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From westword.com
Smoke Detector
Anne Landman has dedicated her life to being a pain in the ash. Will it
make a difference come election time?
BY LAURA BOND
Anne Landman is addicted to cigarettes.
She's never actually smoked a whole one, but she can't stop thinking about
them: how they're made, how they're marketed, what's in them, who buys them, who
makes sure they'll always be for sale.
"People think I'm obsessed, a one-issue person," Landman says. "It's more
like I'm wrapped up in a really good murder mystery that I can't stop reading --
except it doesn't end."
Landman is an environmentalist and activist who lives in Glade Park,
Colorado, a tiny high-desert hamlet ten miles outside of Grand Junction. The
town is so small that newspapers don't deliver to its roughly 300 residents and
shopping is limited to a convenience store that sells little besides gas, cheese
and lottery tickets. It is about as far from Corporate America as you can
possibly get, which is the point: In 1995, Landman and her husband decided to
build a life very much off the grid. In the sandstone plains of Mesa County,
they constructed a plaster-and-glass, eco-friendly "earthship," a house made out
of 4,000 tires with an indoor garden watered by roof runoff.
It is from here, in the middle of nowhere, that Landman has made a career
out of watching the world's most powerful corporations. She is one of the most
visible tobacco researchers in the United States -- and a professional pain in
Big Tobacco's ass.
"I'm like a throbbing brain in a jar," she says, peering out from a
computer screen covered with sticky notes. "I've got these tentacles out
everywhere to people I never see or talk to. It's a very strange way to live."
A transplant from West Hollywood, the Jewish daughter of a doctor, Landman
spent twelve years as a respiratory therapist in Grand Junction during the early
'80s. At that time, the town was a rural, workaday community of about 40,000 --
one that sustained five oxygen companies, thanks to the population's smoking
habit.
"It was the saddest, most tragic stuff, very tough to see," she says. "You
had people who felt like they were drowning, just knowing that as their
illnesses progressed, life would get harder and harder. I think it would have
been easier if they just died."
But it wasn't until 1999 that tobacco truly changed Landman's life. While
working as a regional program director for the American Lung Association of
Colorado, she stumbled upon www.tobaccodocuments.org, which contained materials
related to a multi-state lawsuit brought against the tobacco industry in 1997. A
consortium of attorneys general representing 45 states, including Colorado, the
District of Columbia and five U.S. territories, had argued that the
manufacturers owed a debt to states -- and to smokers -- for the damage done by
their products. They presented evidence that the industry had deceived the
public about the dangers of tobacco and had aggressively marketed to young
people.
The Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 resolved the suit for more than
$200 billion over 25 years. The major tobacco corporations -- including the R.J.
Reynolds Tobacco Company, Philip Morris Incorporated, Brown & Williamson and the
Lorillard Tobacco Company -- agreed to cease marketing to youth and to post
online reams of documents that were unearthed during the discovery phase of the
lawsuit. Smokefree.net, a web-driven tobacco-awareness organization based in
Washington, D.C., compiled the bulk of the MSA data on tobaccodocuments.org,
creating one searchable site that gave the public its first real glimpse into
the industry's inner life.
Once she began reading, Landman was hooked.
"It was just so creepy and fascinating," she says. "It was like being able
to walk into the offices of some corporate executive and opening the file
cabinet to see what they'd been doing. It definitely appealed to my prurient
interest. It was like looking up somebody's skirt."
There are currently more than 27 million tobacco documents online, from
the mundane -- budgets, employee manuals, press releases -- to the damning,
including an infamous 1963 Brown & Williamson legal brief that states, "We are
in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug." And more come every
day: The tobacco companies must upload their correspondence to the web through
2010.
Landman hasn't read every document, but she sometimes feels like she has.
With support from tobaccodocuments.org, she maintains Doc-Alert, an e-mail
newsletter highlighting material she's sprung from various sites. (Each of the
major tobacco companies has its own documents site, and the University of
California at San Francisco maintains a searchable archive at
legacy.library.ucsf.edu/ index.html.) Several times a week, the newsletter beams
out to 3,000 public-health administrators, activists, smokers, former smokers,
professors and physicians in more than 35 countries.
"Anne is a passionate activist and a very tenacious researcher," says
Michael Tacelosky, founder of Smokefree.net. "We've got six million documents on
our site, and her list allows people to get bite-sized bits of it. Rather than
learning the dictionary, say, you learn one word a day. A lot of people have gut
feelings about what has gone on in the tobacco industry, but the list allows
them to really see for themselves: pieces of paper, hard evidence, documents.
There's a lot of power in her list."
In Glade Park, where people keep mostly to themselves and only three
channels come through on TV, the listserv gives Landman a conduit to the larger
world. It also keeps her company, since she spends most of the day on the
computer, accompanied only by her dog, Jack.
"The Internet is a surrogate community," she says. "It helps with the
loneliness. You don't realize how much people mean to you until you move away
from them. Like people at the grocery store, on the street -- the guy who brings
my coffee at my favorite coffee shop. Every time I go to town, I just get so
excited to see him."
People are excited to hear from Landman, too. Her first Doc-Alert post
five years ago was a 1964 memo she'd uncovered that became known as the "Kent
Safety Image." Earlier that year, a Surgeon General's report warning of the
dangers of smoking -- particularly unfiltered cigarettes -- got everyone talking
about tobacco. A Reader's Digest article on the topic released shortly after the
report named the filtered Kent brand as the "safest" cigarette available. The
Lorillard Tobacco Company saw the article as an opportunity to launch a new
advertising campaign celebrating the protective powers of the Kent cigarette
filter. "KENT was marketed as a 'safer' cigarette for the smoker who was
concerned about smoking and health," wrote Lorillard's M. Yellen to the
company's CEO. "Lorillard exploited this advantage so that within a short period
of two years the KENT volume grew from less than four billion cigarettes to
thirty-eight billion annually."
Elsewhere in the nine-page document, Yellen referenced the launch of
Newport, a then-new menthol cigarette: "The brand was marketed as a 'fun
cigarette'.... It was advertised as such and obtained a youthful group as well
as
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I'm not reading the whole thing, but, I read enough. In the 80's, Grand
Junction never had 40,000 people. Also, having a collapsed lung then, I
recieved therapy from a respiratory therapist. Don't recognise her name, but
she may have been at St. Mary's hospital. I was at Community Hospital. St.
Mary's has terrible care, inconsiderate personnel, etc. And, after having
left the hospital, I often wondered, where was the American Lung Association
when my lung collapsed? We have several residents that build houses out of
trash. They're an eyesore. So, not a lot of credibility in this story.
--
Larry
Unlock the Universe
From westword.com
A transplant from West Hollywood, the Jewish daughter of a doctor,
Landman
spent twelve years as a respiratory therapist in Grand Junction during the
early
'80s. At that time, the town was a rural, workaday community of about
40,000 --
...
But it wasn't until 1999 that tobacco truly changed Landman's life.
While
working as a regional program director for the American Lung Association
of
Colorado, ...
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From westword.com
I wonder if there is a Landman around taking on the auto industry...
How come we never got to see their private documents?
If 4-aminowhatever bawb likes was used in rubber production, why don't we
hear that burning your tires would cause cancer?
If cigarettes contain only 40 known carcinogens, where do the other 5,000
come from that are in our air?
If cigarettes contain over 4,000 chemicals, where do the other 71,000 come
from that are in our air?
Why did anti-smokers include PO210 as a major scare when there are over 200
radioactive (cancer causing) particles in our air?
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In article <FNSdnW84e5SLoM_cRVn-vw@look.ca>, Marky <akwaraaat8@look.ca> wrote:
I wonder if there is a Landman around taking on the auto industry...
Ralph Nader was. And look what happened.
How come we never got to see their private documents?
Maybe because, when used as intended, automobile's don't cause
disease and death.
If 4-aminowhatever bawb likes was used in rubber production, why don't we
hear that burning your tires would cause cancer?
See above.
If cigarettes contain only 40 known carcinogens, where do the other 5,000
come from that are in our air?
There is a very short list of carcinogens, contrary to popular belief.
If cigarettes contain over 4,000 chemicals, where do the other 71,000 come
from that are in our air?
List them, please.
Why did anti-smokers include PO210 as a major scare when there are over 200
radioactive (cancer causing) particles in our air?
Geez, Marky, you are a lunatic.
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