By Carol Thompson

Supposedly by meekly submitting to the plaintiff lawyers' extortionate demands, "The tobacco companies are paying off the Attorneys General and others to get support for legislation the tobacco companies want." ("The Latest, As Yet Unnoticed, Political Scandal: Buying Legislation Through the Guise of Settling Lawsuits," by Susan P. Koniak, professor of law at Boston University; at the Conference on the Proposed Tobacco Settlement "Should Tort Law Be on the Table?" July 31, 1997 at Harvard University School of Law.)

This was recently disseminated by the anti-smoker major media (Tobacco Firms Quiet on fees to be paid to plaintiffs lawyers under settlment. By Milo Geyelin, Wall Street Journal 1997 Dec 16), and on anti-smoker websites. It has been parroted by Joseph Califano, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare from 1977-79, as well (The Washington Post Fri Jan 9, 1998, p. A21).

Koniak says: "Consider. A group of major tobacco companies has agreed to pay Mississippi just about four times the amount Attorney General Moore had asked for in damages in the lawsuit he had filed against those companies. He sued for $940 million dollars and `settled' for 3.6 billion on the eve of a trial for which he was admittedly not prepared and might very well have lost. No lawsuit `settles' like that. This is a payoff masquerading as a settlement."

But a payoff from whom to whom? Koniak's conspiracy theory conveniently omits the crucial facts that are lethal to anti-smoker ideology. In fact, these lawsuits were not fought by the tobacco industry the way someone genuinely intending to fight them would do it, either. The tobacco companies deliberately threw the fight to the anti-smokers.

The fundamental premise of those lawsuits is a lie. Smokers are not an economic burden at all. Smokers have saved society money. Smokers have been subsidizing non-smokers' health costs for all those years that the attorneys general pretend their states have suffered "increased costs" due to smoking.

AG Moore's pretense of economic damages is founded on nothing but an act of perjury to Congress by three staff members of the Office of Technology Assessment. The methodological frauds of their smoking cost claims were exposed by the US Congress' own Congressional Research Service report.

The tobacco industry could have easily demolished his claims in court. Better still, they could also have brought legal action many years ago against those who spread that smoking cost libel, or at the very least, they could have used their enormous resources to expose the fraud. And their "staunch allies" in Congress could have nipped the Medicaid lawsuits in the bud ten years ago, simply by investigating and remediating the methodological frauds of the OTA and the CDC's SAMMEC. They could have prosecuted the perjurors, or at least spoken out against them.

But they all sat on their hands and did nothing, until this Big Lie was accepted as truth by its constant repetition, and reached its predictable outcome when the attorneys general gleefully filed their malicious lawsuits.

Then, in state after state, rather than challenging the bogus methodology of the anti-smokers' smoking cost claims as they should be doing, the tobacco lawyers repeatedly attempt to get those suits tried as if they are personal injury or product liability cases instead. They try to blame smokers for smoking or the state for not preventing them, or for side issues like manufacturing cigarettes in prisons. They quibble over technical issues like statutory justifications, when those suits are typically brought "on the basis of equityand common law," meaning common-sense justice for an economic injury (which the states HAVEN'T SUFFERED!) They nitpick about whether the tobacco companies should be liable for the state's portion that was reimbursed by the Feds. They try to get consideration for the cigarette taxes smokers pay, which is promptly rejected because they don't fund the Medicaid program.

And then they flop on their bellies and surrender, promising humongously inflated sums of money to the anti-smokers while whining that they weren't allowed to defend themselves. But not once have they challenged the anti-smokers' methodology.

I have even faxed many of those lawyers copies of the CRS Report Technical Appendix, to no avail. The supposedly hotshot, prestigious law firms who have been long-term representatives of the tobacco companies make no effort to educate their local counsel through whom they're supposedly "fighting" the Medicaid suits, or direct them as to how to properly defend it. They are merely using their local counsel as patsies to lose the lawsuits for them.

As for their defenses against the health issues, which no case has ever gotten to yet, I can picture the lame attempts they'd make from the tobacco industry criticisms of the California EPA ETS Report and the Broin case. We smokers could do a better job of it ourselves.

Koniak writes, "Mr. Moore will take four times his own estimate of what Mississippi's lawsuit was worth home to his state's coffers and will reap the political benefits associated with the tobacco companies' happy portrayal of him as the dragon who slew them, for doing what? For playing pied piper, for bringing other Attorneys General, private lawyers and some public health representatives to the table to sign onto legislation the tobacco companies want so badly that they have launched a massive lobbying campaign to secure it. The memorandum of understanding he signed with the tobacco companies to `settle' Mississippi's lawsuit admits as much. According to that document, he is paid four times the damages he alleged for, among other things, playing `a leadership role among Attorneys General from various states in maintaining civil litigation against the tobacco industry and seeking to forge an unprecedented national resolution' to the industry's woes. What industry pays a premium to the person responsible for getting others to sue that industry and forcing legislative concessions down the industry's throat? Please."

This is a point well taken. But, the "deal" offered to Congress is legislation that the tobacco companies could "want" only if they are either extraordinarily stupid, or else it is they who have been bought off by the anti-smokers (no doubt with our own tax dollars). The terms they agreed to would never be accepted by an industry that hoped to have a future in this country.

This whole elaborate show of the anti-smokers' Medicaid lawsuits, and the tobacco industry pretending to be defeated by them, is just a sham to deceive the public. They are committing industrial suicide, but trying to protect their finances as they do so through the immunity they want so desperately.

The other part of their scheme is to try to pay off as many interests as possible which could be expected to object to their fleeing overseas and leaving them in the lurch (with the notable exception of smokers! Well, on our behalf they've agreed to let us pay for quit-smoking clinics for ourselves. Isn't that magnanimous of them? At least those despicable little insects who obligingly tell the anti-smokers that they want to quit should be happy, especially since the rest of us who don't want to quit will be forced to pay for it as well.)

But escape is nothing but wishful thinking. The anti-smokers will be in full pursuit of them everywhere, funded by our tax dollars and egged on by the international media conspiracy to outlaw tobacco.

Just look at the terms of this settlement that didn't have to be settled, using S1414, the McCain bill modeled after the "deal," as an example of what they're trying to get Congress to perpetrate on us.

Its very premises are lunacy and lies: "(a) Congress makes the following findings: (1) The Food and Drug Administration and other public health authorities view the use of tobacco products by the nation's children as a `pediatric disease' of epic and worsening proportions that results in new generations of tobacco-dependent children and adults."

One would never guess from this gibbering that not one single child died from smoking a cigarette. It reflects a grotesque moral decay of society that these insane creatures have found to their delight that they can bully the public into meekly submitting to them, and handing over their children without question, by ranting garbage like this, when the appropriate reaction of sane human beings should be the exact opposite, namely to pull our children away from them in fear and loathing.

"(2) There is a consensus within the scientific and medical communities that tobacco products are inherently dangerous and cause cancer, heart disease, and other serious adverse health effects."

So without any inquiry, we're supposed to meekly submit to anti-smoker scientific fraud, because the politicized bullies supposedly representing the "scientific and medical communities" say so. This is abdication by Congress of its responsibilities to the people.

"(3) The Food and Drug Administration and other health authorities have concluded that virtually all new users of tobacco products are under the age of 18...."

All that their repeated blathering about protecting children boils down to, is that they believe, by selective attention only to the times when access to tobacco has been easy, that no-one over 18 would ever use tobacco, and therefore keeping young people from smoking is an easy means to cultural genocide of their opposition.

"(4) Federal, State, and local governments lack many of the legal means and resources needed to address the societal problems caused by the use of tobacco products."

I.e., anti-smokerism must be imposed from the top down, by coercion, due to lack of popular support.

"(5) Public health authorities believe that the societal benefits of enacting tobacco settlement legislation in human and economic terms would be vast. The Food and Drug Administration found that reducing underage tobacco use 50 percent `would prevent well over 60,000 early deaths'."

That estimate is based on scientific fraud, furthermore, none of those deaths would be among the underaged, but in middle-aged adults who freely chose to use tobacco.

"The Food and Drug Administration has estimated that the monetary value of the regulations promulgated as a result of this Act will be worth up to $43,000,000,000 per year in reduced medical costs, improved productivity, and the benefit of avoiding the premature death of loved ones."

These economic claims are 100% fraudulent, it is smokers who are being forced to pay $50 billion or so to subsidize the extra costs of non-smokers. Furthermore, this subordinates our civil rights to the personal whims of anti-smokers.

And, keep in mind that those despicable, craven, traitorous tobacco lawyers accepted all of this vile sewage in their so-called settlement with the attorneys general.

Title I, Subtitle A, Sec. 101, prohibits all outdoor advertising, human images and cartoons, internet advertising, and most point of sale advertising.

Since people smoked even in communist countries with no advertising at all, they are wantonly trashing freedom of speech with no justification whatsoever, out of nothing but sheer hubris.

Sec. 102 limits advertising "to FDA specified media" and has further bans on product placement on TV and in movies.
Sec. 103 limits ads to black and white.

Sec. 104 indulges anti-smoker hubris again by requiring their defamatory graffiti smearing tobacco products as "nicotine delivery devices" (even loose-leaf tobacco!).

Sec. 105 bans logos, promotions, and sponsorship.

Subtitle B, Sec. 111, "Cigarette Warnings," forces manufacturers to plaster more outright anti-smoker lies on cigarette packages and advertising.

"WARNING: Cigarettes Are Addictive" (only because anti-smoker criminals changed the definition);

"WARNING: Tobacco Smoke Can Harm Your Children" (anti-smoker criminals falsely blamed it for asthma caused by cockroaches);

"Cigarettes Cause Strokes And Heart Disease" (anti-smoker criminals falsely blamed smoking for cardiovascular disease actually caused by Helicobacter pylori, Chlamydia pneumoniae, and other infection);

"Smoking During Pregnancy Can Harm Your Baby" (anti-smoker criminals deliberately performed defective studies for 40 years to falsely blame smoking for harm caused by chorioamnion-itis);

"Smoking Can Kill You" (a gratuitous smear, since non-smoking does also);

"Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks To Your Health" (the greatest reduction would result throwing out the anti-smokers' bogus health claims).

Requiring these labels is like allowing synagogues to be built only if they're pre-defaced with swastikas. And our cowardly, media-directed Congress undoubtably would like to duck the responsibility of examining these claims, the better to return to their politics-as-usual of catering to the usual special interests, and attempting to interest a bored public in their petty partisan bickerings.

Furthermore, Sec. 115(c) specifically denies any relief from liability by those labels.

Subtitle C, Sections 121 and 122, reiterate the FDA's harassing requirements on retailers.

Subtitle D compels the licensing of tobacco sellers.

Subtitle E, Sections 142 and 143 proclaim tobacco products to be "drugs" and "class II devices" (that is, "restricted medical [!!!] devices"), and hands tobacco over to FDA regulation, "except that the Commissioner may not promulgate a regulation that prohibits the sale and distribution of a tobacco product solely on the basis of the fact that tobacco causes disease."

This is no protection at all against the anti-smokers' plans to outlaw tobacco, as any pretext would serve them just as well. We smokers want the FDA banned from regulating tobacco.

Subtitle F, Compliance plans and corporate culture, Section 153, protects anti-smoker whistleblowers from retaliation. But in regard to this filthy anti-smoking movement, which got everything it has by lies, fraud, corruption, and conspiracy, there is not a single word about protecting those who blow the whistle on them.

Section 155 triumphantly abolishes the Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research. Boy, those tobacco lawyers sure know how to negotiate a tough settlement, don't they.

Title II, Section 201 proclaims, "It is the purpose of this title to encourage the achievement of dramatic and immediate reductions [note - !!!] in the number of underage consumers of tobacco products through the imposition of substantial financial surcharges on manufacturers if certain underage tobacco-use reduction targets are not met."

But since the laws raising the age of access to tobacco were rammed down the peoples' throats by well-organized and government-subsidized anti-smoking groups, they lack popular support and the public massively disobeys them. Thus the anti-smokers would crank up their extortion of smokers under this pretext.

The "Smoke-Free Environment Policy" of Title III, Section 302 would permanently engrave the anti-smokers' lies in stone, as the official basis of federal law, all without public inquiry into the anti-smokers' numerous acts of scientific fraud and concealment of the evidence on our side. We're supposed to swallow whole their corruption of the EPA, and the fraudulent methodology they used to lie that smoking causes heart disease which they extended to blame passive smoking, and other illness as well.

Then, there's Title IV, Section 401, the National Tobacco Settlement Trust Fund. This is the $368.5+ billion stolen from smokers' pockets under the false pretenses that smokers are an economic burden, and that the tobacco companies supposedly committed crimes for which they were never convicted (but the anti-smokers should be!)

Sections 402 (d) and (e) protect the tobacco companies and screw smokers, by allowing the tobacco companies to "annually adjust the prices of the tobacco products... to reflect the amounts of such payments," and deduct the payments as "an ordinary and necessary expense in carrying on a trade or business."

Title V, Public Health and Other Programs, is sheer rape of smokers.

Subtitle A, Section 501 establishes a "Public Health Trust Fund" as a separate fund within the "Trust Fund."

Section 504 (a) (1) and (2) provides for smokers to "reimburse" the State for "treatment of tobacco-related illnesses or conditions" for which we're already more than paying our way, plus subsidizing the anti-smokers' Alzheimer's disease and other decrepitude. The tobacco lawyers are making us pay phony damages to buy off the anti-smokers, and they must not be allowed to get away with it, because WE DO NOT OWE ONE CENT. In fact, the states owe us restitution, and they should be forced to pay damages as well for their attorneys general's violations of our rights.

(3) subsidizes health care for persons under 18, which is just to bribe support from smarmy hypocrites who "care about children," but not with their own money. Those masochistic cretins who assure the anti-smokers that they don't mind cigarette tax increases to pay for "children" will be happy, too.

(4) establishes "a State tobacco products liability judgments and settlement fund," which provides in (c) for punitive damages. So much for the tobacco companies escaping liability -- or at least smokers would not escape it, thanks to them and their allies in Congress. And, this shows that the anti-smokers' fits about granting the tobacco companies "immunity" are just greedy concern that the payouts might not be as large as they hope to win in lawsuits.

(5) is "to reimburse the State for expenses incurred in carrying out the tobacco licensure requirements;" and (6) is "to carry out any other activities determined appropriate by the State" -- a virtual blank check.

But surely the most vile and despicable of all is Subtitle B, Other Programs. In Section 511, smokers will be forced to pay for a "National Smoking Cessation Program" to financially benefit our anti-smoker persecutors as they strive to wipe us out.

In Section 512, smokers will be forced to pay for a "National Reduction in Tobacco Usage Program," which are handouts to anti-smokers "to to carry out activities designed to reduce the use of tobacco products," such as (c)(1), "media-based and nonmedia-based education, prevention and cessation campaigns designed to discourage the use of tobacco products by individuals who are under 18 years of age and to encourage those who use such products to quit."

In other words, this section gives more billions of dollars for the anti-smokers to spew even more of their lies and defamations in our children's faces, and in our own; and for more of their bogus research, plus another blank check.

And, Section 513 forces us to fund the anti-smokers' "National Tobacco-Free Public Education Program," "designed to reduce the use of tobacco products" by spreading still more defamations and slanders: "(d) to conduct multi-media public educational or informational campaigns that are designed to discourage and de-glamorize the use of tobacco products. Such campaigns shall be designed to discourage the initiation of tobacco use by minors and encourage those using such products to quit."

Section 514(c)(1), (2), (3), the National Event Sponsorship Program, is an overt bribe to those "athletic, musical, artistic, or other social or cultural" events or activities, also individuals or teams, that were sponsored by tobacco manufacturers or distributors.

Section 515, the National Community Action Program hands out grants to State and local governments, "to carry out community-based tobacco control efforts that are designed to encourage community involvement in reducing tobacco product use." In other words, bribes for struggling little community action groups for helping to persecute us, much like the CDC's existing programs.

Section 516 is another handout for quit-smoking programs.

Title 6, Subtitle A, Section 611, the National Tobacco Protocol, (b)(3) requires the tobacco companies consenting to this settlement to waive their Constitutional rights.

Section 613(a) denies liability protection to non-participating manufacturers, and (c) forces them to pay into the big slush fund anyhow, 150 percent of what they would have paid if they co-operated with the anti-smokers' blackmail.

Title VII, Provisions relating to tobacco-related civil actions, is reportedly the glorious benefit for which the tobacco industry has sacrificed every other consideration. But why?

The states' claims of economic damages are absolutely groundless and fraudulent. Likewise for their accusations of conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering, which the anti-smokers themselves are guilty of, and of concealing evidence regarding smoking and health. The lawsuits filed in the name of smokers and/or their survivors have been repeatedly rejected by juries, on the just grounds that smokers knew the risks of their actions.

The tobacco lawyers scarcely even attempted to fight the Broin ETS case. As is their pattern, they refused to expose the anti-smokers' corruption of the crucial EPA report on ETS, or to bring up evidence of potential confounding by Chlamydia pneumoniae. Nor did they mention the mounting evidence that the anti-smokers falsely blamed smoking for cardiovascular disease actually caused by CP and by Helicobacter pylori, and extended this fraud to passive smoking as well.

This growing evidence of the anti-smokers' epidemiologic malpractice would have been disastrous to their cause. But instead, the tobacco lawyers are hastening to help the anti-smokers set their lies in stone, by acquiescing to them in this settlement.

The anti-smokers have in fact used their lawsuits as another tool of their racketeering. They have repeatedly recruited smokers for lawsuits, hoping to get lucky with a biased or stupid jury, and erode the principle of personal responsibility to the detriment of society. And, many of the attorneys general, such as Wisconsin AG James Doyle in particular, did not file their lawsuits in ignorance of the fact that their claims were fraudulent.

The solution to the tobacco industry's liability problem is prosecution of actions such as the anti-smokers', and probably new and effective legislation. And it must cover all tobacco growers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.

Title VIII, Public Disclosure of Health Research. This is just a big pander to anti-smoker hallucinations. Like the secret tobacco documents, the hysterics about "secret health research" are just an anti-smoker propaganda gimmick. There's nothing there.

The real secret research, which exonerates tobacco from many of the anti-smokers' accusations, is in the hands of the anti-smokers themselves, including the Centers for Disease Control. They should be compelled to produce their information for Congress.

Title IX, Assistance to Tobacco Growers and Communities, tosses a handful of peanuts to tobacco farmers in return for their freedom.

Title X, Sec. 1002 subjects the Indians to this tyranny as well, and would treat them as tobacco manufacturers.

The real deal between the tobacco companies and the anti-smokers was secretly made behind our backs, years ago. The public maneuvering we're allowed to see (but not comment upon except in anti-smoker-approved terms!) is just setting up the machinery for its implementation.

This so-called settlement is the anti-smokers' blueprint for cultural genocide. The so-called tobacco settlement would hemorrhage money out of smokers' own pockets to fund our own persecutors, give non-smokers a windfall health costs subsidy, and bribe away our allies, to pave the way for the anti-smokers' final assault on our freedom.

The media conspiracy, which rammed the anti-smoking movement down the peoples' unwilling throats in the first place by systematic lies and suppressing discussion, aims to ram this down our throats as well. The tobacco companies hope to flee the country with their profits intact, when the FDA outlaws tobacco.

And all the dumb little moron smokers who didn't fight for their rights will be left standing there, going "Duh, what happened? Why didn't somebody do something?" Including the trusting suckers and dupes in the tobacco industry-funded phony smokers' rights groups, whom they keep in the dark.

Courtesy of Carol Thompson 08/23/93
Smokers' Rights Action Group
P.O. Box 259575
Madison, WI 53725-9575
Phone: 608-249-4568