Transparency as a remedy against racketeering: preventing and restraining fraud by exposing Big Tobacco's dirty secrets.

The 1990s state litigation that resulted in the tobacco industry's initial document disclosure obligations fully expired in 2010. These obligations have been extended and enhanced until 2021 through a federal lawsuit against the tobacco industry over violations of the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). In this special communication, we summarise and explain the new legal framework and enhanced document disclosure obligations of the major US tobacco companies.

Tobacco documents research methodology.

Tobacco documents research has developed into a thriving academic enterprise since its inception in 1995. The technology supporting tobacco documents archiving, searching and retrieval has improved greatly since that time, and consequently tobacco documents researchers have considerably more access to resources than was the case when researchers had to travel to physical archives and/or electronically search poorly and incompletely indexed documents. The authors of the papers presented in this supplement all followed the same basic research methodology.

Menthol cigarettes and smoking initiation: a tobacco industry perspective.

Objectives: To determine what the tobacco industry knew about menthol cigarettes and the initiation of smoking.

Methods: Based on Food and Drug Administration staff-supplied research questions we used a snowball sampling strategy to search the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (http://legacy.library.