British Columbia's Tobacco Industry documents

British Columbia is making public a number of tobacco industry documents made available as a result of legal action in the United States. As part of the settlement of Minnesota's lawsuit against tobacco companies, provision was made for public access to two depositories of industry documents. One such depository is in Minnesota, U.S.; and the other is located in Guildford.

The Guildford depository contains documents from British American Tobacco (Investments) Ltd. (BAT) and B.A.T. Industries p.l.c. Canada's Imperial Tobacco Limited is associated with BAT.

B.C.'s legal team conducted research at the Guildford depository, requesting copies of about 10,000 documents representing about 40,000 pages. Documents retrieved by the provincial government's research team are posted on this web site.

The Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository was established by order of the trial judge as a result of a successful suit by the Attorney General of Minnesota and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota against the seven major American tobacco companies, settled in 1998.

The Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository holds more than 27 million pages of documents, the world's largest hardcopy collection of tobacco industry documents. The collection is growing as the depository continues to receive documents produced in other tobacco litigation. According to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, the tobacco companies are to post these additional documents on their Web sites as well.

B.C.'s legal team has retrieved approximately 1,000 documents from the Minnesota depository in support of its action against the tobacco industry and these documents have been posted here.

PDF Format

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