Taking on a Giant

Anne Landman has always disliked tobacco. She avoids smoke by dining in smoke-free restaurants or, at the very least, by sitting as far as possible from smokers. She championed a smoke-free workplace while in college. She avoids purchasing products owned by subsidiaries of Big Tobacco – even, she says sadly, when the boycotted items include a favorite breakfast cereal. And once, Landman relates, when she saw a man toss a smoldering cigarette butt from his car window, she exited her vehicle, picked up the butt, knocked on the man's window, handed it back to him, and said, "Use your ashtray." He took it back. (Littering does not impress her, either.)

Having worked for more than 12 years as a respiratory therapist, Landman has first-hand knowledge of how tobacco and tobacco smoke do serious harm, and she is convinced that Big Tobacco must be stopped. "Someone has to rein them in," she insists. "Think about it. Tobacco companies don't have to provide a listing of their products' contents – yet even shampoo has to list its contents. And you'd need to have a permit to dump the toxins found in tobacco smoke in a landfill." She lists some of these toxins: "Benzene, arsenic, ammonia, formaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide – they use this in the gas chamber!"

Never one to shy away from confrontation, Landman, as Western Region Program Coordinator for the American Lung Association of Colorado, has been taking on tobacco companies since 1998. At first glance, she might not seem like a formidable opponent to organizations with such massive financial and political clout, but she says she is always thinking, "Where is their Achilles' heel?" She zeroes in on those weak spots, and it has paid off.

From Home Care to Advocacy

In her career as a respiratory therapist, Landman provided the gamut of respiratory care for patients: ICU, ER, pediatrics, neonates, rehabilitation, and, finally, home care. What struck her was the disproportionate number of people who required respiratory treatment due to smoking-related conditions. She estimates that 95% of her patient load in home care was smoking-related.

Feeling emotionally wounded from dealing with the home care patients, Landman decided she needed a change. She learned about a new Bachelor's degree program in environmental restoration/waste management technology being offered in the state of Colorado. Geared toward cleaning up pollution (particularly from mining) the program appealed to Landman's environmentalism, and she signed up. An internship involving air quality kept her in touch with the respiratory realm. In her final year, not wanting to be left holding a useless degree when the government cut funding for mining clean-up programs, she broadened her studies to include communications and picked up courses in law, ethics, and journalism. She found these studies fascinating and earned straight A's.

Despite her full course load, Landman also found time to volunteer with the Lung Association of Colorado. And it was here that she saw a full-time job that sparked her interest: Western Region Program Coordinator. When she was hired shortly after graduation in 1996, Landman's responsibilities included fundraising, organizing and implementing a children's asthma management program, and running teen smoking cessation programs.

Big Tobacco's Secrets Laid Bare

1996 happened to be a very opportune year for tobacco issues: a settlement was imminent in the ongoing legal action being brought against the tobacco industry by 46 states and five US territories. Ultimately, the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement forced the tobacco industry to post publicly 36 million internal documents.

To Landman, this was a landmark. "To be able to do the equivalent of walking into these big corporations' offices, opening their file drawers, finding any letter or report – any little scrap of paper, any memo – and searching it," she says, her voice filled with quiet amazement.

After the settlement, Landman spent hours of leisure time at her computer, at home in the mountains of Colorado, sifting through tobacco industry documents and unearthing things that outraged, amazed, and in some ways entertained her. She then posted these documents on the internet (to view Landman's document collection, see Tobacco Documents Online.) "The more I read," she says, "the more I started to understand the tobacco industry's lingo." A few examples from the documents:

Stopping a Scheme to Hook Kids

In early 1999, Landman made a discovery that she considers her main achievement to date. She amassed evidence to show that the retail merchandising system of self-serve tobacco displays, in combination with industry "placement fees," was designed to illicitly funnel cigarettes to youth. The self-serve displays were located in stores within reach of children, but out of sight of the clerk – thus enabling shoplifting, and, by extension, nicotine addiction.

Determined to prove how easy it was to shoplift under this system, Landman would deliberately steal cigarettes, then confront the clerks with what she had done. In most cases, they were indifferent. What revenue was lost from theft was more than compensated for by the tobacco industry's placement fees. Such shenanigans outraged Landman. Her efforts came to the media's attention, and in April 1999, CBS Evening News produced an Eye on America segment about the scheme. Since then, bans on self-service tobacco displays have been increasing across the United States. "When you see the difference you can make with a little effort, organization, and planning," she says, "you think, how much more can be done?"

Landman's after-hours investigations gave the Lung Association valuable publicity. As a result, since 2000, researching the documents has become the main focus of Landman's job, taking up as much as 90% of her working hours. And she continues to search during leisure time!

Landman also makes presentations to adults and children, focusing on the documents she has culled. She explains how tobacco companies have marketed cigarettes to children and reveals what other products tobacco companies own. Her presentations to schoolchildren vary little from those to adults because, she stresses, she respects the intelligence of children. And she is always impressed at how well they grasp the meaning of the documents. "Once while explaining the self-serve display issue, I had 4th Graders ready to go out and picket a convenience market chain," she says with a smile.

A Sense of Personal Responsibility

Landman understands that her activities have probably made enemies in the tobacco industry. Nonetheless, she insists that she has never felt threatened or directly confronted by anyone in the industry. She is careful to ensure that her work stays within the legal definition of "fair use" of copyrighted material; that is, documents are reproduced only for the purposes of criticism, comment, reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. And she believes in being personally responsible. Concerned that some information may be too disturbing for her website's readers, she will not post everything she uncovers. In particular, Landman posts only a few of the tragic, personal letters she receives from worried smokers and from families who have lost loved ones to smoking-related illnesses.

Some colleagues have suggested that she should put the information she has gathered into academic or medical journals, but Landman has declined. Her main goal is to educate the public, the people who are in the most danger of tobacco-related illness. "I want to reach the people who use the product and who are exposed to it. I want them to know how the companies look at consumers. I want them to know what's in this stuff they're taking into their bodies." Why does Landman do this? Because she wholeheartedly agrees with her husband, Steve's assertion, "Now, when I see someone smoking, I see someone dying. It's hard to watch."

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