Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tobacco industry wants us to believe that smoking is a choice made by informed adults who evaluate the potential health risks of smoking and then decide, none the less, to engage in a risky behavior. Yet, these claims are near impossible to accept, especially in light of the fact that the tobacco industry so wants to avoid civil trials that, in the last year alone, it has agreed to pay $250 billion dollars to treat smoking related illness over the next 25 years...
...Miss). In the fullness of time, he became a born-again Christian and crusading lawyer who took up the cause of Nathan Horton, a black carpenter and contractor who smoked two packs of Pall Malls a day, developed emphysema and lung cancer and filed suit against the American Tobacco Co. for $1.5 million in damages in 1986. Horton died in early 1987, but Barrett and the Horton family kept up the fight...
...first court battle ended in a mistrial. On retrial, the jury embraced New Thinking by finding American Tobacco liable for Horton's death--a conceptual breakthrough. But Old Thinking lingered: the jury figured, at the same time, that Horton had obviously brought cancer on himself and awarded zero dollars in damages...
Next came industrial espionage. Orey introduces an engaging, skittish misfit named Merrell Williams, a Ph.D. in theater with an intermittent drinking problem and an inability to hold a job until he went to work as a paralegal doing closely held research for Brown & Williamson Tobacco. The object of Williams' work was to determine what B&W execs knew about the effects of tobacco and when they knew it, to help company lawyers fight future damage claims. Out of a sometimes fuddled sense of righteousness, Williams began smuggling documents from the B&W offices and copying them. The pilfered papers--which...
Finally, Orey focuses on Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore's brainstorm: his novel lawsuit against the entire tobacco industry to recover the state's Medicaid costs. The idea worked with thermonuclear effectiveness, blowing tobacco's safe and unlocking the dirty billions...