Tobacco Lawyers Deny Misleading Public

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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WASHINGTON – Lawyers for tobacco companies yesterday acknowledged that smoking is dangerous and addictive, and that there are no safe cigarettes, but told a federal judge that they never conspired to mislead the public into believing otherwise.


The federal Justice Department’s $280-billion racketeering suit against major tobacco makers is motivated by money and based on “revisionist history” of past conduct, industry attorneys said in their opening statements.


Rather than engaging in a half decade of misleading public relations and advertising, as the government maintains, the companies’ public statements questioning the risks of smoking merely reflected unsettled scientific debates of the time, the lawyers said.


“For there to be a conspiracy, there must be intent,” an attorney for Philip Morris, Ted Wells, told Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.


“You can’t find in these documents the intent to mislead anybody,” he said, referring to the thousands of internal industry communications from several decades that the government says contradict what the companies said publicly.


Justice Department lawyers cannot show continuing and future misconduct, in part because the tobacco companies now inform the public about the health risks of smoking under the terms of the $246-billion settlement reached in 1998, the lawyers argued.


Lawyers for the tobacco companies denied promoting low-tar cigarettes as a safe alternative to regular cigarettes to induce smokers to switch brands rather than quit altogether.


They used various historical memos and studies to show that tobacco makers had been urged by public health organizations and the federal governments to offer low-tar brands as a healthy alternative. “We had no intent to defraud smokers, we were simply following the lead of the government,” said a lawyer for Lorillard, William Newbold.


Mr. Newbold also dismissed the government’s claims that the industry manipulated levels of nicotine in cigarettes to create and maintain addiction in smokers.


On the contrary, he said, public health advocates had urged the companies to increase the nicotine levels relative to the tar content, so that smokers would achieve their fix more quickly and consume fewer cigarettes. In any case, the attempts “didn’t work,” he said.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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