corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1991

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Philip Morris Muzzled Marketing of Cessation Products
Join Together 2002 Aug 15
http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2002/philip-morris-muzzled-of.html


Full text:

A report by health-policy researchers found that the tobacco industry pressured drug companies into limiting their marketing campaigns for smoking-cessation products, the Associated Press reported Aug. 13.

According to the report by Lisa Bero and Bhavna Shamasunder, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, in the 1980s and 1990s the tobacco industry tried to undermine the marketing campaigns for nicotine-based gum and a skin patch.

The researchers found that the tobacco industry pressured a Dow Chemical pharmaceutical subsidiary to scale back on educational materials tied to Nicorette nicotine gum. The materials encouraging doctors to urge their patients to quit smoking.

At the time, Philip Morris was a major purchaser of Dow’s tobacco-crop chemicals, and suspended purchases of Dow products in the midst of the pressure campaign.

Similar tactics were used on Ciba-Geigy, which sold the Habitrol nicotine patch. The company also made tobacco pesticides.

The report’s findings are based on documents posted on a website containing documents that were part of the 1998 national tobacco settlement.

Brendan McCormick, a Philip Morris USA spokesman, said the documents cited in the report do not reflect the company’s current beliefs that cigarette smoking “causes serious health effects in smokers and is addictive.”

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909