Tobacco Industry Strategies to Undermine Tobacco Control Activities at the WHO

In the summer of 1999, an internal report to the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested that therewas evidence in formerly confidential tobacco company documents that tobacco companies had made “efforts to prevent implementation of healthy public policy and efforts to reduce funding of tobacco control within UN organizations.” In response to this report, Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland assembled a committee of experts to research the once confidential, now publicly available, tobacco company documents.

The documents reveal that tobacco companies viewed WHO as one of their leading enemies, and that they saw themselves in a battle against WHO. According to one major company's master plan to fight threats to the industry, “WHO's impact and influence is indisputable,” and the company must “contain, neutralize, [and] reorient” WHO's tobacco control initiatives. The documents show that tobacco companies fought WHO's tobacco control agenda by, among other things, staging events to divert attention from the public health issues raised by tobacco use, attempting to reduce budgets for the scientific and policy activities carried out by WHO, pitting other UN agencies agains tWHO, seeking to convince developing countries that WHO's tobacco control programme was a “First World” agenda carried out at the expense of the developing world, distorting the results of important scientific studies on tobacco, and discrediting WHO as an institution.

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