Valerie Yerger honored at the 2012 Legacy Tobacco Industry Documents Awards

UCSF Professor, Valerie Yerger, was honored this year at the National Conference on Tobacco or Health  for her innovative work using tobacco industry documents to demonstrate how the tobacco companies have targeted African American groups and inner-city neighborhoods. The Legacy Tobacco Industry Documents Awards recognize individuals for their use of tobacco industry documents to educate the public about industry tactics and disseminate this information to other educators and policy makers. Dr. Yerger's research also includes a focus on the relationship between melanin and nicotine, and the use of menthol as a cigarette additive.  In 2010, Dr. Yerger and her team contributed reports to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC), which concluded that the availability of menthol cigarettes increases initiation and reduces cessation.

For more information on this award, please access the Legacy News Release 

Congratulations Valerie!

2012 Legacy Tobacco Industry Documents Awards

Legacy's Tobacco Industry Documents Awards

Call for Nominations Nominate a Deserving Colleague for Legacy’s Tobacco Industry Documents Awards Legacy is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the 2012 Tobacco Industry Documents Awards. The awards include the Sybil G. Jacobs Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents and the Christine O. Gregoire Youth/Young Adult Award for Outstanding Use of Tobacco Industry Documents (for individuals 24 years of age or younger). These awards recognize individuals who have made a significant contribution to the health of the public in the recent past through use of tobacco documents. The awards honor innovation in the use and application of tobacco industry documents to further the goals of tobacco prevention and control in order to help build a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit. Those nominated should be individuals who have made a notable impact through innovative use of tobacco industry documents as applied to research, policy, or advocacy. These awards will be presented at the National Conference on Tobacco or Health to be held August 15-17, 2012 in Kansas City, Missouri. To submit a nomination and for more information, please visit www.legacyforhealth.org/awards. DEADLINE FOR NOMINATIONS – Friday, March 30, 2012

LTDL to Receive $6.25M for Document Indexing and Access

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a proposed consent order on December 14, 2011 with a federal district court that finalized requirements for three major tobacco companies to make internal documents public in accordance with an earlier ruling that the companies violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The documents have been and will continue to be archived in UCSF’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL).

The order is part of the remedy phase of the largest civil racketeering (RICO) case in the history of the United States and specifies that the companies provide $6.25 million to the court to improve public access and indexing of the documents.  These funds will go to the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library for this purpose.

“These funds will allow us to substantially improve the way investigators, the media and the public are able to research how tobacco companies produce, price and market their products as well as protect their political interests globally,” said Kim Klausner, UCSF Industry Documents Digital Library Manager.

“Research based on the documents has provided a unique insight into how the tobacco industry manipulates scientific and political processes and engineers its products and marketing to maximize its sales,” said Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, UCSF professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UCSF. “By revealing the industry’s behind-the-scenes strategies and involvement, this understanding has transformed public health from city councils to the United Nations.”

Read more at: http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2011/12/11138/ucsf-receive-tobacco-papers-funding-improve-public-access-documents

American Legacy Foundation honors Prof. Stan Glantz

The American Legacy Foundation has announced a gift to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to honor Dr. Stanton Glantz with a new Distinguished Professorship in Tobacco Control. Glantz, the first recipient of this distinguished chair for the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UCSF, is a widely respected scientist and advocate for tobacco control. Among his many personal and professional achievements, Professor Glantz is the head of the national advocacy program, Smoke Free Movies, a member of a number of scientific peer review bodies, and co-author of The Cigarette Papers as well as over 20 other books and more than 200 scholarly articles.

LTDL wins the Rogers Award

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library was awarded the Thomson Scientific/Frank Bradway Rogers Information Advancement Award by the Medical Libraries Association (MLA) at its 2007 annual meeting. The Rogers Award, sponsored by Thomson Scientific, is presented annually in recognition of outstanding contributions for the application of technology to the delivery of health science information, to the science of information, or to the facilitation of the delivery of health science information. Rogers was the director of the National Library of Medicine from 1949 to 1963.