Reaction to Jury Verdict : Most People Blame Smokers, Not Firms
Arthur Guice was emphatic as he drew on a cigarette, a habit he has had for 40 years. Tobacco companies, he said, aren’t responsible for warning people that smoking is dangerous.
Guice’s views were shared by the clear majority of people questioned Tuesday about Monday’s jury verdict against a tobacco company in the death of a New Jersey woman.
Organized opponents of the tobacco industry--groups like the American Lung Assn. and the American Cancer Society--praised the verdict, while almost everyone else interviewed said smokers ultimately were responsible for tobacco’s effects.
“People smoke on their own,” said Guice, 55, of Anaheim. “They’re not encouraged to smoke. They go out and buy tobacco on their own. The tobacco companies don’t force people to buy their products.” As for cigarette advertising, he said, “I’ve never paid any attention to ads.”
On Monday, a federal jury in New Jersey found the Liggett Group Inc. partly liable in the death of Rose Cipollone, a longtime smoker, because ads in the 1950s claimed Liggett-made cigarettes were safe and “just what the doctor ordered.” The jury ruled that Liggett had a duty then to warn of smoking’s risks, and it awarded $400,000 to Cipollone’s widower.
“Now, everybody will be suing,” said Sue Petrucci, a 46-year-old Huntington Beach housewife who said she was stunned when she learned of the verdict. “I think anybody who smokes is asking for trouble,” she added, sitting inside South Coast Plaza and taking a puff on a cigarette.
“I think it’s crazy. The responsibility should be the smoker’s and not the manufacturer’s at all,” said Sandy Kieran, who, with her husband, owns and operates the Tinder Box, a pipe and tobacco shop in Orange. Smokers, she said, “have a choice before they put the cigarette in their mouth.”
Carolyn Wilson, a data processor from Mission Viejo, said that with or without a warning from a cigarette manufacturer, Rose Cipollone surely knew what she was doing every time she lit a cigarette. “No one can expect that, when they are sitting there with something burning in their mouth, that it’s not harming their body,” said the 32-year-old nonsmoker. While saying that smokers are solely liable for their health nowadays, some county residents expressed sympathy for Antonio Cipollone’s claim. When his wife started smoking, tobacco companies weren’t required to put warning labels on cigarette packages, and thus some reasoned that Rose Cipollone should not have been responsible for her death from lung cancer.
“We all have to be responsible for our own actions,” said Beryl Nicolai, a 59-year-old courthouse clerk from Tustin. But, she emphasized, “the main thing is that we must be made fully aware” of the risks of smoking. Evelyn McMillin, a retired housewife from San Clemente, said that when Rose Cipollone started smoking, tobacco companies should have warned of smoking’s dangers. Now that everyone knows the hazards, it is entirely “up to the people not to smoke,” she said. The only responsibility tobacco companies have now “is to stop it with this Marlboro man thing and not deceptively advertise their products, especially to teen-agers.”
Such advertising helped convince Don Buck that Monday’s ruling was fair. “They should be held liable for their products. What they used to advertise was blatantly false,” said Buck of Mission Viejo, a 34-year-old map draftsman for Orange County. Cipollone “should have won a lot more.”
Buck’s sentiments were echoed by several anti-smoking activists and the county chapters of national health organizations.
“While the amount of the jury award was not significant,” said Dale Bonifield, spokesman for the Orange County chapter of the American Heart Assn., “it represents a change in attitude and a rejection of the cavalier attitude of tobacco companies about the long-term health of smokers.”
Ed Cornett, a longtime anti-smoking activist affiliated with the American Lung Assn. and Action on Smoking and Health, said Monday’s verdict would encourage future liability suits, and he called it “a first step.” But, he said, “it’s not a win, not a loss, just one jury’s opinion that this tobacco company shares some of the blame in (Cipollone’s) death.”
While saying she was heartened by the decision, Debbie Mahood, director of smoker education for the Orange County Lung Assn., said the real issue in the case transcends liability. “The main question,” she commented, “is why is this product is on the market in the first place.”
