THE PEOPLE VS. BIG TOBACCO: How the States Took on the Cigarette Giants
By Carrick Mollenkamp, Adam Levy, Joseph Menn and Jeffrey Rothfeder
Bloomberg Press, 334 pages, $23.95
CORNERED: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice
By Peter Pringle
Holt, 352 pages, $27.50
`From Main Street to Wall Street, from Tobacco Road to Pennsylvania Avenue, tobacco has a powerful grip on America. It’s the country’s sixth-biggest crop–fetching $2.5 billion for growers–and the No. 1 nonfood crop. Tobacco is remarkably profitable: Farmers earn $4,000 an acre from tobacco vs. only $400 an acre from strawberries.”
So declares the prologue to “The People vs. Big Tobacco: How the States Took on the Cigarette Giants,” one of two new books chronicling the negotiations and events leading up to the tobacco industry’s recent landmark settlement.
All told, the tobacco industry generates $200 billion a year in revenue, which is as large as the entire economies of Turkey or Austria. Like 20th Century Medicis, tobacco companies sponsor cultural and sporting events, and whole towns, such as Winston-Salem, N.C., were built by tobacco, the prologue notes.
Consumers know that smokers will “walk a mile for a Camel” and that women have “come a long way, baby.” In movies, on Times Square billboards, with cartoon animals and merchandise giveaways, the tobacco industry has not only infiltrated but shaped parts of American life.
Against this sweeping historical backdrop are set “The People vs. Big Tobacco,” written by a team of Bloomberg News reporters and editors, and a second telling, “Cornered: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice,” by investigative journalist Peter Pringle. The two accounts chronicle how the seemingly untouchable tobacco giants in the U.S.–players such as Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco–altered their longstanding refusal to admit smoking was dangerous and agreed to concessions that would forever change their multibillion-dollar industry.
Both books aim to be real-life legal thrillers, telling the inside story of the settlement that evolved after states sued the tobacco companies to recoup billions in state Medicaid expenditures for smoking-related illnesses. In the biggest liability settlement in U.S. business history, the industry offered $368 billion to stave off personal-injury lawyers and state attorneys general.
The cast of characters includes liability lawyers, state attorneys general and industry whistle-blowers. Also interspersed in the stories are the individual smokers whose civil cases–based on the argument that the industry sold a product it knew was harmful but that consumers didn’t–helped propel the negotiations forward.
The books’ accounts culminate in the June 1997 settlement announcement. Of course, both stories will likely deserve sequels, as the haggling continues; Congress is still debating the terms of the landmark accord.
“The People vs. Big Tobacco” is an exhaustively reported look at the evolution of the accord. It is for the compulsive reader who wants to follow the negotiations and behind-the-scenes blowups as they occur. In contrast, “Cornered” takes a broader and less labored view of the settlement, placing the industry’s agreement in a larger context of longtime secrecy, huge profits and powerful personalities that makes for a richer read.
“The People vs. Big Tobacco” begins in May 1993, with Jackie Thompson, who lay dying of cancer from her longtime Salem habit. Her friend and attorney, Michael Lewis, who ran a practice in the central Mississippi town of Clarksdale, went to visit Thompson at her hospital room in Memphis and left wanting revenge for the high costs–both medical and emotional–of her illness. During a short elevator ride from Thompson’s hospital room, Lewis hatched his plan: Convince the State of Mississippi to sue tobacco companies to recoup the public money spent on smoking-related health care.
Lewis looked to his friend Mike Moore, the Mississippi attorney general, to spearhead the case. Moore eventually led a team of attorneys general in intense negotiations that hopscotched across the country–and that dominate the Bloomberg book.
“The People vs. Big Tobacco” tells of the maneuverings and strategies that Moore and his tobacco counterparts needed to employ to keep a united front against their respective foes while dealing behind closed doors with vicious infighting. The other major group involved in the negotiations were private trial lawyers, who sought smoking-cessation programs for their clients and lucrative payouts for themselves.
Pringle begins his account by stepping back from the immediate settlement to put the accord into perspective–a technique he employs repeatedly in “Cornered” to good effect.
Right off, the reader is shown the incredible resources of the tobacco companies and their wholesale denial that they ever misinformed the American public. The book starts with a 1987 trial against American Tobacco Co. by Nathan Horton, a carpenter who for more than 30 years smoked two packs of the manufacturer’s Pall Malls daily. He had inoperable lung cancer.
American Tobacco’s extraordinary defense, writes Pringle, included hiring a team of private investigators to do background checks on all 500 names in the jury register at the courthouse in Lexington, Miss. The company also hired local leaders of the community to advise the defense lawyers on reactions of the jury members once the trial began. After a mistrial, a second jury decided that cigarette smoking had caused Horton’s cancer but that both he and the manufacturer were at fault.
By going back a decade, Pringle shows how the traditional argument that cigarette-makers should be held responsible for the harmful contaminants in their product failed again and again, especially when individual smokers went up against tobacco’s legal armies. A new approach was necessary. “If you use the wrong weapon against a tank you’re not going to blow it up,” said Richard Scruggs, the liability attorney who teamed with Moore in the settlement talks.
(Who actually thought of the idea of suing the tobacco companies to recover states’ Medicaid expenditures is open to debate. But, notes Pringle, accounts rarely credit Donald Garner, a liberal law professor at the University of Southern Illinois, who, in a 1977 article, suggested that states get cigarette manufacturers “to pay the direct medical cost `of looking after patients with smoking diseases.’ “)
In another successful retreat from the present, Pringle devotes a section of his book to the industry’s concealment of scientific research that suggested links between smoking and cancer. For years, tobacco companies quashed legitimate–but damaging–findings by scientists on their payrolls.
Ultimately, both books would benefit from more input from the tobacco side. But the writers do an admirable job of working around the less-than-forthcoming tobacco executives and their attorneys; though the Bloomberg team, true to the book’s thorough reporting, landed several interviews with key tobacco players. Of course, the anti-tobacco attorneys were more than willing to share their stories.
In his epilogue, Pringle points out that the settlement may only be the “illusion of surrender.” Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Far East offer new and expanding markets for U.S. tobacco companies. The industry could raise prices on a pack of cigarettes and make use of tax deductions on the settlement’s penalties and easily cover their settlement costs.
Meanwhile, the standoff continues. The tobacco industry is vowing to take its money off the table if liability protections are scrapped, but Congress isn’t inclined to shield tobacco companies from future lawsuits. A sequel seems inevitable.
