The complexities of creating Good Epidemiological Practices developments have been examined by University of San Francisco researchers Stanton Glantz and Elisa K. Ong in papers such as "Tobacco Industry Efforts to Subvert the IARC's Second hand smoke study" published in The Lancet.
[2] In February 1993, an executive of Philip Morris USA, Ellen Merlo, wrote a memo to her CEO William Campbell outlining their strategies to discredit the 1992 report by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that identified secondhand smoke as a Group A human carcinogen, and to counter what she described as "junk science".
[8] In Europe the UN's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was about to release a similar report, which the tobacco industry also needed to counter.
[citation needed] Helmut Reif, Tom Borelli and Mitch Ritter at Philip Morris's Science & Technology division thought the CMA's GEP could be improved to help PM develop standards for secondhand smoke epidemiological studies.
(June 1994) on how GEP might be used to combat the IARC's report, since this would give United Nations weight to the claim that second-hand smoke was potentially cancerous to non-smokers.
[citation needed] The main organisation hired to run the GEP program was Federal Focus Inc., a PR company set up during the second term of the Reagan Administration by two top Agency officials, Thorne Auchter, who had been the Director of the OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) and James J. Tozzi who had been Reagan's "Deregulation Czar" as head of the OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs), at the OMB (Office of Management & Budget).
These two and the head of the EPA (Anne Gorsuch Burford) were among the 20 or so top Agency executives forced (or encouraged) to resign over Reagan's regulatory scandals.
They then widened the advisory pool and held a London Conference where Philip Morris opened the operation to British-American Tobacco and the other companies.
], so it was tried in Asia through conferences of the Asian WhiteCoats group (collectively known as 'ARTIST') and with other recruits in Kuala Lumpur, Hong-Kong, Yokohama, Beijing, and then Guangzhou.
with an excellent overview of how the Philip Morris GEP unravelled in a long letter of complaint to Cathy Ellis, his executive overseer in Brussels (Apr 3 1998).