by Sharon Early

Created on: April 22, 2010

Big Tobacco even when they lose they win.

Big tobacco has pulled off somewhat of a coup and no one is saying anything about it. Normally when someone or a group of people, in this case the US government and individual states, gets a judgment in court against a group of defendants, for a punitive amount, that amount is expected to be tendered from the defendants. If you or I were to get a judgment against us in court, and we were ordered to pay x amount of dollars, we would have to pay it, not by weaseling the money out of our customers and paying higher taxes, we would be expected to pay it off out of our own pocket. However when big tobacco was found to have lied, cheated, and stolen from the American people to get them to use their products, they made a deal with the government to pass the cost of the judgment on to the consumers of their products in the form of higher taxes on cigarettes. The tobacco companies claimed that in order to pay the punitive judgment that it would cause them to have to go out of business, to a degree I think that this was the intention of the judges who negotiated and levied the settlement.

The following is a brief synopsis of the legal fight against Big Tobacco and their illegal practices over the last 60 years. This summary was published as part of a report by Barbara Francesco, April 25,2000 entitled A Tobacco Lawsuit Primer, retrieved from http://www.slate.com/id/1005187

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Individual smokers. Smokers have been suing tobacco companies since the 1950s. Until recently, they have been almost entirely unsuccessful-mainly because tobacco companies argued effectively that smoking is a personal choice and that people have known of its harmful side effects for years. That argument is proving less effective these days as plaintiffs produce documents proving that cigarette makers have known all along their product is addictive. The next logical inference-if cigarettes are addictive, then people don't choose to smoke them-has led to a couple of multimillion-dollar jury awards in recent months. In February, a California jury ordered Philip Morris to pay $51.5 million to a woman who said she developed inoperable lung cancer from smoking, and a month later, a state jury in Oregon awarded $81 million to the family of a man who smoked Marlboro cigarettes for 40 years before his death. Both awards were cut in half by the trial judges, and the cases are still on appeal.

Groups of many smokers. Class-action suits are brought by a few plaintiffs

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