This is about 2 weeks old, but I couldn't find any threads referring to it, so I thought I would throw it out there for informational purposes.
According to the Pensacola (FL) News Journal, on 9/15 a jury decided to give RJR a nice little swat in the wallet;
An Escambia County jury has returned a $34 million verdict against R.J. Reynolds tobacco company on behalf of the family of Garry O'Hara, a 50-year-old man who died of lung cancer 15 years after he had quit smoking.
This is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, $34 million ain't chump change, even to RJR. Second is that this is probably not the last. This suit is a direct result of a previous lawsuit against the tobacco giant. Per their reporting;
The legal claim was made by O'Hara's widow and two of his three children under the historic Engle v. Liggett Group Inc. class-action suit, in which a jury awarded damages of more than $145 billion to a nationwide group of people with smoking-related disease and family members of deceased smokers.
The Florida Supreme Court later later overturned that ruling in 2006 but said that individual plaintiffs could file suits using the Engle jury's findings, which were that smoking causes cancer, nicotine is addictive, and the tobacco companies sold defective and unreasonably dangerous cigarettes.
I wish that someone had explained what the FL Supreme Courts reasoning was for overturning the original verdict in the class action suit, but the important takeaways are not only that the plaintiffs in the suit could still sue individually, but that their new suits could reference the original suit and results. I have a feeling that if we kind of keep a general eye on this, we'll see more award settlements coming down the pipe as more and more of the individuals in the class action suit see their claims settled in or out of court.
But there was one quote in the article that really pissed me off;
"If Americans only knew what these companies concealed ...what they knew about smoking and lung cancer and nicotine addiction," Mark Avera, a lawyer who represented O'Hara's family, said in a written statement. "They were decades ahead of everyone else on smoking and health. That was all they did, study cigarettes and research how to addict more young teens."
So much for the decades of shoulder shrugging, "I din't no nuttin" persona put on by Big tobacco. They were not only keeping up on current research, they were investing millions of dollars not only into whether or not cigarettes were addictive and legitimate health risks, but to figure out how to make it even
more addictive, especially to teenage smokers, from additives to advertising.
I think it's fairly obvious that Bram Stoker must have been talking to an ancestor of modern RJR leadership when he came up with his Dracula character.
Thanks as always for reading!
1:11 PM PT: about 10 days ago I wrote a diary about the FDA pulling the plug on 4 different RJR brands for violating rules for new products...In an op-ed in the Columbus dispatch a Dr. provided enlightenment on why the FDA took the action;
"The banned products, especially appealing to youth, were removed because they contained new ways of delivering menthol, higher levels of menthol (which can make the experience of smoking more pleasurable because it is cooling and smoother), the addition of sugars and sweeteners (improving taste), and other changes that increase harmful chemical constituents."
So, the little shits were caught adding extra "yummies" like more sugar and menthol to make the smoke cooler and taste better, thereby enticing kids to smoke more often...What a bunch of right little charmers, eh???