Addiction Research Foundation: A Case Study Of A Special Project The Industry Was Not Interested In Funding

The documents contain at least one instance in which an applicant for funding considered the lawyers as the court of last resort in attempting to procure tobacco industry funding for research. In December 1976 the Addiction Research Foundation, directed by pharmacologist and Stanford University professor Avram Goldstein, M.D., submitted a formal grant application to CTR requesting $400,000 for the purpose of constructing a new research facility. The Addiction Research Foundation had been studying the mechanism of opiate addiction, and the new facility would enable it to expand its work to include the mechanism of nicotine addition.

Dr. Goldstein was told by CTR that it would consider proposals "directly related to tobacco and health, but that it was not in a position to provide funds for structuring the Addiction Research Foundation" {1913.08}. He then pursued funding from individual tobacco companies. Correspondence alerting the individual companies that Leonard Cornell of the Addiction Research Foundation would be contacting them was circulated by Shook, Hardy, and Bacon to Brown and Williamson, American Brands, Liggett & Meyers, Lorillard, Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, and US Tobacco. The letters stated that Cornell would be writing the tobacco companies to request funding and that CTR had already rejected the Addiction Research Foundation's application for funding. Cornell did approach the individual companies seeking funding. Only Lorillard responded to his letter, and it issued a terse denial of funding that offered no reason for its decision.

In a final attempt to receive funding from the individual companies, Cornell wrote William Shinn, attorney at Shook, Hardy, and Bacon, on August 9, 1978. Cornell argued that the tobacco industry should be interested in funding the Addiction Research Foundation because the foundation's work could be directed to developing a "safe cigarette"—i.e., a cigarette that "could create the nicotine effect that smokers enjoy without the toxicity of nicotine" {1913.04}.

Perhaps the term 'addiction' turns them [the tobacco companies] off. That is no obstacle. We're willing to establish the tobacco research under a separate name: 'The RJ Reynolds Program ...' or whatever. {1913.04, p. 2}

Although Cornell wrote that his appeal was "attuned to the needs and desires of the tobacco industry in terms of public relations and accelerating profits" {1913.04, p. 2}, he did not realize that the tobacco industry would not fund any proposals that acknowledged that nicotine is addictive.

The document shows that Shinn transmitted Cornell's letter to the general counsels for several tobacco companies as well as to other outside lawyers {1913.04}, but the lawyers showed no interest in approving Cornell's request. The tobacco companies refused to fund the Addiction Research Foundation because of their starting assumption about nicotine; at the same time, BAT's internal research program had come to similar conclusions about nicotine and addiction fourteen years earlier (see chapter 3). The reason that the Addiction Research Foundation did not receive support from the industry is summed up in a memo from C. L. Waite to H. R. Kornegay (of the Tobacco Institute):

Mr. Cornell's foundation actually assumes tobacco (nicotine) is addictive and costs the U.S. citizen 42 billion dollars a year! He also believes tobacco causes 300,000 premature deaths each year. And he wonders if this is why we might not be interested. {1913.01}