Drug companies toned down marketing campaigns for smoking-cessation products like nicotine-based gum and a skin patch in the 1980s and 1990s because of pressure from the tobacco industry, according to a medical journal report. ...
In one instance, a Dow Chemical pharmaceutical subsidiary that made Nicorette chewing gum scaled back educational materials encouraging doctors to urge their patients to quit.
This happened in the early 1980s, after executives at Philip Morris, a major purchaser of Dow's tobacco crop chemicals, objected to the materials' anti-smoking tone, according to the report.
In 1984, Philip Morris suspended purchases from Dow, the report says, citing a Philip Morris memo from May of that year.
"Dow was informed that the recent spate of activity can only be interpreted as a conscious corporate decision that Nicorette is more important than the Philip Morris (and other tobacco) business. That is, they cannot realistically expect a customer to spend millions of dollars for materials, when the profits from those sales ... are used to attack that customer's product," the memo says.
Another Philip Morris memo details how it resumed purchases after Dow changed its practices.