Word: tobacco
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...Wigand, with his allegations that B&W manipulated nicotine levels in cigarettes, knowingly used a carcinogenic additive to make pipe tobacco taste better and covered up research into "safer" cigarettes, has begun talking to lawyers, grand juries and the media at an inopportune moment for tobacco. The Food and Drug Administration has proposed to regulate nicotine as a drug in cigarettes; teen smoking rates have taken an alarming jump; and five grand juries are looking into possible perjury and malfeasance by industry executives. At the same time, a novel legal strategy, which would hold the tobacco industry responsible to taxpayers...
...allies believe Wigand is just the man to bring a jury into tobacco's inner sanctum. "Wigand can personalize the story and give...firsthand evidence...as to how the industry was conducting its business and what its motivations were," says Scott Ballin of the Coalition on Smoking OR Health, which includes the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association and the American Heart Association. "The efforts that they are going through to discredit him are directly proportional to the damage they know his testimony can do," says Richard Scruggs, the Mississippi lawyer who is shepherding Wigand through the courts...
...Many tobacco executives swore otherwise when testifying before Representative Henry Waxman's health subcommittee in 1994, but consistency has never been central to the industry's legal defense--overwhelming force has. As RJ Reynolds lawyer J. Michael Jordan put it in a 1988 memorandum, "To paraphrase General Patton, the way we won those cases was not by spending all of Reynolds' money but by making that other son of a bitch spend all his." Liggett Group, for instance, spent an estimated $75 million fighting the Cipollone case in New Jersey; though the jury awarded the husband of Rose Cipollone...
...however, the anti-tobacco forces are taking a page from the cigarette makers' own playbook. "This king-of-the-mountain game they've played is a game that would be played by a schoolyard bully," says Northeastern University law professor Richard Daynard, chair of the Tobacco Products Liability Project, which conducts research for anti-tobacco lawsuits. "After you've beaten a couple of kids up, nobody dares take you on. But the moment the kids say, 'We can take him if we band together,' the bully is finished." It helps too that the new legal strategy of states filing third...
...tobacco, which has traditionally deployed veritable armies of attorneys from such white-shoe firms as King & Spalding in Atlanta, Covington & Burling in Washington and the Kansas City firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, this new assault amounts to a dangerous game of dominoes. "The moment they lose one the other states are going to have to file," says Daynard. "Imagine being the attorney general of a state and saying while my neighboring attorney general is getting $400 million in restitution for the taxpayers of his state, I am not going to file as a matter of principle. At that point...