The People vs. The Tobacco Industry

[Updates below.]

I apologize for any following outbursts of angry, vulgar sarcasm...but holy SHIT I'm unhappy.

Reuters: Louisiana Jury Awards $591 Mln in Smoking Case

The tobacco industry must pay $591 million to fund a 10-year program to help Louisiana smokers quit, a jury in a class-action suit decided on Friday.

Fucktards.

The people on that jury who choose to impose this fine - this socially-acceptable tax on a socially-inacceptable industry to pay for the self-imposed health problems of dolts too docile to take responsibility for their own actions - are fucktards.

The defendants include Philip Morris USA, a unit of Altria Group Inc.; R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., part of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc.; Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., a unit of British American Tobacco Plc; and Lorillard, which is part of Loews Corp. and trades as Carolina Group.

The defendants promised to appeal the verdict, which is less than the $1 billion the plaintiffs had requested.

No less blame can be laid at the feet of the "plaintiffs" (such a benign term for these jackals). They encourage and enable additional feeble-minded assholes to bitch and claw for other people to provide for their own goddamn problems. One billion dollars. Out-fucking-standing. The heights of absurdity are certainly not limited by any ceiling.

The verdict is the second part of a case filed in the mid-1990s. A jury last year found the tobacco companies must fund the programs, and the second phase of the case was to decide how much that would cost.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

I missed the first phase, which is monumentally more important than this penalty phase. The jury then is the same jury now. Even back in the 90's when I smoked regularly and I lacked a great deal of my current philosophy, I was an ardent proponent of personal responsibility and never saw any reason for a business to be punished because the product it sold can cause serious diseases. I can't say I'd be as viciously opposed to this kind of dogshit as I am now, but I can say no plaintiff in this case would want me on that jury.

Bloomberg: Tobacco Industry Must Fund $590 Mln End-Smoking Plan

The jury, which decided in July to require the companies to help Louisiana smokers quit smoking, ruled today that they must pay the money into a court-administered fund that will finance 12 end-smoking programs for periods of five to 10 years.

The companies will pay $562.7 million to fund the programs, including $130 million for marketing and education to encourage smokers to quit and $102 million to fund reimbursement of smokers' medication. The jury also added 5 percent to the payment for the programs to cover administrative costs. The total payment for the companies is $590.8 million.

Fucking ridiculous, even if the individual plaintiffs aren't getting any direct financial compensation. At this stage in the game, now that the ground rules have been laid, why not just drop all the pretense and do the following:

• Require car companies to cover the costs of the accidents that involve their vehicles.
  
• Require music labels to pay for the costs of funerals for people who kill themselves to music the labels publish.
  
• Require companies to give pension and health care benefits to anyone that is fired.
  
• Require alcohol and drug companies to chip in for any related hospitalization from unhealthy use of their products.
  
• Require magazines aimed at men and women to help out with marriage counseling for couples unhappy with the standards the magazines set for their readers.
  
• Require keyboard and mouse companies to pay for all computer-related carpal tunnel injuries.
  
• Require juries to individually - personally - pay for all the economic harm inflicted by these insane rulings.

Because personal responsibility in this country is dying and we live in post-reductio America where it is increasingly apparent more people believe other people should be forced to do what the first set of folks want.

The Louisiana smokers claimed the cigarette makers hid the health risks of smoking and committed fraud. The companies claimed the case shouldn't have been tried as a class action because individual life stories were too different for claims to be grouped together. They said the program was based on speculation about how many people would use it and how much it would cost.

©2004 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved.

Fraud would have been committed if tobacco companies told the public that it's products had no negative impact on consumers' health or if their products made people healthier. I've seen and heard of the documents unearthed in the previous decade of lawsuits against the companies. I don't have a decent picture of the efforts they made to present the best possible face towards their users. Perhaps they did act fraudulently. But such action does not justify the jury-created largesse I'm reading about now.

FOXNews: Jury: Tobacco Firms Must Pay $500M for Stop-Smoking Programs

The plaintiffs included any Louisiana resident who smoked before the mid-1990s when the suit was filed.

They wanted a 25-year plan that would pay for stop-smoking patches and gum, telephone hot lines, intensive counseling, advertising for the program, grants to churches and community groups to publicize the program, and training programs for quit-smoking counselors. The plan would be administered by the court through a trust fund set up by the tobacco industry.

These people are forcing an industry to exclude itself from it's own market, to assume the responsibility for the actions of it's customers, and to pay for their customers to stop using their products. I'd give up beer to see them apply their own standard to themselves.

The tobacco industry had said that a much-more modest program, lasting two to three years, would give smokers adequate time to obtain counseling and try various quit-smoking aids.

Copyright 2004 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

And then there's the industry itself. It certainly did itself no favors by not being upfront and honest about the dangers of smoking. Some businessmen went further than that and lied and dodged direct questions. Through their stupid behavior, they made the transition into this quagmire much easier than it could have been. Personally, I'd fire the lot of them and bring in new management.

And I'd have that new management utterly oppose every single attempt to rein their companies in. I'd have them instruct their lawyers to not even offer a lesser, counter plan to the one desired by the plaintiffs. I'd tell them to remind the public that the choice to smoke is always with the consumer and anyone younger than 30 (that's been extremely generous) is a fucking idiot for thinking that the inhalation of burning matter is a safe act. I'd certinly not have them cave into demands that the FDA regulate cigarettes.

With Austin's smoking ban set to go into effect June 1st, I can only sit here and fume at a world that makes less sense every day.

UPDATED 5/9/2005 9:03am
The Additional Tyranny - The New Austin Smoking Ban Passes

UPDATED 8/30/2005 1:50pm
Deadline for the Austin Smoking Ordinance

Posted by Drizzten at May 21, 2004 03:27 PM