Ashes to ashes

The success Big Tobacco enjoyed for decades in manipulating politicians and winning courtroom battles is crumbling like ashes at the end of a cancer stick.

Impressed with the way the states’ attorneys general engineered a $206 billion settlement for past and future health-related costs, lawyers for the federal government began exploring strategies for recovering hundreds of billions of dollars spent by Medicare and other federal health programs to treat sick smokers. Friend of Big Tobacco, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., tried to slip a provision into a bill funding the Commerce, Justice and State departments that would have barred Justice from spending any money on a lawsuit against the tobacco companies.

Democrats screamed, and Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., introduced an amendment removing the offending language. “To allow the tobacco industry to escape responsibility would be totally irresponsible, a surrender of our fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayer,” he said. The Justice department is now pursuing this litigation.

In July, a Miami jury handed tobacco companies their biggest courtroom defeat in history. In a class-action lawsuit representing 500,000 sick Florida smokers, the jury found that cigarettes cause many diseases — including 14 different forms of cancer, lung and heart disease — and that the industry had committed fraud, misrepresentation and conspiracy, and was liable for punitive damages. Two weeks ago, the 3rd District Court of Appeals in Miami ruled that the money awards should be decided individually rather than as a class, but maintained the suit’s class-action designation. The next phase of this trial will begin in October. Some estimates of the eventual outcome predict that this trial alone could cost the industry over $100 billion.

Such a result will result in additional increases in the cost of pack of cigarettes, which has been shown to be the most powerful deterrent to teen smoking. “For every 10 percent you raise the price, 7 percent of kids won’t start smoking,” says Linda Crawford, vice president of the American Cancer Society. The State of California, which passed Proposition 10 last November, adding 50 cents tax to each pack of cigarettes in order to fund children’s educational programs, is reporting a 30 percent drop in cigarette sales for the first half of 1999. The tobacco companies have done their part, by raising prices an average of 63 cents in anticipation of the states’ settlement.

While not particularly kind to tobacco addicts who must pay increasingly exorbitant prices, the relentless legal and political hounding of tobacco companies in the form of lawsuits and tax increases is producing the right result, a reduction in tobacco consumption.

As sales decrease and costs to defend itself skyrocket, perhaps the industry will slowly waste away, like the millions of people who died from consuming its products.