The case of Portland lung cancer fatality Jesse Williams is in the news again. (see http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2611265&page=1 ) Williams smoked approximately 2-3 packs of Marlboros a day from approximately 1950 until his death in 1997. Williams ignored pleas from family members to stop smoking and the Surgeon General's warnings. Instead, Williams rationalized that it was OK to keep smoking if he switched to light cigarettes.

Previously, a punitive damage award of $79.5 million had been awarded to Williams's wife. Phillip Morris is now challenging the size of this award in the Supreme Court.

I can't say that I am a big fan of this case. If the award stands, I think that the money should go to cancer research. There is a certain element of buffoonery going on here. According to the stories that I have seen, Williams made no effort at all to stop smoking, saying that the cigarette companies had convinced him that smoking had no health consequences. However, I have not seen any specific examples of what things Williams saw published by the tobacco companies that led him to this conclusion. What made him think that he should put his complete trust in the tobacco industry?

I'm not a big fan of the tobacco companies, either. Some time ago, on NOVA's web site, I saw some pages about a documentary that NOVA had done on the quest for a safer cigarette. By the early 1970s, several of the major tobacco companies had identified the main carcinogens in cigarette smoke, and they had developed additives to neutralize these cancer causing agents. However, for marketing reasons, cigarettes with these additives never made it to market. To the cigarette makers, putting such cigarettes on the market would mean that (1) they would be admitting that cigarette smoking could cause cancer and (2) that the methods used to determine whether these treated cigarettes were less carcinogenic than regular cigarettes were actually valid. These test methods involved coating a rat's skin with a paste containing concentrated cigarette tars. The tobacco companies had previously denounced such testing, saying that it could not conclusively demonstrate that cigarette tars would cause cancer in humans.

He may have been a "victim" in the 1950s, but beginning in the 1960s evidence of the harm was beginning to mount. He continued to smoke until 1997. He should lose.

By the way, I too am no fan of the tobacco companies. The sooner they are out of business, the better.

Oh the tobacco companies will NEVER be out of business. Hell they are so subsidized by government, they aren't going anywhere.

Besides, each state would lose a TON of tax revenue. Why would they really want big tobacco to go away?

big tabacco going away would lower medicare costs to the goverment.

Good point Brian. Sort of the fox in charge of the chicken house.

With the major tobacco settlement, states and cities are partners with tobacco.

It was like a new tax, the more cigareets sold, the more money govts receive.

NAILS IN THE COFFIN

And just think how much money the govt saves in Social Security payments by people dying iff in their late 50's and early 60's.

The government doesn't save a nickel in Social Security payments, Nwokie; that money comes out of the trust fund, which we all pay into (presumably). The amount your SS rate may have to be raised in the future may be affected, however.

It's easy to say that anyone who had been smoking for 10 years by the mid-1960's should have simply quit when it was announced for a fact that smoking causes lung cancer. But it's not simple to quit, and it's harder for some people than others, apparently in part due to genetics. My Dad's cancer specialist told us that kicking nicotine was harder than kicking heroin.

I watched my Dad - a lifelong, 3 packs a day smoker - die of lung cancer a few years ago. He actually might still be alive had he quit when he was diagnosed six months before his death, because his cancer was treatable. But he wasn't able to quit, there were complications of his treatments, and his continued smoking surely complicated things. I remember taking him for chemo treatments and dropping him outside the hospital doors in the smoking area, while I parked the car and he had one last cigarette before going in. In fact, the last day of his life, at home in hospice care and breathing from an oxygen tank, he crawled out of bed into the kitchen (smart enough to remove his oxygen first to avoid an explosion) and apparently was searching for cigarettes - or that's how is girlfriend found him (she had thrown them all away). It's pathetic what smoking reduces you to even when you know it is killing you. It's too bad some people can't quit, but it's far from simple.

Andrew

Hate to tell you this, but there is no SS trust fund, every dime will have to come out of the general fund.

You mean, when Reagan raised payroll taxes in the 1980s predominantly on the lower and middle classes to pump more money into Social Security, he was really stealing that money for general spending? I thought Reagan cut taxes not raised them?

Andrew

I hate to tell YOU this, but the trust fund is filled with IOU's, also known as US Treasuries. Those are backed by the "full faith and credit" of the US. Are you suggesting that the US simply default on those? Do you have any idea what a default would do to our economy and credit worthiness?

kinda puts those hundreds of billions going into iraq into perspective.

I'm a little disturbed at the callous tone that this thread has taken. To clarify, I am not intending to mock the pain that lifelong smokers and their families go through (by the way, I'm terribly sorry to hear about the loss of your dad, Andrew). Actually, for a brief period of time--during Spring quarter of my third year in college--I smoked cigarettes daily. I only got up to about 5 cigarettes a day, and I stopped when school let out that year. I guess that I didn't smoke enough to get addicted or that I don't have the addictive body chemistry. I do remember that one of the things that I enjoyed the most about smoking was having a cigarette after a stressful day or being in the company of other smokers while smoking.

My doubts are about the efficacy of these big anti-tobacco suits. What positive changes are they supposed to accomplish? Are they supposed to force the tobacco companies to try to develop a safer product? Are they intended to make an example out of the tobacco companies for any other company that might have skeletons in its closet regarding its products? Are they intended to drive the tobacco companies out of business?

I am not poking fun at Jesse Williams, but I am taking issue with what comes across to me as his expectation that the tobacco companies admit the hazards of their products before he could accept the idea that these products had hazards. I am a little bit surprised that even though his logic was flawed, his estate was able to win the original suit. Then again, there are some parts of the story that I don't know (like what Williams might have read from the tobacco companies that convinced him that it was OK to keep smoking).

This is just a ploy at easy money. I can understand if this was 40 years ago, but it's been known for a long time that cigs cause cancer.

my dad, a former smoker died of relatively early age due to lung cancer. I've mixed feeling on the matter -- I think we should stick it to the tabacco companies for their death sticks and the BS they delivered about cigs years ago, at the same time some balance needs to be reached.