In the 1980s, research by the National Academy of Sciences and the Office of the Surgeon General concluded that passive smoke caused lung cancer. Later research would indicate an even greater risk of heart disease and other illnesses. In effect, the EPA report served more to strengthen political action against the industry than to bolster antismoking efforts with new science. For that reason alone, many tobacco experts doubt that any smoking bans will be repealed. Perhaps the strongest early warning inside the industry about the health and financial problems posed by secondhand smoke came in 1978.
Documents suggest that the industry was happy to oblige.
Likewise, in a 1981 document from Philip Morris, an executive laments the dearth of scientific information on which to support the company's public position. Some of the tobacco companies' research, however, appears to have served their opponents' case better than their own. In the early 1980s, says Farone, secret industry research in Europe found that one of the most toxic of the nitrosamines, a compound known as NNK, continues to build up even after a cigarette is extinguished. A Philip Morris spokesman said a jury in an Indiana passive-smoking case had heard all the NNK evidence and still ruled in favor of the tobacco industry. The industry dismissed or discredited research that was inconvenient to its side of the secondhand-smoking debate, some scientists say.