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The Department of Health (DoH) is to roll out an initiative that aims to recruit smokers to local NHS Stop Smoking Services.
The COI has appointed Carlson Marketing to handle a ‘Getting off cigarettes' campaign, spanning face-to-face activity, press, radio, outdoor, door drops and advertising bikes to target smokers trying to quit. The activity will target a range of venues, from shopping centres and bus depots to workplaces.
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A tobacco company's attorney told the Missouri Supreme Court on Wednesday that the firm shouldn't have to pay $20 million in damages to the husband of a Kansas City-area woman who smoked for decades.
Many claims in Lincoln Smith's lawsuit against Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co. were the same as ones a judge previously rejected in an unsuccessful lawsuit filed by his wife, Barbara, before she died, attorney Andrew McGaan said.
Both suits accused Brown & Williamson of causing the woman's respiratory and heart diseases and failing to warn about smoking dangers.
Barbara Smith, who smoked Kool cigarettes for about 50 years, died from a heart attack in 2000.
Case Media
* Oral Argument
* Opinion Announcement
* Written Opinion
Abstract
Oral Argument: Wednesday, December 1, 1999
Decision: Tuesday, March 21, 2000
Issues: Economic Activity, Consumer Protection
Advocates
Richard M. Cooper (Argued the cause for respondents) Seth P. Waxman (on behalf of the Petitioners)
A Missouri appeals court has sent a case to the state Supreme Court involving a $20 million verdict against a tobacco company in Jackson County.
The appellate court decision reversed parts -- and affirmed others -- of a 2005 decision involving a Kansas City-area family that had sued Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. Click here to find out more!
Barbara Smith died in 2000 after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992. She had smoked Kool cigarettes starting shortly after she began smoking in 1942.
10) Sufficient evidence was presented that a tobacco company's act of manufacturing or selling defective or unreasonably dangerous cigarettes was tantamount to intentional wrongdoing where the evidence demonstrated that the tobacco company: had an active process of creating controversy regarding the health risks of smoking; planned to dispute every Surgeon General's Report, regardless of its basis; had policies of preventing harmful information from becoming available to the public; and established procedures to ensure negative information did not reach the public.
Dissenting Summary by Judge Smart: The dissent argues that the majority wrongly interprets the wrongful death statute and that the plain wording of the statutory language creates a condition for the filing of a wrongful death action by the survivors of a tort victim. In this case, that condition is not fulfilled because the decedent, having already resolved her tort claim, would be precluded from bringing another suit against B&W.
The dissent also argues that Smith fails to make a submissible case as to causation on the failure to warn claim, because the evidence showed that no warning would have been effective. The dissent also argues that there was no basis for applying a presumption that a warning would have been heeded.
10) Sufficient evidence was presented that a tobacco company's act of manufacturing or selling defective or unreasonably dangerous cigarettes was tantamount to intentional wrongdoing where the evidence demonstrated that the tobacco company: had an active process of creating controversy regarding the health risks of smoking; planned to dispute every Surgeon General's Report, regardless of its basis; had policies of preventing harmful information from becoming available to the public; and established procedures to ensure negative information did not reach the public. Majority Opinion in the Smith appeal.
In a groundbreaking decision Tuesday, a Missouri appeals court found evidence of intentional wrongdoing by a tobacco company but ordered the case retried on the issue of punitive damages.
In setting aside a $20 million punitive verdict -- the largest ever awarded in Missouri in a smoking case -- a three-judge panel of the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City nonetheless found that evidence of Brown & Williamson's wrongful conduct was sufficient to submit to a jury.
The lengthy opinion written by Judge Robert G. Ulrich noted that Brown & Williamson "had an active process of creating controversy regarding the health risks of smoking and planned to dispute every surgeon general's report, regardless of what it was based upon."
"Further," Ulrich wrote, "B&W had policies of preventing harmful information from becoming available to the public and established procedures to ensure negative information did not reach the public." . . .
The decision was noteworthy in two respects. First, the court found evidence of deliberate wrongdoing by a tobacco company. And second, the court ruled for the first time that the surviving families of tort victims can sue even if the victims had previously brought suit themselves.
Even so, the court sent the case back for a new trial on punitive damages because the basis of the jury's award was unclear.
Whether that will actually occur is somewhat uncertain because Judge James M. Smart dissented from Ulrich's opinion and exercised his prerogative to transfer the case to the Missouri Supreme Court. . . .
Although the appeals court found insufficient evidence of intentional wrongdoing sufficient to warrant punitive damages on the first two claims, it found sufficient evidence to do so on the defective product claim. But because all three claims were submitted to the jury on a single form, which made it impossible for the appeals court to determine the basis of the punitive award, it sent the case back to the jury to retry the last claim alone.
[Brown & Williamson] had an active process of creating controversy regarding the health risks of smoking and planned to dispute every surgeon general's report, regardless of what it was based upon. Further, B&W had policies of preventing harmful information from becoming available to the public and established procedures to ensure negative information did not reach the public.Missouri Court of Appeals Judge Robert G. Ulrich, in the majority opinion in the Smith case.
An unusual battle has heated up between a Toronto landlord and her non-smoking tenant, who she wants evicted because his friends lit up inside his apartment.
Christine Cebula, who owns a furnished luxury condo in Yorkville, will take her case to the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board to try and evict John Davidson, who requested a non-smoking unit and signed a year-long lease agreeing there would be no smoking in it.
She is also seeking $9,900 to cover the cost of replacing linens, towels, broadloom and reupholstering some of the furnishings in the condo, which she previously has rented as short-term accommodation to travelling executives.
But Davidson, who admits friends lit up inside the ninth-floor unit on a few occasions when he wasn't home, says there has been no damage from the smoke. He calls her allegations "bogus."
Suits filed against two cigarette makers over the marketing of "light" cigarettes have been thrown out by a federal appeals court.
Earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the 2003 suits filed by two people against the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. and by five people against Philip Morris USA Inc.
Although the suits alleged the companies had falsely marketed "light" cigarettes as safer, none of the plaintiffs claimed they had been injured from smoking or sought compensation for medical expenses. Rather, they sought damages based upon alleged false marketing. . . .
David Howard, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., which acquired Brown & Williamson in 2004, said the 5th Circuit "has made clear that lawsuits attacking the term 'lights' and the marketing of 'light' cigarettes are at odds with the comprehensive cigarette labeling system that Congress has established. As a result, any such lawsuits are barred under federal law." . . .
"We have long maintained that the U.S. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission created a regulatory scheme for marketing low tar and "lights" cigarettes, and that this type of lawsuit is legally improper as a result of that federal law and regulation," William S. Ohlemeyer, Philip Morris USA vice president and associate general counsel, said in a statement released late Thursday.
We thus conclude that an express warranty claim arising solely out of the use of descriptors based on the FTC method is preempted. In Cipollone, where the plaintiff was permitted to proceed with his express warranty claim, the plaintiff had produced advertisements explicitly stating that there was “proof†that that brand of cigarettes “never ... did you any harm.†Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 893 F.2d 541, 549 (3d Cir. 1990). The defendant in that case was held liable for the additional representations that it made with respect to the safety of its products, not for its use of the FTC-approved descriptors. We therefore hold that the district court erred in finding that Plaintiffs’ express warranty claim is not pre-empted by the Labeling Act.
2. The district court also held that Plaintiffs’ claims based on alleged breach of implied warranty are not pre-empted. This holding finds no support in the Cipollone opinion. As Plaintiffs failed to explain the basis of this claim in their pleadings or to argue in support of this claim on appeal, and as the district court failed to provide any discussion of the pre-emption analysis with respect to the claim in its order, we will not consider it for the first time here. We therefore hold that this claim is dismissed with prejudice.
IV.
For the foregoing reasons, we reverse the judgment of the district court and remand with directions to enter a judgment dismissing all claims with prejudice.
on January 30 the Washington Post printed an article by toxicologist and epidemiologist Gio Batta Gori, titled "The Bogus 'Science' of Secondhand Smoke." Gori claims that many published studies on the health hazards of secondhand smoke are based on unreliable data, and that smoking restrictions aimed at protecting public health are "odious and unfair." The byline describes Gori as a "fellow of the Health Policy Center in Bethesda," and mentions his former position as deputy director of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention. Hmmm... sounds like a high-level scientist, all right. However, the Post fails to mention Gori's longstanding record of financial and contractual ties to the tobacco industry. Previously-secret internal tobacco company documents now on the Internet (and available to any reporter) show decades of payments made to the esteemed Dr. Gori, primarily from cigarette maker Brown & Williamson, for promoting pro-tobacco views on secondhand smoke in publications and public testimony. Without this information, readers were kept in the dark, unable to evaluate Gori's damning critique of well-established public health research.
The Washington Post publishes a guest editorial today from a man named Gio Batta Gori titled "The Bogus 'Science' of Secondhand Smoke" . . .
Here's how the Post identified him:
Gio Batta Gori, an epidemiologist and toxicologists, is a fellow of the Health Policy Center in Bethesda. He is a former deputy director of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention, and he received the U.S. Public Health Service Superior Service Award in 1976 for his efforts to define less hazardous cigarettes.
Here's what they left out, courtesy SourceWatch:
In 1980 Gori became Vice President of the Franklin Institute Policy Analysis Center (FIPAC), a consulting firm funded initially by a $400,000 grant from the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation (B&W). [2] Following its initial formation, FIPAC continued to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding annually from B&W. [3][4]. [5] Gori worked on R&D projects for B&W, such as analysis of the sensory perception of smoke and how to reduce the amount of tobacco in cigarettes. By 1989, Gori was a full time consultant on environmental tobacco smoke issue for the Tobacco Institute in the Institute's ETS/IAQ (Indoor Air Quality) Consultants Project. [6] In May 1993, Gori entered an exclusive consulting arrangement with B&W, reaping pay at the rate of $200/hour an day to $1,000/day for attending conferences. [7]
Activities in which Gori engaged on behalf of the tobacco industry included attending conferences, writing and publishing books and papers, and lobbying.
Are Gori's links to the tobacco industry new or obscure? Nope. They were detailed as far back as this 1978 TIME magazine article.
Deception, huh? Exactly who is doing the deceiving? Seems like it's the Post and Gori.
Penguins have played a part in marketing and popular culture for almost a century. The imprint Penguin Books was introduced in 1926; seven years later came Willie, the brand mascot for Kool cigarettes, then owned by the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation.
Willie had his own Hollywood moment in the 1949 Marx Brothers movie “Love Happy,” when Harpo was chased through Times Square and climbed a neon sign advertising Kool. In the ’50s and ’60s, cartoons featured penguin characters like Chilly Willy and Tennessee Tuxedo.
Brown & Williamson sought to revive Willie in the early ’90s, in a hipper incarnation, but in 1998 tobacco marketers agreed to end the use of cartoon characters in cigarette ads.
Did the Republican leadership learn anything on Election Day? Did they finally get it that voters are fed up with politicians who use their office to raise money and get perks? . . .
This is the same John Boehner who took to the House floor a few years back and distributed checks from tobacco PACs to those congressmen who put their desire for cigarette money ahead of the health of their constituents and voted against government regulation of this hideous industry. This kind of self-serving, money-focused politics is just what landed the GOP in sufficient trouble to lose the House in the first place. Letting the escalator move up one notch and inviting Boehner to head the party's House delegation will send a clear signal that House Republicans have, like the Bourbon kings of France, in Talleyrand's words, "learned nothing and forgotten nothing." . . .
Majority Whip Roy Blunt's (R-Mo.) wife, Abigail Perlman, and his son, Andrew, both lobby for Altria, which is the newly sanitized name for Philip Morris. If Blunt is limited to the standard congressional salary of $165,500, there is no reason why he shouldn't take care of his family finances by letting lobbying firms that represent this death-dealing industry hire his son.
Blunt and Boehner deserve to be thrown out of leadership. . . .
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will be a vast improvement over Frist. At least he is a politician, not a misplaced doctor. But McConnell will be Mr. Outside, the party's face to the media.
The board of directors of Reynolds American Inc. (NYSE: RAI) has elected Jeffrey A. Eckmann to the position of RAI Group President. Eckmann was previously executive vice president of strategy and business development for the company. In his new role, Eckmann, 54, is responsible for four of RAI's five operating companies: Conwood Company, LLC; Lane, Limited; Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, Inc.; and R.J. Reynolds Global Products, Inc. He will also have ongoing accountability for RAI's strategy and business development functions. Eckmann will continue to report to Susan M. Ivey, chairman and chief executive officer of Reynolds American. His promotion was effective Oct. 1. Eckmann was formerly senior vice president and chief financial officer of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation (B&W) and led the integration of that company's U.S. cigarette and tobacco business with R.J. Reynolds