Flight Attendants Sue Over Tobacco

Attorneys for flight attendants have filed a $5-billion class-action lawsuit charging tobacco companies with causing cancer and other diseases in flight attendants, the attorneys said Thursday.

It is apparently the first major lawsuit charging that tobacco companies are liable for disease in nonsmokers exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke, said Richard Daynard, chairman of the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University in Boston.

“We’re accusing the cigarette companies of selling a cancerous addiction and then affecting innocent people,” said Peter Schwedock, one of the attorneys who filed the suit. “These are nonsmokers.”

Brennan Dawson, spokeswoman for the Tobacco Institute, an industry trade group, said that the institute did not comment on product liability suits.

The lawsuit was filed in Dade County Circuit Court in Miami on behalf of several flight attendants, including Norma Broin, who had lung cancer and had a lung removed.

As a class-action suit, it charges the tobacco companies not only with causing Broin’s cancer, but also with generally increasing the risks of cancer in other nonsmoking flight attendants.

The defendants in the suit include Philip Morris, RJR Nabisco, Loews, Lorillard, Brooke Group Ltd., American Brands, Dosal Tobacco, American Tobacco and the Liggett Group.

Tobacco companies have defended themselves against smokers’ lawsuits by arguing that smokers knew the risks of cigarettes and chose to smoke anyway.

The Miami lawsuit sidesteps that issue, said Stanley Rosenblatt, who helped prepare the action.

“The arguments that smokers accept the risk, which I never bought anyway, certainly doesn’t apply to my plaintiffs,” Rosenblatt said. “They have no choice.”