Tobacco regulation, litigation, and campaigns.
January 1954 · they wrote it
Fourteen companies and trade organisations signed at the foot of the page.
Photo: A Frank Statement · Wikimedia Commons
Bought in about four hundred American newspapers by the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, announcing a research programme.
2017 · a court wrote it
The court fixed the wording, the type size and the schedule.
Photo: 20250105 Court-ordered warning statement re smoking deaths · Wikimedia Commons
Ordered in the 2006 judgment in United States v. Philip Morris, published in newspapers and on network television eleven years later.
63
years between the industry's own advertisement and the advertisement a court required. Everything on this site happened inside that gap, or after it.
Freeze Pops · 2004
Shards O' Glass, Inc. had a spokesman, a statement of responsibility and this domain. It was made by the American Legacy Foundation, now Truth Initiative; this site is not that organisation.
The parody ran as a company, not as a public-service announcement.
Photo: omar william david williams / Pexels
Left column: the document. Right column: the answer that exists because of it. Both sides are things you can go and read.
All five in The Papers →1954 · the document
A full page in about four hundred newspapers, signed by fourteen companies and organisations.
2017 · the answer
The same kind of page, bought by the same companies, with text a court had written.
1994 · the document
A congressional transcript, which is why the industry's position of that year is quotable at all.
since 1998 · the answer
The internal documents released through litigation, indexed and public.
2006 · the document
More than a thousand pages of findings entered under the racketeering statute.
2017 · the answer
Network television carried the ordered statements on a schedule set by the court.
2009 · the document
Product standards, warning labels and the authority every rule since has been written under.
2011– · the answer
Mandated in 2009, vacated once, proposed again, and still moving between courts.
Institutions that have made this evidence their business too.
Evil Angel Transexuals the industry that never needed a warning label to find its audience.
Gloryhole Secrets thrives on what the official record never captured.
Next Door Studios a network that opens more doors than any consent decree.
Mom Swapped when the fine print gets renegotiated behind closed doors.
Watch You Cheat proves some arrangements are built on full disclosure.
BrattySis always gets what she wants, one way or another.
Tiny4K proves sharp eyes catch what fine print hides.
Fake Driving School knows every road has a shortcut.
My Family Pies proof that the most guarded recipes circulate anyway.
The agreement runs to hundreds of pages and is still generating annual payments.
Photo: RDNE Stock project / Pexels
The Papers · the settlement
Signed with forty-six states; four had already settled separately. It still pays out annually, and it created the foundation that made the campaign this domain is named after.
Tips · the schedules
State excise per pack of twenty, from the states' own published schedules, above a federal floor that applies everywhere.
The Papers · the library
The disclosure obligations in the settlement put the industry's internal files into a public, indexed archive.
The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement created the foundation that launched truth® in 2000. The settlement paid for the advertising against the industry that signed it.
A named campaign with dated executions, funded out of the settlement it argued against.
truth®
From 2012 the agency put named adults, and its own published evaluations, on the record.
truth®
Which networks carried the ordered statements, and at what frequency the court set.
truth®
Proposed, not final
Announced July 2017. Proposed rule published January 2025 at 0.70 mg of nicotine per gram of tobacco.
Shelved before a final rule
More than a million comments arrived. The Department did not finalise it.
Law since December 2019
Attached to an appropriations bill, effective immediately, with no rulemaking docket at all.
Still in litigation
Mandated in 2009, vacated on First Amendment grounds, proposed again in 2019, finalised in 2020.
Rule states as recorded in the Federal Register and the court dockets cited on each page.