ABC Day One story on tobacco industry documents available here

I just found a video of the first national TV story about the Brown and Williamson documents I received on May 12, 1994. This ABC Day One story produced by Walt Bogdanich, ran on May 19, 1994:

While I appear in the story, ABC did not identify me as the source. I wanted enough time to write about the documents before having to deal with potential lawsuits. When it became public that I had the documents, B&W did sue UC trying to stop dissemination. They lost.

There are more videos about the documents including the PBS Frontline program “Smoke in the Eye” (which mentions UC’s successful legal defense against B&W) and the CBS 60 Minutes stories on former B&W chief scientist and whistleblower Jeff Wigand linked in my blog post “This is not the first time a sale of CBS caused problems for 60 Minutes.”

And this was just the beginning. The original Brown and Williamson collection of 1381 documents (about 9,000 pages) has grown into the UCSF Industry Documents Library that provides an inside view of how several industries have worked to protect their interests even when doing so undermined the public’s health. As of May 29, 2025 the UCSF Industry Documents Library contained 136,538,216 pages in 24,182,266 documents:

• Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library: 107,190,848 pages in 18,685,673 documents.
• UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive: 27,319,197 pages in 5,284,767 documents.
• Chemical Industry Documents Archive: 812,010 pages in 31,889 documents.
• Drug Industry Documents Archive: 346,543 pages in 5,755 documents.
• Food Industry Documents Archive:855,105 pages in 173,021 documents.
• Fossil Fuel Industry Documents Archive: 14,513 pages in 1,161 documents.

In addition to illuminating the behavior of specific industries, searching across collections highlights common strategies and even many common players.

And, it’s still growing!