Jump to full article: nzoom.com (TVNZ), 2006-03-13
Author: Source: One News
Intro: Tobacco companies and anti-smoking groups are waiting nervously for the outcome of a landmark case brought by Invercargill woman Janice Pou.
The five week case has wound up with both sides clashing over whether it was common knowledge here in the 1960s that smoking was a serious health risk.
Cancer victim Pou vowed that smoking sent her to the grave and on Monday lawyers closed her case calling for two tobacco giants to be made accountable.
"They cannot logically allege a 17-year-old shop assistant in Invercargill must have known in 1968 along with the rest of the country that smoking was dangerous," says David Collins QC, lawyer for the Pou family. . . .
Now Judge Graham Lang must weigh up whether tobacco giants British American Tobacco and Wd and Ho Wills had a duty to warn New Zealanders, before 1974 when the first health notices popped up on cigarette packets.
"Common knowledge or obviousness are one and the same, you either know something by knowledge or you know something by seeing it...it's as simple as that...there is no duty to warn," defence lawyer Michael Camp says.
But Collins says that health warnings competed with a very sophisticated advertising campaign and denials from the industry that there was a causal link between smoking and lung cancer.
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