States Sue Tobacco Firms to Recoup Health Costs : Courts: Florida, Mississippi, West Virginia and Minnesota launch a legal onslaught on cigarette makers. Up to 60 million ‘little guys’ join in massive class-action suit.

The tobacco industry has never given up a penny in a health-related lawsuit, but opponents say they may finally have found a winning strategy: a new, multi-front legal onslaught against cigarette manufacturers.

In four cases, states rather than smokers are the plaintiffs, seeking “reimbursement” for smoking-related health costs.

In other cases, smokers have sued on behalf of anyone hooked by nicotine, huge class actions seeking hundreds of billions in damages. And for the first time in tobacco cases, scores of law firms have banded together to fight for the little guy--and the potential big payday.

“The industry at this point is really on the run,” said Richard Daynard, a Northeastern University law professor and chairman of the Tobacco Products Liability Project, a public health advocacy group in Boston.

Daynard acknowledged he has made similar statements before, but called the new plaintiffs “more appealing” to jurors than those in past suits, often ill smokers who had ignored decades of health warnings.

R.J. Reynolds vice president Daniel Donahue and others in the industry say the tobacco interests will prevail, but he warns that such strategies ignore the bite a loss by cigarette makers could put on taxpayers.

“There doesn’t appear to be anyone out there who’s concerned about the effect that success by these politicians and lawyers would have on the economy of this country,” he said.

If states succeed in suits that seek to recoup from cigarette makers the costs of Medicaid and other public health care associated with smoking, Donahue predicted other industries will be next--from distillers, for alcoholism’s costs, to grocers for their contribution to garbage.

Besides Florida, which filed suit in February seeking $1.43 billion, the states that have gone to court are Mississippi, West Virginia and Minnesota. Though none of the cases is expected to come to trial this year, nearly every month brings a hearing somewhere.

As the four states cooperate on their legal actions, they say others may join the fray.

“We’ve been in touch with many, many other states about the possibility of their following suit. . . . More than half the states, I’d say,” said Tom Pursell, deputy attorney general in Minnesota, where the legal claims include antitrust violations and conspiracy.

Pursell said evidence indicates some cigarette makers conspired to keep a supposedly “safer” product off the market because other products would be damaged by comparison--a contention industry representatives vehemently deny.

Besides the state-initiated suits, a new breed of class actions faces the industry. One, filed in New Orleans, may turn out to be the largest ever lodged, with as many as 60 million plaintiffs.

In that case, joined by some 60 law firms from coast to coast pledging a total of $6 million in exchange for 25% of any potential damages, anyone diagnosed by a doctor as nicotine-dependent or who has tried unsuccessfully to stop smoking could be a plaintiff. Estimates of potential damages rise to $100 billion. A similar case in Florida seeks twice that, though tobacco industry officials scoff at the figures.

When he learned of the New Orleans case, Patrick Rifflard, who has smoked for 34 of his 47 years, called the lawyers on behalf of himself, his wife and his mother-in-law. All have tried to kick their habits, to no avail.

“The longest I ever lasted was four days, and all I could think of was cigarettes. It’s as bad as drugs, I would think,” said Rifflard, of Orange County, N.Y.

The class actions are not the only ones in which plaintiffs are being represented by private lawyers who would collect substantial fees if they win--so are the four states.

That rankles the tobacco companies, which, as Michael York, a lawyer for Philip Morris, noted, already pay billions of dollars in taxes to the states.

York also criticized a Florida law, currently being appealed by tobacco and other manufacturers, that makes it easier for them to be sued.

“These lawsuits are a radical departure from the American judicial system. They assume liability and keep companies from mounting any kind of defense. It’s not constitutional,” York said. “It’s more of a political stunt.”

If the financing of anti-tobacco suits by law firms is one major change in the strategy for plaintiffs--who previously often were financially exhausted by drawn-out court battles--the political battlefield also has been altered dramatically.

Many tobacco opponents agree with Pursell of the Minnesota attorney general’s office when he says, “All of the things that happened in Washington last winter and spring were cumulatively the trigger for these lawsuits.”

Specifically, he said, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler helped “rip away the veil” during congressional testimony about decades of tobacco research.

Kessler called nicotine powerfully addictive, said cigarette vendors “control the levels of nicotine to satisfy this addiction” and suggested their product perhaps be regulated as a drug.

“The public wants less regulation. What they’re saying is, ‘Stop these efforts at backdoor prohibition.’ Those that got elected are going to be more objective,” said Alan Hilburg of the Smokeless Tobacco Council in Washington, which represents the makers of chewing tobacco.

On the other side of the argument, Cliff Douglas, former special counsel to anti-cigarette Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.), said the election means “basically a standstill” on tobacco reforms.

“We should protect children. We should provide for fully informed consent for adults,” Douglas said.

Rifflard, the class-action plaintiff, said he didn’t know what he was starting when he picked up a cigarette at 13.

“I can’t tell you how much I want to quit,” he said. “I feel like I’m slowly being destroyed by cigarettes. It’s very scary. I’m 47 years old. I’ve been smoking too long.”