
third quarter results.

The site - a joint project between the London School of Hygiene and Tropica=
l
Medicine; the University of California, San Francisco; and the Mayo Clinic,
a US medical not-for-profit group - will give access to more than 1m pages
of internal memos, research and reports relating to the activities of BAT
from the early 1940s to 1995.

Kelley Lee, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine and one of the project's co-ordinators, said the launch marked a
milestone in public information relating to smoking. "Now people will have
access to all this information 24 hours a day and for free," she said.

The Guildford Archiving Project started out as a means of expanding public
access to internal documents which BAT was forced to establish in 1998,
following litigation brought by the State of Minnesota and Minnesota Blue
Cross Shield.

The project has cost =A31.6m and taken almost five years to complete, as ea=
ch
page of hundreds of files has been scanned and placed on the website.

Prior to the launch of the site, members of the public who wanted to access
BAT's files had to travel to the group's depository in Guildford, Surrey.

The site founders say the online archive will eliminate some of the more
obtrusive elements to a visit to Guildford. There have been concerns that
BAT lawyers are able to track visitors' searches of the archive.

Derek Yach, professor of public health at Yale University, said the archive
was important because it had already shown how health policy had been
influenced by tobacco groups through lobbying.

"It gives us important lessons on how we can work with companies because of
the many tactics they use to delay or thwart policy," he said.

Levels of disclosure could influence the behaviour of other large
businesses, he added. "The corporations will realise that they have to be
cleaner because it could be them next."

Deborah Arnott, director of Action on Smoking and Health, described the
project as "crucial", because the public could lose its access to the
archive in 2009.

She said: "It's very clear that once there is no legal requirement for the
archive it will be closed down."

BAT said it remained unconcerned about the site as the records had been
available to the public for many years at Guildford. The online archive can
be accessed at www.bat.library.ucsf.edu