The tobacco industry and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Perspective hile there has been a redoubling of efforts to reduce smoking rates among Indigenous Australians, Indigenous health researchers have paid almost no attention to the tobacco industry — the " vector " of smoking-related diseases. The exceptions are two reports of the use of Aboriginal images to advertise Winfield cigarettes in Europe. 1,2 We decided to examine industry documents to look for the inside story of the tobacco industry's approach to the Indigenous Australian market. The online Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) has more than 70 million pages of tobacco industry documents, of which 98% are full-text and searchable. 3 Most of these records relate to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), which continues to require transnational tobacco companies operating in the United States to make publicly available all industry documents disclosed during the pre-trial " discovery " phase of past and future lawsuits. The LTDL does not include all Australian industry documents, but can still be used to investigate the attention paid to Australia by transnational tobacco companies. 4,5 The completeness of the collection is further compromised by the industry's destruction of many documents; 4 nevertheless, some consistent themes emerge. We searched the LTDL for tobacco industry references to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, guided by standard procedures. 6 Initial keyword search terms were " Australia " or " Australian " combined with " Indigenous " , " Aboriginal " , " Aborigine " or " Torres Strait Islander ". Further search terms were from items discussed in the two previously published articles 1,2 or from items in the documents retrieved in the primary search. These included " Kata Tjuta " , " Get your own black " and combinations of: " Winfield " , " peace pipe " and " Think Downunder " ; " Olgas " and " Australia " ; and " Senate " , " Australia " and " Aboriginal ". The document searching was conducted between December 2010 and September 2011. A total of 2295 documents were reviewed. We also investigated newspaper and parliamentary reports referred to in the industry documents. We reviewed all documents to assess whether they included evidence about the industry's approach to the Indigenous market. Most did not. Those that did were analysed for emergent themes. Transnational tobacco companies routinely monitor Australian media, parliamentary and scientific reports, including those related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 5 …