Butt out: finally, a way to beat the cigarette companies in court.

• Author: Catanoso, Justin

Take two packs and call me in the morning: When these ads ran, the tobacco industry knew better.

Reynolds executives were not thrilled with their scientists' findings. The

company summarily closed down the Mouse House, fired all the scientists, and confiscated--and never returned--dozens of the biochemists' research notebooks.

For nearly four decades, law suits against tobacco companies have followed an unnervingly familiar pattern: 1) litigant (or family of litigant) brings claim, 2) company hires battery of lawyers, 3) expensive trial ensues, 4) litigant loses. Plaintiffs either fail to convince a jury to award them damages, or the tobacco companies, for whom shelling out huge legal fees is a price of doing business, drag out proceedings long enough to break the will of their antagonists. The results have been a tally of lopsided victories that you might expect from constantly pitting the San Francisco 49ers against a Pop Warner team: After 40 years and 320 different lawsuits, no tobacco company has paid anyone a single dime.

The landmark Supreme Court decision handed down last June could end this streak. Ruling in Rose Cipollone's case against three tobacco companies, the court handed the industry some fairly good news and some very bad news. Lawsuits alleging that cigarette makers failed to warn plaintiffs that smoking is dangerous, the foundation of virtually every lawsuit against the industry thus far, would no longer be allowed; the Supremes held that warning labels shield the industry from such suits, at least on claims after 1969. But the court also ruled that plaintiffs can sue cigarette makers for fraud, based on a theory that by concealing facts about smoking and health, or by actually lying about damaging information in their possession, the manufacturers breached a legal duty not to deceive. There may still be some new angles to try in the I-couldn't-quit approach to tobacco litigation (see sidebar). But juries in future trials are likely to be considering new questions: What did the cigarette makers know about the dangers of smoking, when did they know it, and what did they do with the information?

The short answers: The industry had reams of scientific data confirming everyone's worst fears about smoking, they had it early on, and they made an organized effort to keep the truth about their product from the public. Longer answers are contained in the 100,000 pages of once-privileged documents that Cipollone attorney Marc Edell subpoenaed from the tobacco industry. documents showing that the industry has suppressed, ignored and even lied about what vince dispassionate observers--fair-minded jurors, for instance--that over the course of the past four decades, the tobacco industry engaged in massive fraud.

Smoke and mirrors

Much of the new and most damaging information pertains, ironically, to efforts by tobacco companies in the fiFties and sixties to understand and even mitigate the health problems already being associated with smoking. Scientific studies by independent researchers began linking cigarettes to lung cancer in 1950. Around that time, Reynolds, for example, became interested in developing its own research lab. The company's goal was to identify the many compounds in cigarette smoke, figure out which might be toxic, and develop...