ON MAY 12, 1994, a box filled with four thousand pages of secret internal documents from the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation (B&W) and its parent company, British American Tobacco, appeared on the desk of Professor Stanton Glantz in the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. The return address read only "Mr. Butts." These documents contained proof of what antismoking activists had long suspected: Tobacco companies were intentionally withholding information from the public and the scientific community concerning the harmful effects of tobacco. Professor Glantz and his colleagues analyzed the thousands of pages of documents and at last made public their report in a book titled The Cigarette Papers, which, they say, contains

overwhelming evidence of the irresponsible and deceptive manner in which B&W has conducted its tobacco business. . . . For more than thirty years B&W has been...