U.S. Supreme Court Buys Into Tobacco's Twisted Argument, page 2

U.S. Supreme Court (continued)

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Is the general welfare the enemy of the general health, which would be improved by cigarette regulation. The majority knows "that tobacco products are addicting in much the same way as heroin and cocaine, and that nicotine is the drug that causes addiction." However, it grants nicotine amnesty from the war on drugs. In the majority's version of Congressional reality, where the public is squared off against the tobacco industry, the enemy is not it, but us. The court seems to be saying that tobacco is special and more deserving of protection than the lives and health of our people, referencing "the economic and political significance of the tobacco industry" in explaining its view of Congress's immunizing intent. Congress may be hazardous to your health.

As the dissent -- author Justice Breyer joined by Stevens, Souter and Ginsberg -- points out, it is only recently that the FDA has obtained evidence sufficient to prove the intent of the tobacco industry to market nicotine cigarettes as a drug. Surely old politics should not trump new evidence.

Although the Supreme Court leaves it to Congress to manifest a new regulatory intent, the failure of congressional initiatives to resolve tobacco claims has demonstrated the strong hold that the industry retains on Congress.

This leaves private litigation. Public litigation, in the form of government entity suits, proved successful in recouping much of the public's cost of treating tobacco-related disease and in obtaining youth marketing restrictions. However, the industry still has paid not one penny to any smoker on individual injury claims, despite several jury verdicts and punitive damage awards.

Even the most successful smokers' trial lawyers are not taking on individual tobacco cases in the wake of these recent victories, because smoker’s suits are too costly to win. The tobacco industry still successfully deploys its strategy of attrition to protect, on the private front, the immunity the Supreme Court has now affirmed on the regulatory front.

It is time for those engaged in private litigation to take up the torch passed by lawyers heroically engaged in individual smoker's suits, to establish tobacco industry accountability.

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