UCSF Receives $15M Grant to Post More Tobacco Industry Documents Online
Backed by a $15 million grant from the American Legacy Foundation, the University of California-San Francisco will maintain a "user-friendly" online archive of documents on the tobacco industry and create the Center for Tobacco Control and Research, a department that will study tobacco documents and "train scholars in the field," the AP/Contra Costa Times reports. Under the terms of the 1998 national tobacco settlement, tobacco companies were required to post the documents online, but would have been able to remove them in 2010. When it is completed, the archive is expected to contain almost 40 million pages of information made public mainly during lawsuits brought against the tobacco industry by 46 state attorneys general. About 100,000 pages currently are available through the UCSF online library. In 1994, UCSF became a "crucial" source of information on the tobacco industry when professor Stanton Glanz was given 4,000 pages of "secret" industry documents by a source known only as "Mr. Butts." Glanz will serve as the academic center's director. The goal of the new archive is to make it "user-friendly" and more comprehensive, UCSF and foundation officials said. Richard Daynard, Tobacco Control Resource Center president and a Northeastern University law professor, said that the archive and center "will provide the public health forces with the ammunition necessary to fight the industry." UCSF officials said the archive could be launched "within a year" (Yamanouchi, AP/Contra Costa Times, 2/2).