Tobacco Institute and major U.S. cigarette manufacturers

The Tobacco Institute was the principal trade association of the U.S. cigarette industry from 1958 until its dissolution in 1998, coordinating the public-relations and lobbying efforts of major manufacturers including Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard.

Role in Documented Cases

The Institute and its member companies are the subject of this archive’s file on Tobacco Industry Litigation. Litigation beginning in the 1990s compelled the disclosure of millions of pages of internal industry documents, later compiled into public archives, showing that company researchers had understood since at least the 1950s and 1960s that nicotine was addictive and that smoking caused serious disease — knowledge the Institute and manufacturers publicly denied or disputed for decades in testimony, advertising, and lobbying. State attorneys general, led by Mississippi and later joined by dozens of other states, sued the industry in the mid-1990s to recover public healthcare costs attributable to smoking, litigation that drew heavily on documents surfaced through discovery and from industry insiders.

Accountability

In 1998, the four largest tobacco companies reached the Master Settlement Agreement with the attorneys general of 46 states, requiring payments estimated at more than $200 billion over 25 years, restricting marketing practices aimed at young people, and mandating the dissolution of the Tobacco Institute and the industry-funded Council for Tobacco Research. In 2006, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc. that the major cigarette manufacturers had violated the civil provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, finding they had engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to deceive the public about the health effects and addictiveness of smoking. The ruling ordered the companies to issue court-mandated corrective statements; publication was delayed for years through appeals before the statements began appearing in newspapers and television broadcasts starting in 2017.

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