Tobacco.org

• Broward Jury Awards Former Mayor's Sister $300 Million in Fraud Case Against Tobacco Giant Philip Morris USA  

A Broward Circuit Court Jury returned a $300 million verdict against Philip Morris USA within hours of closing arguments this afternoon in favor of Cindy Naugle, the sister of Jim Naugle, a former mayor of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Naugle, 61, who stopped smoking in 1993, smoked her first cigarette in 1968 when she was twenty years old because she thought they "made her look older." She told the jury that had she known then what the tobacco companies already knew, but had concealed, namely that nicotine is a highly-additive drug and cigarettes were considered by Philip Morris to be a "drug delivery device," she never would have taken that first puff. The jury assessed $56.6 million against Philip Morris for Naugle's past and future medical expenses as well as for her pain and suffering. It also assessed punitive damages in the amount of $244 million to punish the company for its misconduct. The jury also found Ms. Naugle was 10% responsible because of her decision to start smoking.

Ms. Naugle, who tried unsuccessfully to quit smoking for many years, now needs 24-hour oxygen and must travel in a wheelchair because the simple act of walking leaves her exhausted. "Cindy admitted her fault to the jury," said her attorney, Robert W. Kelley of the Fort Lauderdale law firm Kelley/Uustal. "But Philip Morris refused to accept any responsibility for her emphysema, even though she was an addicted customer for 25 years," he added. . . .

Kelley went on to say: "The cigarette companies managed to hide the truth about their product for a long time, but the truth is out now. And when the jury finally hears the truth about what these companies knew and when they knew it, they almost always side with the addicted smokers, most of whom started smoking as teenagers before there were any warning labels on cigarette packs." Kelley predicts the industry is in for a long series of losses because "most Americans are fed-up with corporate fraud and misconduct."

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Lights out at hospitals  

Hospitals across southwest Florida are banning smoking completely. It's impacting more than just employees, like Adrienne Jones. She used to smoke a pack a day.

"Our lunch hour, smoke as many as you can instead of eating," admits Jones.

That attitude stopped a year ago when her 42-year old husband, also a smoker, suffered a heart attack.

"It was sudden," said Jones. "We didn't expect it, we didn't know he had a bad heart."

Health concerns are the main reason her employer, Lee Memorial Health System, is installing a tobacco ban on all their properties starting November 19.

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Marion hospitals begin ban of tobacco on campuses  

The idea of lighting up in the parking lot of Marion County's two largest hospitals got snuffed out when Munroe Regional Medical Center and Ocala Health became tobacco-free campuses today.

The two hospitals, which chose today's Great American Smokeout to launch the ban, are now part of a consortium of more than 70 smoke-free Florida hospitals.

Both hospitals had tried for years to make the change, but a gentle push from a local doctor and management brought the project to fruition.

Dr. Dante Raju, who still remembers when doctors smoked inside hospitals, said he brought the issue to the fore.

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Smoking ban begins today at Lee Memorial Health System  

A smoking ban begins today across Lee Memorial Health System.

As of November 19th, all forms of tobacco, including cigarettes and smokeless tobacco like chewing products and dip are prohibited on all properties owned and leased by Lee Memorial Health System.

During this year’s Great American Smokeout, many other local employers went tobacco free in order to promote a healthier environment

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• UF study finds more teens smoke hookah 

Danielle Lee won’t touch a cigarette, but she’ll pass a hookah pipe around a circle of friends any day.

And, according to a recent UF study, an increasing number of middle school- and high school-aged children share Lee’s fondness for the alternative form of tobacco.

The study, presented on Nov. 9 at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, found that 11 percent of Florida high school students and 4 percent of Florida middle school students had smoked hookah at least once.

Hookah burns charcoal and tobacco. Air is first drawn through the tobacco and then into the pipe, where it passes through water, which leads many smokers to believe hookah smoking is safer than cigarette or cigar smoking.

Maureen Miller, alcohol and other drug prevention specialist with UF’s GatorWell Health Promotion Services, was quick to point out hookah’s potentially dangerous effects.

“This isn’t harmless,” Miller said of hookah. “There certainly are some serious health concerns here.” The World Health Organization reported a typical 20- to 80-minute hookah session is the equivalent of smoking about 100 cigarettes and can deliver 11 times more carbon monoxide than a cigarette.

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Florida cigarette sales have dropped sharply since new tax  

Cigarette sales have fallen sharply across Florida since a $1-a-pack tax increase took effect July 1, plunging nearly 50 percent in some counties.

Statewide, cigarette sales that regularly topped 100 million packs per month dropped to 73 million packs the month the tax became law. Since then, sales have inched back to around 78 million packs but remain well below prior levels.

To supporters, the sagging sales are evidence that the tax is meeting its public health objective: getting smokers to quit. Critics, however, say many people are simply buying their cigarettes elsewhere or switching to items that aren't subject to the higher tax, like small cigars.

The state charge on cigarettes is now $1.34, compared with the 34 cent tax that had been in place since 1990.

"It's working exactly the way it was designed to work. People are quitting," said Rep. Jim Waldman, D- Coconut Creek, a cigarette tax champion. "If I could, I'd raise it another dollar."

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Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. Or not 

Friday is the Great American Smokeout, when millions of smokers give it up, at least for the day, so we figured it was a good time to round up cigarette songs from five South Florida bands. Their inspirations included an ashtray full of cigarette butts that caught on fire, a woman who had a much-desired cigarette in her hand but no lighter, and a 7-year-old boy who took his grandmother's car on a joy ride while his passenger, also 7, smoked cigarettes.

Kaley Wolfe/Clementine is a West Palm Beach singer, guitarist and ukulele player who performs under the name Contrast Colors. Like fellow local Rachel Goodrich, Clementine weaves stories into her songs, and "My Cigarettes Are Treating Me Fine" opens with the sound of a lighter being flicked . . .

Jenny Wolfson, a.k.a. Miami Beach folk singer-guitarist Upside Down Jenny, wrote "One More Cigarette" from the perspective of someone who smokes despite having a cough, which becomes "just the flu" and eventually "just cancer, I guess." . . .

This month, Americana band Mike Dunn and the Kings of New England released the album Sundowner, which contains a bonding-over-cigarettes song titled "Cigarette." "Oh I don't mind meeting you/'Cause it's the right thing to do," Dunn sings. "Can I bum a cigarette?

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Court Orders Stanford Expert to Surrender Manuscript ($$) 

A Stanford University professor is fighting to keep his unpublished book manuscript out of the hands of tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, which subpoenaed it after he testified as an expert witness for smokers who are suing the company. Last month, Stanford asked the court to reject the company's demand, saying that it could have a "chilling effect" on researchers serving as expert witnesses.

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Tobacco Company Seeks Access To Historian's Unpublished Manuscript 

The Chronicle discusses attempts by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco to obtain access to an unpublished work by Stanford's Robert Proctor. Dr. Proctor is an expert witness in a lawsuit against the company; R. J. Reynolds thinks material in the manuscript will be helpful in its cross-examination of the historian of science. Dr. Proctor is fighting the tobacco company's subpoena. Dr. Proctor coined the term "agnotology," a term meaning the cultural production of ignorance.

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Getting Burned for Putting the Heat on Tobacco ($$) 

When professors raised questions about University of Florida students working as researchers on behalf of tobacco companies, they themselves came under tough scrutiny (see related article).

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Big Tobacco Strikes Back at Historian in Court ($$) 

A Stanford University professor who has sought to expose ties between historians and the tobacco industry is being accused in court of having broken the law in challenging the employment of four graduate students at the University of Florida as researchers assisting tobacco companies in litigation.

In motions filed in two Florida state courts last month, tobacco-company lawyers allege that Robert N. Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, engaged in illegal witness

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Scholars' Right to Keep Unpublished Work Private Is at Issue in Lawsuit ($$) 

In a case with potentially major implications for scholars and publishers, a Stanford University professor who often serves as an expert witness against tobacco companies is fighting an effort by lawyers for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to obtain the manuscript of his unpublished and unfinished book on that industry.

A Florida state court judge has already authorized the tobacco company's lawyers to issue a subpoena requiring Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford professor of the history

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Koballa v. Philip Morris, et al  

The case of Stella Koballa, et al., etc. v. Philip Morris U.S.A., Inc., et al., etc. is a civil lawsuit filed against Philip Morris U.S.A., Inc., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and several other large tobacco firms in 2007. The case was filed on behalf of Stella Koballa, a lung cancer survivor who also suffers from emphysema. As with many other court cases against the tobacco companeis, Koballa alleges that cigarette makers concealed information about the hazards of smoking during the 1950s and 1960s, causing individuals to smoke without regard to health risks, including cancer.

The case became controversial because during the case, lawyers for R.J. Reynolds subpoenaed an unfinished manuscript about the history of the global tobacco industry written by Stanford history professor Robert Neal Proctor, who was tapped to serve as an expert witness for the plaintiff in the case. Proctor and lawyers for the plaintiff lawyers are contesting the subpoena, saying the attempt to reveal the unfinished manuscript is an effort to harass and intimidate Dr. Proctor, and ruin his credibility. They maintain that if the defense obtains the manuscript, it would have a chilling effect on other experts who may be asked to testify against the industry.[1]

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Stanford Historian Robert Proctor vs. R.J. Reynolds: A Lot on the Line 

History is unkind to tobacco companies, and never more so than since a federal court in 2006 found the industry guilty of perpetrating 50 years of fraud and deceit upon the American people. It's a sordid history to live down, and maybe that's why R.J. Reynolds is harassing one of the few historians who has been willing to step up and testify in court about the real history of the tobacco industry's behavior: Professor Robert N. Proctor of Stanford University.

Dr. Proctor specializes in the history of 20th- and 21st-century scientific controversies, including the history of tobacco and "agnotology,", the study of the cultural production of ignorance and doubt -- a field familiar to tobacco companies. After all, Brown & Williamson wrote in a 1969 proposal that

Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' [linking smoking with disease] that exists in the mind of the general public ... If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. . . .

Tobacco companies hate Dr. Proctor because he helps draw a clear picture for juries about how the industry reacted when the hazards of smoking were revealed in the 1950s an onward. He has also evaluated how the history of smoking in the U.S. might have been different had the industry had responded honestly to evidence that its products cause disease. Dr. Proctor has even taken other medical historians to task for testifying in the industry's favor in lawsuits.

Big Tobacco has employed historians in the courtroom to help demonstrate how "everyone knew" about the dangers of smoking at any given point in time. More than 40 historians have testified for the industry, but only three have testified against. Dr. Proctor is one of those brave three. He has testified in 15 tobacco lawsuits since 1998, and now, in the latest suit, Koballa v. Philip Morris, et al, R.J. Reynolds is trying to stop him. . . .

Proctor's battle to protect his manuscript has broad implications for privacy, protection of academic work, and future court cases in which scholars, researchers and other experts are tapped to testify. As Dr. Proctor has pointed out, it is already difficult to find historians who are willing to testify against the industry. Now we can see why. It obviously takes courage to do so, and can lead to significant extra expense. That Dr. Proctor has had to spend so much of his own money to participate in this case is egregious.

This intimidation of Dr. Proctor, if the court allows it to continue, will only make the tobacco industry's path to win cases easier, and punish those who step up in court to tell the truth about this industry's past.

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SCF campus may move to go tobacco-free  

BRADENTON -- The local community college campus may be going smoke-free.

Lars Hafner, president of State College of Florida, told board members Monday that students had been talking to him about the possibility of a tobacco-free campus.

At SCF's Venice campus, students recently held a forum about the matter, he told the board.

"Down in Venice, they've started to aggressively pursue that," he said. "It's a student-driven initiative."

If student groups formally seek a change in the college's policies, it would fall to the Board of Trustees to decide the issue, Hafner said. If the board voted to ban tobacco, it would apply to the Bradenton campus as well as those in Lakewood Ranch and Venice, he said.

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