Word: tobacco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...five days, the negotiators, exhausted and increasingly needy of fresh shirts, darted between Washington's Park Hyatt and ANA hotels, from conference room to mezzanine, hallway to bedroom conference call. Every so often, rumpled lawyers would emerge with wildly divergent claims about the progress of the fractious tobacco talks: a settlement was imminent, negotiators had hit the worst impasse since the start of deliberations on April 3, talks were on the brink of collapse. Wait! There's a settlement! (Well, almost...) Finally, at 3:30 p.m. last Friday, a chorus of state attorneys general gathered around a microphone...
Although the attorneys general talked as though they had just cured cancer, in truth they may have done the next best thing. They forced the tobacco industry to concede, in so many grudging words and so many, many more dollars, that cigarettes are a deadly regimen. The companies--Philip Morris Companies, RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., B.A.T. Industries PLC's Brown & Williamson and Loews Corp.'s Lorillard--reached a resolution with the attorneys general of nearly 40 states in which the industry will pay out $368.5 billion over the next quarter-century in compensation, drastically alter their marketing programs and submit...
...tobacco interests, the touchiest issue in the endgame was the specter of document disclosure. They are still subject to lawsuits, and feared the prospect of turning their research files into a plaintiffs' library. Instead, the industry agreed to fund a repository in Washington where it will deposit a mountain of documents: all information relating to health, toxicity, addiction and marketing to minors; and all documents produced for the state suits. Documents for which industry officials have claimed attorney-client privilege will be subject to a review process before a three-judge panel...
...final hang-up to the agreement had to do with disclosure of another sort: the attorneys general demanded an end to further industry prosecution of whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, the former Brown & Williamson executive who wielded company documents to help press his claim that the tobacco company had deliberately manipulated nicotine levels. Wigand, now a high school science teacher, becomes free to make whatever public statements he wants...
...would have predicted such a swift outcome back in March, when this all began with the obvious but startling admission by one of the smallest tobacco companies, Liggett Group, that cigarettes are addictive and have been pointedly marketed at kids for years. The confession signaled the first real break from the industry's see-no-evil posture. Reportedly, the event prompted North Carolina Governor James Hunt to call his friend Bill Clinton. The White House then got in touch with Mississippi's Moore to ask if talks with the industry might prove productive...