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Editor: C. Calvin Warriner
Profession: Cigarette & Tobacco Attorney

Category: Tobacco News

In the truth is stranger than fiction category, a post ruling motion filed by Big Tobacco in response to Judge Kessler's recent ruling banning the sale of "low tar" and "light" cigarettes shows just how blatantly unfazed tobacco remains to litigation setbacks. Despite having been found guilty of fraud, corruption and racketeering, Big tobacco has actually filed a motion seeking clarification that the court's ban only applied to the domestic sale of cigarettes.

The companies filed this brief knowing that the judge had ruled that the use of such terms was part of a massive pattern of fraud and deceit. Yet in a sign of the boundless rapaciousness of these companies in marketing death, they had the temerity to ask her not to apply her order "to sales wholly outside the United States." If we can't continue to defraud Americans into killing themselves, they effectively asked, can we at least keep suggesting to billions of people abroad that some cigarettes are safer than others?

So commented the Washington Post in today's editorial. Its point being that litigation losses don't faze the multibillion dollar killers and that it will take bold legislation to bring the lawless tobacco companies in check. Can our elected officials continued to bow to tobacco's lobby in the face of an ever increasing mountain of evidence of tobacco's heinous conduct?