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Tobacco damages Smoke Gets in Your EyesBy Rick Horowitz
What an amusing choice of words -- that's what you're thinking. You've been keeping track of that big tobacco lawsuit down in Florida, the one where the jury decided that the tobacco companies should pay, and pay large, for what they've been doing to people all these years. Punitive damages of $145 billion, that's what the jury decided, to go to hundreds of thousands of sick Florida smokers. But that wasn't the amusing part. The amusing part came a few days before that, when the tobacco lawyers and the tobacco execs tried to wriggle out from under, tried to convince the jury not to sock them with big, big numbers. A "death warrant," the lawyers said. A multi-billion-dollar damage award would be a "death warrant" for the tobacco companies. That was the amusing part. Until that very moment, you'd never realized that the tobacco companies had such a wonderful sense of humor, such a finely tuned command of irony. But there they were, in open court, talking about the hardships they'd surely suffer if the jury made them cough up, so to speak, huge sums of money. And the words they used to describe this possibility weren't words like "financial crisis," or even "fiscal disaster." They were "death warrant" -- as if the five big tobacco firms weren't giant corporate entities, but living, breathing human beings. Of course, you also heard -- and wasn't this worth a giggle all its own? -- the tobacco troops trying to convince the jury that they shouldn't be punished anyhow because they'd changed their ways. Maybe their behavior was somewhat less than exemplary once upon a time, they conceded, but that was back in "the '50s, '60s and '70s." Things are different now, they said. You bet they are, you said to yourself: They got caught. Their documents were uncovered, their strategies revealed. And you tried to imagine some habitual criminal somewhere -- a bank robber, a serial killer -- being captured at long last by the police, and as the handcuffs go on, smiling his sweetest smile and saying, "Fresh start, OK?" What a thigh-slapper. Then you suddenly remembered -- talk about funny! -- the tobacco execs with their hands in the air, swearing that cigarettes aren't addictive, insisting that cigarettes don't make people sick. A great bunch of kidders even then, weren't they? What a kick they must have had, putting one over on Congress. They must have laughed themselves silly for weeks. That wasn't back in "the '50s, '60s and '70s" either, you reminded yourself; that was just a few years ago. So really now: How much have they changed, for all their attempts at an image makeover? Not that, come to think of it, you don't chuckle your way through those feel-good ads the biggest of the tobacco firms has been running lately. The one you like best of all, you think, is the one with the friendly man who not only delivers groceries to the shut-in old lady, but sits with her and sings old Italian love songs to ward off her loneliness. The ad never does explain why she's alone, why her husband's not around anymore. You've got your hunches, of course. Wouldn't it be a tickle if you were right? Absolutely, but still not as big a tickle as "death warrant" was. The jury didn't let "death warrant" sway their judgment, you were pleased to see; either they didn't believe that an enormous damage award would make the tobacco companies go belly up -- or they didn't care. ("You can't just say you're sorry after 50 years," one of the jurors explained.) But you did find yourself wondering whether the jurors had found the phrasing even half as entertaining as you had. The very idea, after all, of this particular industry describing its plight in those particular words -- While you, of course, a prisoner of your own experiences, figured that words like "death warrant" were better reserved for other occasions. Like the time not so long ago when the doctor looked at a father's X-rays, studied a husband's biopsies, and said to the man and his family, "Lung cancer." That was a "death warrant." Posted 7/18/00. Fresh
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Rick Horowitz