1987 Cig Ind Legal Coordination

The Cigarette Century p 297

By the late 1980s, the tobacco companies recognized that second hand smoke posed a potentially life-threatening risk- to the industry. As John Rupp, a lawyer at Covington & Burling working on tobacco accounts, put it, “we are in deep shit.” Rupp was speaking at a 1987 conference for Phillip Moris’s Project Down Under, organized to devise new strategies to address the threat. 66 Attendees continued to hope for ways to upend the research implicating second hand smoke as a serious health risk. Minutes from the meeting reported, “A scientific battle was lost with the Surgeon General’s 1986 Report. Is there any way of showing the Surgeon General is wrong?” 67 Even as the gathered executives recognized that they were loosing the battle of public perceptions, they understood that they still had considerable advantages in resources and power.”