A leaked internal memo from British American Tobacco allegedly shows Britain’s biggest tobacco company knew nearly 20 years ago that the sales of its products depended on their addictiveness.
The 1979 document is in 10,000 released in a lawsuit brought by Medicaid, the US state health organisation. It details executives looking for a new “socially acceptable addictive product, likely to include nicotine or a substitute for it, that did not need to be lit – to eliminate the need for inhalation and the danger of passive smoking”… “We also think that consideration should be given to the hypothesis that the high profits additionally associated with the tobacco industry are directly related to the fact that the customer is dependent on the product.” The industry has never admitted publicly that cigarettes are addictive.

(British Medical Journal, 21/2/98)