WARNING: This site deals only with the corporate corruption of science, and makes no inference about the motives or activities of individuals involved.
    There are many reasons why individuals become embroiled in corporate corruption activities - from political zealotry to over-enthusiastic activism; from gullibility to greed.
    Please read the OVERVIEW carefully, and make up your own mind.

Jeff Furr originally worked through King & Spalding , a large multi-office law company based in North Carolina (extending into Washington DC, and even to London in the UK). The company provided the main external legal advice to RJ Reynolds Tobacco. Both companies were based in Winston-Salem.

Furr provided a trusted insider-service to Reynolds which far exceeded the normal commercial or litigation legal services of an attorney. [John Rupp, offered similar services to Philip Morris and the Tobacco Institute.] He was party to many of the industry's discussions and conference where fake-conferences were set up; sham organizations created; etc. Furr, like Rudd was involved in searching out and "training" scientists and academics who would maintain a pretense of independence, while actually working for the industry.

The McGill University ETS conference [November 1989] was one of the most ambitious of the industry's plans. It bought together about 80 academics that had been recruited around the world by Philip Morris's lawyers, and put them into social contact with 20 or so of the top executives of the company. This was initially intended as a Philip Morris-only operation, but in the month before the event, RJ Reynolds was invited to participate to help cut costs. At the last minute, BAT also became peripherally involved.

This, and many other sham operations, like the Business Council on Indoor Air (BCIA), and some of their secret funding of veterans and labor organisations, was also known to Furr since he received carbon copies of important speeches and correspondence.

Furr was also later involved with the SAI environmental engineering group and its executive Stanley M Greenfields (which was actually conducted through his private Greenfield & Associates). This was a similar scheme to the BCIA, recruiting indoor environment experts who were paid to give evidence to Congressional inquries that the smoke-pollution constituency of office building indoor air quality was not a substantial problem.

1989 Feb 6: Furr is involved in helping the Tobacco Institute attack an anti-smoking article by A. Judson Wells. Wells was a retired businessman who became a reknown epidemiologist, providing voluntary services to the American Lung Foundation. In 1988 he published a comprehensive study which estimated that premature deaths fom second-hand smoke could be as high 50,000 in America each year. This was much higher than the EPA had estimated (3,000) — and the true figure is probably somewhere in between. But Well's methodology (although not necesarily his finding) is now widely accepted as superior. [Note: Alan W Katzenstein was a contract statistical consultant often used by the Tobacco Institute to discount threats from epidemiological studies.]

1989 Sep 15: The US tobacco industry's ETS Coordinating Committee report says of C&B and Farr collecting information to counter a Califonian proposal for a smoking ban: "(Jeff Furr of WCS&R (Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice) and I assisted in this effort)"

1989 Sep 27: The Tobacco Institute's Chairman says in a 'confidential' speech that its success "in managing the issues is reflected in our blueprint for hearings. We call upon witnesses from the industry; from the scientific community — scientific consultants and academic scientists. As you know, this group is a direct result of the new funding the executive committee authorised in April, to enable us to revitalize our academic scientists program.
    • from the indoor air quality arena [ie HBI and similar companies]
    • from organized labor [AFL-CIO et al]
    • and the business community
    • from other groups
    • and the economists [Social Cost Economists group]

Within the Scientific Community.. our current team of 16 ETS and IAQ consultants are assigned not only witness duty .. but are also expected to attend and participate in scientific conferences ... to work with the general media, and to review and respond in print to critical articles related to ETS science.

    At the previous meeting of the Executive Committee, we reported on our efforts to identify, recruit and deploy academic scientists. As our explanded team of 14 academic scientists gets into full swing, we'll broaden our reach and our effectiveness, particularly within the scientific comunity, the scientific literature, and the regulatory agencies.

1989 Sep 27: He was a member of the Tobacco Institute's 'core constituency' of disinformation executives and lawyers who receive carbon copies of confidential information about the TI's corrupt activities.

    This key document is a briefing by James W Johnston, Chairman of the Executive Committee, Tobacco Institute, about their propaganda and science-corruption operations.
[NO ONE RECEIVING A COPY OF THIS DOCUMENT CAN CLAIM NOT TO BE PART OF THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY'S CONSPIRACIES]

[See the cc list on last page.]

1989 Sep 18: They are scouring the scientific reseach files hoping to find some study which can be used to counter the anti-tobacco actions.

1989 Sept 15: A report on the ETS Coordination Committee meeting: They have been discussing Philip Morris's massive 'closed conference' [exclusively of tame scientists] which is about to be held at McGill Univeristy in Montreal, Canada.

This conference is set for November 3 and 4 (1989). The planning has been done by Rupp at the behest of Philip Morris International (the PM-USA representatives at the committee meeting had never heard of it). Rupp had discussed this conference in the past with me, Jim Goold, and Jeff Furr. It is now seen as having uses beyond the Canadian context, and it's going to be expensive ($500,000-$600,000) so Rupp will probably come to RJR, PM-USA, TI, or all of the above for financial aid.

    Don Ecobichon, who has worked for Rupp and the Canadian industry before, has received permission to have the conference sponsored by the medical school at McGill. Ecobichon is on the faculty there.

    The conference will be closed; attendance is by invitation only. There will be no pre-conference publicity, no publicity during the conference, and no post-conference press conference. They look for 50-70 attendees and have already received commitments from about 20 U.S. scientists, 4-5 Asians, and 4-5 Europeans. Nearly all of the "[Academic] first team" [Wu, Wexler, Hood, Gross, Hsi, Fleiss, Switzer] will attend, and in part it will serve as a continued training session for them.

1989 Sept 29: Farr is listed in Shook Hardy & Bacon's accounts for the Medical Witness Maintainance and Development program . See p 47 B&W accounts from SH&B It says they held a "discussion with him re the "use of SAI in the ETS area" [SAI is an Environmental Engineering company - see also Stanley M Greenfield]
[Note: Despite the date, this doesn't refers to activity related to the McGill University ETS Conference, but to a long-term witness development project]

1994 Oct 24: He is on RJ Reynold's list of those who are given the responsibility of controlling and priming witnesses who will appear at a Congressional Hearing

1998 Sep 28: He is now on RJR list of those receiving "Issues Watch Fax" messages from from Steve Milloy of TASSC . Milloy had set up a global operation through Grey Marketing (the parent company of APCO after it was part-purchased from A&P). This plan was to monitor scientific and medical findings around the world and circulated the information to the tobacco companies — both items of special interest, and attacks on smoking.

Issues Watch was part of the backroom services set up for a coalition of companies by Margery Kraus's son Evan at APCO. It was then run through TASSC by Milloy, shifted briefly over to work through the lobbyshop Powell-Tate under the control of RJ Reynolds, and eventually migrated Milloy's cais.com private operation. It provided material for his http://www.junkscience,com web site, and allowed him to offer quick-reaction services to his clients when they came under attack.
[Note that Furr is known as "Jeff" by Milloy, which suggests substantial dealings.]
[The Neil Kodsi mentioned in the fax is another lawyer with Womble Carlyle who specialised in defending the tobacco companies.]

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