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Excerpts from: Tobacco firms hid smoking's effects, jury is told

By Ramon Coronado -- Bee [11/08/02]
 
A dying Sacramento man claims that two of the country's largest tobacco companies defrauded the public and concealed the addictive and cancer-causing effects of smoking cigarettes, then targeted the nation's youths as prime customers, a lawyer said Thursday.

"My client was a drug addict, and these defendants are the drug dealers," Gary M. Paul told a Sacramento Superior Court jury during opening statements of a trial that could lead to a multimillion-dollar verdict.

One month after another life-time smoker was awarded $28 billion in punitive damages, Laurence Lucier is similarly suing Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco for an unspecified amount of general and punitive damages.

He claims the corporations are liable for negligence, making false representations and fraudulent concealment in what Paul described as a marketing plan carried out nationwide.

"They developed and fostered a perception among childhood peer groups that smoking cigarettes was a necessary rite of passage into adult life," the attorney said in court papers.

Opening statements are to resume this morning before Judge Steven H. Rodda with Philip Morris' attorney Gerald V. Barron of San Francisco giving his opening statements.

The trial is the seventh on the West Coast involving dying plaintiffs who have filed suit against the tobacco giants in recent years. Two trials were in Oregon, two in San Francisco and two in Los Angeles. In each case, the tobacco companies lost millions in varying jury verdict awards.

Until recently, the tobacco industry was virtually judgment proof for more than 40 years, successfully defeating challenges in court by claiming as Grossman did Thursday that smoking cigarettes is a matter of choice.

But as Paul told the Sacramento jurors, it wasn't until four years ago that the tide started to turn against the tobacco companies with the leak of incriminating industry documents.

Paul claims that several documents prove that tobacco company executives personally knew of the addictive dangers of smoking as long ago as the 1950s and have since engaged in a deliberate campaign to conceal the dangers, "engineer" the cigarettes so they were more addicting and "target" the country's youths to replace their dying customers.

"It is a massive conspiracy that will shock you. It will stun you because of its depth," Paul said.

In one 1953 document from R.J. Reynolds, Claude Teague, a researcher for the company, concluded that there was a 96.1 percent correlation with lung cancer patients who were also long-term smokers, Paul said.

A year later, the tobacco industry ran an advertisement in 448 newspapers throughout the country to counter the emerging research.

Called "a frank statement to cigarette smokers," the ad said, "there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes of lung cancer," Paul said.

Paul said the tobacco companies also had a choice.

"These defendants had a choice to tell the truth and suffer the consequence. For my client, the consequence of his choice is death," Paul said.