Word: tobacco
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Over the past few years, tobacco companies have spent heavily to update their manufacturing facilities, resulting in several rounds of layoffs. There could be yet another wave of consolidation--or even wholesale corporate restructuring--across the industry, as cost cutting becomes paramount. Some lawyers will lose out as the industry redirects some of the $600 million it spends annually on legal expenses. Remarkably, the industry will find some savings on its tax bill: the settlement costs are deductible...
...third of a century has passed since the first U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking persuasively assembled the scientific case on the lethal effects of the habit. Yet the rest of the Federal Government, deftly manipulated by the powerful tobacco industry and fearful of antagonizing the industry's tens of millions of addicted customers, has allowed the cigarette to remain our most deadly but least regulated consumer product. Its manufacturers, meanwhile, doggedly denied that the ever mounting medical evidence against them constituted conclusive proof, yet insisted, with ultimate brass, that smokers had been amply warned of the health risks...
...tantamount to a rogue industry's confession of decades of malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance. True, most smokers have grasped that they were flirting with grave health consequences, but their awareness owed no thanks to the industry. Its Council for Tobacco Research and in-house scientists failed to undertake serious, sustained inquiry into the causal links between smoking and disease formation (no doubt out of fear that what they might find would put them out of business). Its Tobacco Institute picked apart every new Surgeon General's report and trivialized the damning findings of dedicated independent public-health investigators...
...package. It cannot resurrect all those millions of dead smokers or cure those now terminally afflicted. Besides, current high cigarette excise taxes already cover much of the states' public-health outlay to care for sick smokers. The settlement price is really meant to put a dent in the American tobacco industry's bottom line. But by gradually jacking up the retail price of the 24 billion packs they sell in the U.S. annually and saving much of their present multibillion-dollar-a-year advertising, promotion and merchandising budget (thanks to restrictions on those outlays in the settlement package), the companies...
...been done, for now at least. The lawyers have capped their Mont Blanc pens and shut their $3,000 Italian-leather attaches. The state attorneys general have returned to their paneled offices to watch, over and over again, the tapes of their performances on the local news. And the tobacco executives now daydream--the stock price has held up!--of a peaceful retirement clipping bond coupons in Boca Raton...