I'm thinking of submitting an information request to Philip Morris International, the world's biggest tobacco company.

Nothing too elaborate. I only want to know a bit about its methodology, if you like. Little things.

For example: how many newly-addicted teenagers are required annually, here and in the Third World, to fill the shoes of dead customers and satisfy the stockholders? What’s the corpse-to-investment ratio in a modern brand-leader’s marketing budget? How much does it cost, exactly, to frustrate medical science and governments the world over for the sake of a toxic product?

The company should be feeling generous. In Missouri, in concert with five other firms, they have just defeated a $455 million lawsuit brought by 37 hospitals demanding reimbursement for treating uninsured, often destitute, casualties of smoking materials alleged to be “unreasonably dangerous”. Big Tobacco won.

Or as a spokesman said afterwards: “The jury agreed with Philip Morris USA that ordinary cigarettes are not negligently designed or defective.” This happens to be absolutely true: cigarettes do exactly what they are supposed to do, with remarkable efficiency. Their singular side-effect – early death – is otherwise a matter of consumer “choice”.

That must be why Philip Morris Asia is threatening the Australian government with legal action. In the antipodes, the firm wants compensation, possibly running into billions, if legislators proceed with a scheme to introduce plain and brandless packaging for cigarettes. If users can’t find the logo on their favourite toxic product, the multi-national might lose business. United Nations trade rules are being invoked.

With all this going on, my request for information might be a little optimistic. But then, unlike the University of Stirling or England’s Department of Health, Philip Morris International are under no obligation to supply the likes of you or me with any sort of information. That’s not how freedom of information (FoI) works. Public bodies have a duty to attempt transparency; private concerns, armoured in “commercial confidentiality”, can exploit the fact at will.

Hence Stirling’s current plight. The university’s Institute for Social Marketing, acting as part of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies – guess their aim in life – have been studying the reasons why teenagers start smoking, and what they think of tobacco advertising. These topics are of enduring interest to Philip Morris. Any risk that Britain might penetrate the secrets of teenage addiction, or contemplate a move to plain and brandless fag packets, needs watching. So the FoI demands have begun to arrive in Stirling.

The university’s studies, encompassing 5500 confidential interviews with children aged 11 to 16, are part of a larger academic effort involving eight other British institutions. The Scottish work is funded by Cancer Research UK – no one even mentioned irony – simply to discover why so many adult smokers started young. There is, it seems, a vast amount of raw data. And Philip Morris International want it all. They have, they say, a “legitimate interest”.

Or as one Anne Edwards, the company’s director of external communications, said yesterday: “As provided by the FoI Act, confidential and private information concerning individuals should not be disclosed. We made the request in order to understand more about a research project conducted by the University of Stirling on plain packaging for cigarettes.”

That couldn’t – unlike traditional packaging – be plainer. But it also points to a hitherto unsuspected problem with FoI in a country usually obsessed with official secrecy. Here, as in England, the legislation is intended to be strictly neutral: any individual, group or company is supposed to have the same rights to information as any other. Until Big Tobacco got involved, most people, journalists not least, would have called that a good thing.

But why do Philip Morris International want Stirling’s data? Not, I think, to provide helpful tips in the effort to eradicate teenage smoking. They say they want to study the researchers’ methodology. Would that be to help improve the methodology, or to hunt – in this, Big Tobacco has form – for anything that might be construed as a flaw? It’s straightforward: the company is enemy of the Stirling academics and their work. The law might nevertheless yet oblige the latter to assist the former. To assist, that is, the tobacco industry. And tobacco kills: you might have heard.

Some will say that’s as FoI should and must be. Information, say the idealists, must always flow freely for the sake of public understanding and innovation. If Philip Morris International play fast and loose with the data, the truth will be out there; they will be found out and exposed. Remember, in any case, the trauma that befell the University of East Anglia when climate change scientists attempted to frustrate FoI requests: they handed a victory to the sceptics.

Such arguments are naive. Forcing Stirling to co-operate with Philip Morris is akin to forcing the MoD to hand over military secrets to anyone with a passing interest in “methodology”. For obvious reasons, the legislation forbids such lunacy. But the conflict over cigarettes is itself a kind of war: lives are certainly at stake. Academics should be exempt, surely, from the predatory instincts of Big Tobacco.

Why assist an industry whose products are dangerous – every government agrees – to public health? And why surrender data that is funded by the taxpayer or by charities to a private concern with a £27 billion turnover? Philip Morris International can afford their own research.

The company will respond, of course, by saying that theirs is a legitimate enterprise, that their products are legal, and that they have the same rights as everyone else. FoI enthusiasts will argue that exemptions defeat the purpose of the law, that the Philip Morris case is, in effect, a price worth paying for openness in public life. But this is, for once, an actual life or death argument. Was this truly the purpose of FoI?

Stirling is not alone. Alarmed by the prospect of plain branding – or just by the idea that addicts, unguided, will smoke anything – Big Tobacco is reportedly bombarding government with FoI requests. The Department of Health, predictably, is the main target as the industry seeks to amass intelligence on its enemies, as they are perceived, in medicine, academia and anti-smoking campaigns. Would CND, Greenpeace or the average trade union enjoy such luck?

You could look on the bright side. You could interpret all of this as evidence that Big Tobacco is growing desperate as it loses the war in the west.

Why should Philip Morris International care about British teenagers, in any case, when in recent years it has been buying up tobacco interests in Mexico, in Pakistan, in South Africa, Columbia and the Philippines? Billions of potential addicts yet await. But will smoking seem so alluring to teenagers in those countries if their style-setting western peers lose the habit?

The cliché runs that no-one would get away with introducing anything as lethal as cigarettes today. Perfectly true. But that invites a question: so why is the tobacco industry and its outrageous behaviour still tolerated?

Should anyone at Philip Morris imagine the foregoing was born of blind prejudice, there’s a twist. In the interests of full disclosure, and to spare them from requesting the information, I am still, pathetically, one of their addicted customers. Unlike a non-smoker, I have 40 reasons a day to despise the company.