Handsel Art
PRESS
RELEASE
Date: 19 May 2008
For
Immediate Release
Contact: J.R. Few at
(870) 427-1365 or email
Tobacco
Free Marion County program coordinator Julie Andersen and volunteer J.R. Few joined a limited number of activists trained to investigate the
millions of tobacco industry documents at the fifth annual Tobacco Documents
Workshop at the University of California San Francisco, May 16 and 17.
Titled “Putting the Tobacco Industry’s Words to Work for You,” the conference was
hosted by the Center for Tobacco Control Research and sponsored by the American
Legacy Foundation. A group of national
and international attendees from Berkeley to India were treated with an overview
of policy change by veteran smoke free lawyer Richard Barnes during a Friday
workshop. Barnes made special note that
policy makers respond to money and pain and “…tobacco control advocates don’t
have any money so we have to understand how to show them pain.”
The Saturday session involved
hands on document demonstrations using the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library on
line. The collections are comprised of tobacco
industry documents from the late 1800's up through the present with the bulk of
the collections dated 1950 through 2002. The Legacy Library has an accessible
but sophisticated search engine for 8,264,666 integrated documents.
Says TFMC media coordinator, J.R. Few, “This is an important tool for tobacco control
advocates, researchers, lawyers, and policy makers to reveal and challenge
industry strategies. Even for the layperson these documents reveal the dirty
underbelly of a morally bankrupt industry.”
The UCSF Tobacco Control Archives were started in 1994
and can be found online at www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/
. 
Dr. Stanton Glantz welcomes
advocates to the 5th annual Tobacco Documents Workshop at UCSF. Glantz is Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at
the University of California San
Francisco School of Medicine and an iconic
figure in tobacco control.
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