Pubdate: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 Source: Baltimore Sun (MD) Copyright: 2014 The Baltimore Sun Company Contact: http://www.baltimoresun.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37 Author: Evan Halper, Tribune Newspapers Page: 7 CIGARETTE FIRMS EYED SELLING POT IN 1970S WASHINGTON - Richard Nixon was in the White House, his "war on drugs" was in full swing, yet Big Tobacco was secretly exploring the possibility of becoming Big Pot. Newly discovered documents from tobacco company archives at the University of San Francisco show major companies in the cigarette industry investigated joining the marijuana business in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The companies were driven then by the same shift in public attitudes now pushing legalization across the nation. One company even asked a federal counternarcotics official to secretly secure marijuana from the government for research. "We request that there be no publicity whatsoever," a Philip Morris vice president wrote in late 1969 to Milton Joffee, drug sciences chief at the Justice Department's narcotics bureau. "We will provide the results to you on a confidential basis, and request that you not identify in the form of any public announcement where the work has been done." Joffee responded that Philip Morris could skip Food and Drug Administration review of its application for government pot. "I do not feel there is any bar to maintaining the confidentiality you request," he wrote. The documents, discovered by public health researchers, were disclosed today in The Milbank Quarterly, a health policy journal. They not only shed new light on the Nixon era but appear when some Wall Street analysts and health advocates say tobacco companies may again be considering the expanding market for legalized weed. "The issues the tobacco companies were exploring are all still there today," said Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California at San Francisco. "The only thing they were wrong on is they thought legalization would happen a lot sooner," Glantz said. Legalization seemed in the air in the 1970s, although Nixon staunchly opposed it. He ignored a presidential commission's recommendation in 1972 to decriminalize possession for personal use. But 11 states would do just that between 1973 and 1977. Jimmy Carter was elected to the White House in 1976 on a platform that included marijuana decriminalization. Views shifted dramatically in the 1980s, however, and President Ronald Reagan oversaw a crackdown that included imprisonment for thousands of nonviolent offenders. The tobacco companies say the documents are no longer relevant. "Our companies have no plans to sell marijuana-based products," said David Sylvia, a spokesman for Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris. Company denials were also emphatic in 1971, when Joseph Cullman, chairman of the board at Philip Morris, declared marijuana was nowhere on its corporate radar. A note from the company president at the time, George Weissman, suggests otherwise. The Philip Morris marijuana collaboration with the Justice Department, he wrote, was meant to explore "potential competition" and "a potential product." Another Philip Morris memo, this one unsigned, laid out to executives the rationale for the marijuana research. "We are in the business of relaxing people who are tense and providing a pickup for people who are bored or depressed," it said. "The only real threat to our business is that society will find other means of satisfying those needs." Company officials say they do not know what came of the project. Nor do staff at the Justice Department or the National Institute on Drug Abuse. No files could be found at the National Archives. But the project clearly rattled other tobacco firms. An internal memo from an executive at the American Tobacco Co. reported his team had learned from a "reliable source" that Philip Morris "was granted a special permit to grow, cultivate and make marijuana extracts." Over at British American Tobacco, the world's second-largest tobacco firm, documents show a confidential research effort labeled the "Pot Project" was launched in the United Kingdom. - --- MAP posted-by: Matt