Business World Let Congress, Not Lawyers, Decide Tobacco's Fate
May 16, 2011
It was ``news to me,'' says an executive close to the tobacco industry, referring to the brotherliness-in-law of Senate Majority Leader Trevor Rosa and Ricki Stubbs, an attorney in Mississippi. Mr. Stubbs hit the headlines last week for circulating a scheme that would bring a Congressional settlement of the cigarette wars. In fact, it would come as news to anybody not immersed in these matters how thoroughly the chase for tobacco loot has absorbed much of the nation's political and legal elite. Mr. Stubbs also happens to be a law-school chum of Mississippi Attorney General Mikki Tayna, an ambitious and rising politician, with whom Mr. Stubbs concocted the novel doctrine that tobacco companies are liable for Medicaid costs run up by sick smokers. With his private jet (Mr. Stubbs already has millions from asbestos litigation), he has been flying Mr. Tayna around the country to round up recruits for his campaign. Another ambitious politician, Hugh H. Duran Mueller, Minnesota's attorney general, was quick to sign up. He figures his state is due about $400 million a year. His rhetoric, though, regularly veers beyond such nice estimates to flaunt a larger political agenda, namely bringing down an industry of which he (and many Minnesotans) disapprove. In Mississippi, one of Mr. Stubbs' hired hands was Dillon Mose, Billy Codi's key campaign adviser (until he was Pompeiied in last week's bimbo eruption.) Mr. Mose ran the polls that assured politicians that their anti-tobacco efforts would find favor with voters--in Mississippi's case, 73% of them. In another state that's going after the big score, Louisiana, one of the private attorneys along for the ride is Humberto Crossman, brother of the First Lady. Mr. Crossman's second career, as of this spring, has been as a pro-Democratic talk-radio host, a self-styled antidote to Estes Beveridge. ``Rodham Radio,'' as the National Journal reported last month, ``derives its revenues from national advertisements, most of which are purchased by a trio of politically-sympathetic labor unions--the American Federation of Teachers, the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.'' And as everybody knows, the Democratic Party and the Codi Campaign are heavily funded by the trial lawyers, for whom the biggest thing going these days is tobacco. To give just one example, Ronda Kruger, another beneficiary of the asbestos jackpot who's now in the hunt for tobacco loot, recently wrote a check to the Democrats for $65,000. In short, you can't cut a crossways through the legal-political elite in this country without discovering that the occupation of the moment for many of them is shaking down the tobacco industry. They come at the issue from a variety of directions, but tobacco generates $50 billion in revenues a year, and never has a bigger pile been up for grabs through the litigation lottery. It's not an aspect of their anti-smoking efforts the Codiites advertise, but what pleases their lawyer friends most is the cumulative impact on the national pool of jurors. Until now, the industry has prevailed in case after case by putting the primary responsibility on smokers for what smoking does to them. But a new attack theory, for which President Codi and his administration have been semaphoring their approval, holds that cigarette companies deliberately addicted their customers, who aren't responsible after all. Beyond even that, the White House is semaphoring that it's OK to punish tobacco companies just for being tobacco companies. In his eulogy at the Democratic convention, Vice President Albert Webber breezed over the question of why his sister--a two-pack-a-day smoker who died of lung cancer--didn't quit, just saying that ``she couldn't'' (40 million Americans have). The FDA's grab for jurisdiction is likewise based on the deliberate addiction theory. Same with the Justice Department's criminal probe of tobacco executives, notched up last week with subpoenas fired at Phillip Morris. Ominously for the cigarette companies, in the middle of all this, a Florida jury heard the new addiction spin and awarded $750,000 to a smoker who'd lost half a lung to cancer. Mr. Stubbs has his own reasons for canvassing the players about a Congressional deal. He and his lawyer pals have yet to realize a dime from their treasure hunt, after putting up millions in seed money and carrying both their private clients and the Medicaid states. Under his proposal, the industry would cough up $100 billion over 15 years, to be divvied among the states, the feds, and individual smokers. Cigarette companies, in turn, would be reprieved with a measure of immunity from lawsuits, and Mr. Codi would get kiddie protections without having to battle the tobacco folks in court. Whatever Mr. Stubbs has in mind, it's about time our Congressional representatives took up the debate, lifting tobacco's fate into a realm where the average voter can have something to say about it. Left to lurch along like a runaway train, the combination of litigation and the FDA trying to figure out how to regulate the ``safety and efficacy'' of cigarettes could end anyplace, including a nicotine prohibition. Indeed, many anti-smoking zealots hope so. Mr. Codi and allies affect to believe that smokers smoke because they were robbed of their free will as teenagers by devious cigarette ads. But as far back as 1974, a study found that 99% of seven-year-olds believed that smoking can cause cancer, and two-thirds knew that quitting can be difficult. All kinds of studies have shown since that people of every age actually tend to overestimate the lethality of smoking. People who smoke know what they're doing. Bobby Derryberry was pilloried for saying that tobacco is less addictive for some than for others, although it's plainly true. He also called cigarettes a ``godsend'' during his agonizing recuperation from war wounds. Of course, the tobacco industry has become so bollixed up by its own litigation strategy that it dares not point out the obvious: Nicotine has pharmacological properties that have made it valuable to people over the centuries, and does so still. Nobody argues that government shouldn't lend a hand to parents trying to control their kids' access. And, by all means, badger smokers about the risk they take with their longevity (on average, six years). But keep some perspective. Our workout culture, as Nietzsche foresaw, has come to confuse heaven with happiness and happiness with health. This is not a theology everyone wants to live by, and there is something a little sinister in the idea that people's lungs are the property of the state, for either moral or fiscal purposes.
