ASSUMING THE RISK: The Mavericks, the Lawyers, and the Whistle-Blowers Who Beat Big Tobacco.

• Author: Massing, Michael
• Position: Review

ASSUMING THE RISK: The Mavericks, the Lawyers, and the Whistle-Blowers Who Beat Big Tobacco By Michael Orey Little, Brown $24.95

The struggle against tobacco companies is far from over

THE FIGHT AGAINST BIG TABACCO HAS given rise to a burgeoning literature. In 1996, Richard Kluger published Ashes to Ashes, his impressive history of the rise of Philip Morris and the efforts to contain it. Soon after came Stanton Glantz's The Cigarette Papers, a collection of internal documents from Brown & Williamson, and Philip J. Hilts's Smokescreen, an examination of the industry's marketing practices. Last year appeared Peter Pringle's Cornered: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice, a look at the lawyers involved in suing the industry. Now comes Assuming the Risk, by Michael Orey, an editor at The Wall Street Journal and a former writer and editor at The American Lawyer, describing "the Mavericks, the Lawyers, and the Whistle-Blowers Who Beat Big Tobacco" as his subtitle puts it.

Enough already, you might say. But the effort to rein in the nation's tobacco companies has been one of the most significant and fascinating political developments of the decade. Certainly the swiftness with which this once-impregnable industry was brought low has been breathtaking. The subtitle to Richard Kluger's book--"America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris"--was obsolete almost as soon as it appeared, with Philip Morris suddenly subject to once-unimaginable controls. The campaign against tobacco is now being emulated in many other fields. In several cities, for instance, supporters of gun control are seeking to hold gun manufacturers responsible for deaths and injuries their products have caused. The families of the three victims in the 1997 school shooting in West Paducah, Ky., have filed suit against the makers and distributors of violent movies and video games alleged to have been watched by the gunman. And grassroots organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving are exploring new ways to rein in the nation's alcohol companies, whose products take the lives of an estimated 100,000 Americans a year.

So, from a public-health standpoint, any new insights that can be gleaned from the great offensive against tobacco are to be welcomed. In Assuming the Risk, Michael Orey focuses on events in Mississippi--the first of the more than 40 states to sue the tobacco companies for the recovery of public funds spent treating...