Word: tobacco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Richard Joshua Reynolds, 58, playboy heir to a king-size slice of his father's tobacco empire (Camel, Winston, Salem), who scorned the family trade to become a taxi driver, deck hand, aviator, ship owner, horse breeder and sometime Democratic politician, managing meanwhile to run through $10 million of his $25 million inheritance settling three marriages; of chronic pulmonary emphysema; in Lucerne, Switzerland, 36 hours before his fourth wife gave birth to a daughter...
Hastings won a verdict that cigarettes did indeed cause Green's death, but the jury refused to award any damages to Green's wife and son. Since the knowledge of tobacco's dangers was not established until the mid-1950s, the jury agreed that the American Tobacco Co. could not have known during most of Green's smoking years that cigarettes can cause cancer. Later, after the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Florida law subjects any product sold for public consumption to an "implied warranty" that it is not harmful, the Federal Court of Appeals ordered...
Question of Numbers. When the retrial opened in Miami Federal District Court last month, Dr. Hastings had hopes of winning the first damage verdict in the history of the tobacco-cancer controversy. His hopes began to fade when Judge Emett C. Choate started his charge to the jury. Implied warranty, explained the judge, only meant that the product must be "reasonably fit and safe for the ordinary purpose for which it was sold." The issue, he continued, was not whether Green died of cigarette-induced cancer; another jury had decided that. This jury was simply to determine whether "a large...
Under that definition, the tobacco company was found not guilty of breaching its implied warranty. Complained Dr. Hastings: "If a candy company sold one poisoned lollipop that caused one death, it would not be necessary to show that its lollipops had killed off a sizable segment of the population...
...problem that the jury was assessing the danger not of one unusual lollipop, but the possible danger of countless ordinary cigarettes to a "significant number" of people; as doctor, he must have realized that for all the convincing statistics pointing to a relationship between smoking and lung cancer, the tobacco companies can still point to millions of people who smoke and do not contract the disease...