Leading the Air War on Cigarettes

Norma Broin’s transformation from flight attendant to anti-tobacco zealot began in 1989 with an X-ray that revealed a pea-sized spot on the lower left lobe of one lung. A “dark gray nubbin,” said the pathologist, who deemed it “invasive adenocarcinoma.”

This was fancy doctor talk for lung cancer, the kind common to smokers. But there was something rather uncommon about the little gray growth in Broin’s lung. She had never smoked.

Even so, the cancer did not entirely surprise her. At 34, she had spent 13 years--the better part of her adult life--dishing up cocktails and peanuts in the swirl of smoky airplane cabins. When she decided to point the finger of blame, she knew there was just one person to call: Patty Young, a Dallas flight attendant pursuing her own, one-woman crusade against tobacco.

These two now provide the driving force behind a landmark, $5-billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of all flight attendants who believe they have been injured by environmental tobacco smoke. And they are etching worry lines into the brows of some of the richest and most powerful people in America: the nation’s tobacco industry executives.

It is an unlikely partnership: Broin, a devout Mormon, political conservative and gracious military wife who lives in San Pedro with her husband, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, and their two children; and Young, an avowed atheist, left-winger and zany artist who shares a funky cottage in Dallas with her three dogs and her art.

Yet last month they and 28 co-plaintiffs scored a crucial legal victory when a Florida appeals court ruled that as many as 60,000 other nonsmoking flight attendants across the nation could join their case. The decision, which the tobacco firms are trying to overturn, makes Broin versus Philip Morris the largest lawsuit ever to attempt to hold cigarette makers responsible for illnesses suffered by people who don’t smoke.

The case is part of what is being called “the third wave” of tobacco litigation--a series of recent lawsuits, none of which has yet come to a verdict, contending that the cigarette manufacturers have known for years that their products are addictive and dangerous, but marketed them anyway to an unsuspecting public.

“These are not nice people,” Broin says of her tobacco industry foes in her understated fashion.

Young puts it another way: “They are the most criminal, disgusting, sadistic, degenerate group of people on the face of the Earth.”

Tobacco Defender

Daniel Donahue has grown used to such rhetoric. As deputy general counsel for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., he defends the nation’s second-biggest cigarette manufacturer from people like Broin and Young. He sees their case as nothing more than the latest twist in what has been a decades-long, unsuccessful effort to beat the tobacco companies in court.

There is, Donahue says, no evidence of a cover-up. “They have never been able to prove that because there is no proof,” he said.

And, he maintains, no one can be certain that secondhand smoke causes disease; there is still scientific debate over the hundreds of studies suggesting that it does. As for attacks on tobacco executives, he offered this lament:

“It’s a tough environment these days in which the tobacco industry finds itself. It seems like not a day passes in which somebody does not offer some derogatory comment about the industry.”

A tough environment indeed. At a time when cigarette manufacturers are facing attacks from so many fronts, Broin and Young might seem to be the least of the industry’s problems.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has proposed regulating nicotine as a drug. The attorneys general of five states are suing the tobacco companies to recover the states’ costs of providing health care for people with smoking-related illnesses.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether tobacco executives lied under oath to Congress. Just a few weeks ago came explosive claims from a former top researcher at the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. that his bosses at the nation’s third-largest cigarette manufacturer did precisely that--a charge the company vehemently denies.

“There was a time when this case [the Broin lawsuit] would have been standing out as a spectacular development and all eyes would be on it,” said Dick Daynard, a tobacco litigation expert at Northeastern University in Boston. “There are so many other things happening now that this has gotten lost in the media perception. But it’s a very important case.”

Important, says Daynard, for two reasons. First, if the flight attendants win, their case could open the floodgates for a wave of similar lawsuits from nonsmokers. And second, because the suit eliminates a defense that the tobacco companies have used with repeated success--that those harmed by their products must take the blame because they chose to smoke.

“The industry has very substantial exposure here,” Daynard says. “These are appealing cases, because it’s very hard to blame the nonsmoker.”

It is, however, hardly a slam dunk.

Since 1954, there have been hundreds of product liability cases filed against the cigarette manufacturers--and while the companies have lost on a couple of occasions, they have never paid out a dime in damages.

The so-called “first wave” of cases, brought in the 1950s and ‘60s when scientific evidence about the dangers of smoking was just beginning to emerge, were unsuccessful because plaintiffs could not prove cigarettes caused disease. The second wave, brought during the 1980s, failed for precisely the opposite reason--there was so much information linking smoking to disease that juries decided smokers should have known better.

This perfect track record is not lost on Stanley Rosenblatt, the Miami lawyer who represents Broin and Young. He notes that even if the flight attendants succeed as a class, only those who then prevail in individual trials on the merits will collect any money. That may prove difficult.

“I always let them know,” he said, “that no matter how well things are going--and right now, things are going very well for us--that the odds are against us, that most sophisticated lawyers think I’m a fool and think that the tobacco companies, with all their money and all their public relations and all their lawyers, are ultimately going to win.”

For now, tobacco industry lawyers are busy fighting the case on procedural grounds, contending that class actions should be brought only when a slew of individual cases on the same topic are clogging the courts. Currently, there are just two secondhand smoke cases filed by individuals--one on behalf of a Mississippi barber, the other on behalf of an Indiana nurse, both of whom died of lung cancer.

“The question I would ask is, ‘What’s the rush? Where’s the fire?”’ said Donahue, the Reynolds lawyer. “Let’s try a few of these individually first.”

As both Broin and Young have discovered, this is an industry that plays hardball. In the four years since their suit was filed, briefcase-toting lawyers, politely identifying themselves as Philip Morris representatives, have been making surprise visits to their neighbors, friends and relatives, turning up on doorsteps from Utah to Minnesota to Texas. (A company lawyer acknowledged the visits, saying they were conducted “appropriately and respectfully.”)

“You all have your hands full with her,” Young’s college roommate, Susan Hull, warned the sleuths when they came to call. “She is really hell-bent.”

“Hell-bent” is perhaps too mild to describe Young.

Young once discovered a diplomat smoking on a nonsmoking flight to Washington. She plucked the cigarette out of his mouth and extinguished it in his whiskey glass.

On the coffee table in her living room is her artistic vision of tobacco’s legacy. It is a doll’s bed, fashioned of barbed wire, covered by a blanket of delicate lace. In the bed is a bronze heart with a cigarette stubbed out in it. The heart, she says, represents the death of her parents, both smokers who died of lung cancer. The lace is her love of beauty, her yearning “for a more dignified world.” The barbed wire is a symbol of her inability to rest.

Young’s family thinks she is wearing herself out. “She’s too strenuous about it,” complained her 77-year-old aunt. Her friends think she’s a little bit nutty. Even some fellow anti-smoking activists find her too extreme. Young doesn’t pay much heed to what others think.

“People say to me all the time, ‘Why are you so angry?’ I love my anger because it makes me productive. . . . I want to be 100 years old, wearing my French shawls, listening to Rod Stewart, telling people to go to hell if I disagree with them.”

At 49, she has been doing just that for a quarter-century.

At first, it wasn’t her health that motivated her; it was fear of fire. She was constantly putting out little blazes that would erupt when passengers fell asleep smoking. Then she met a photojournalist who had witnessed a jet make an emergency landing after a cigarette started a fire in a lavatory waste basket. Fire quickly spread through the cabin. “One hundred and [twenty-four] people died,” Young said sardonically, “because smokers have their rights.”

She began collaring passengers and fellow flight attendants (they were a captive audience) to talk about getting cigarettes off the planes. When her journalist friend became the White House photographer for former President Gerald R. Ford, Young learned her way around Washington and took her lobbying to Congress.

As science turned its attention to the health dangers of secondhand smoke, so did Young. She became convinced that her frequent headaches, ear infections and bouts with bronchitis stemmed from her exposure on airplanes. It was due in large part to Young’s testimony that, in 1990, Congress banned smoking on domestic airlines.

Over the years, word has spread among flight attendants that if you have a problem with tobacco, there’s a woman in Dallas you can ring up. The calls come from all over the world--Sao Paolo, Brazil; Mexico City, Paris. Young’s phone number is unlisted. She has no idea how people find her.

In 1990, Broin joined the legions of women--and they are, for the most part women--who have made it their business to find Young.

It had been less than a year since Broin underwent surgery to remove the malignancy on her lung, and she had been busy reading the medical literature on secondhand smoke. The more she read, the more she felt like a victim. She had never smoked, drunk or used caffeine--all are prohibited by the Mormon health code. How else could she have gotten cancer?

All of a sudden, her whole life was circumscribed by cigarettes. Every decision was governed by whether she would be exposed to smoke--where she could dine, where she could travel, even whether she could take class field trips with her kids. Going to a hotel meant not only having a nonsmoking room but calling ahead to make sure the lobby was nonsmoking.

“I felt,” she said, “like the woman in the glass bubble.”

She was angry; she wanted to sue. But her husband was against it.

“You’re fighting an industry that’s very, very powerful, that’s very, very smart and that hasn’t lost a suit yet,” Mark Broin told his wife. “Is this worth the sacrifices we will have to make?”

Norma Broin thought it was. On a layover in Dallas, she dropped a note in Young’s mailbox, asking her to call. Within days, Young was on the line with a list of lawyers who might be willing to take the case. None was. Then Young suggested Peter Schwedock, a Miami lawyer who had been helping flight attendants win workers’ compensation claims. But Broin was wavering.

“I said, ‘Look, I don’t have lung cancer; you’ve got it,’ ” Young recalled. “What’s it going to take to get you down to Miami?”

Finally, Broin made the trip. When Schwedock heard her story, he was astounded. “She is what I call the perfect plaintiff,” he said. “She has never even had a sip or a taste of coffee. She’s a devout Mormon. If you could build a plaintiff, this is what you would build.”

He took Broin to Rosenblatt, who said he would think about the case. Weeks went by without word. The Broins were packing up for Okinawa, Japan, where Mark was to have his next three-year tour. On their way out of town, they drove to Utah to see her relatives. She called Rosenblatt from a pay phone in Nevada.

He agreed to take her on.

Focus on Science

The trial--if there is a trial--will turn largely on the science. At least, that is how the tobacco companies plan to fight Broin and Young.

To date, about 1,000 scientific studies have linked secondhand smoke to disease, according to Dr. David Burns, a UC San Diego professor of medicine who served as senior scientific editor for the 1986 surgeon general’s report on environmental tobacco smoke. Studies have shown that ETS--as it is called in the medical literature--is responsible for lung cancer, heart disease and a host of respiratory and sinus problems, including chronic bronchitis and pneumonia, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome.

The Coalition on Smoking OR Health estimates that 53,000 Americans a year die from exposure to passive smoke. In 1993, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report declaring passive cigarette smoke a “Group A” carcinogen, in the same deadly category as asbestos and radon.

The tobacco industry hotly disputes the science and challenges the methodology. Citing a recent study by the Congressional Research Service that criticized the EPA report, the industry argues that the risks of secondhand smoke have been blown way out of proportion.

“There is no evidence anywhere, there is no scientific basis, for the contention that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke on an airplane can cause any disease, much less the ones that are alleged here,” said Donahue, the lawyer for R.J. Reynolds.

Rosenblatt casts his battle in grander terms.

“When you narrow the issue and just deal with the science, you are playing their game,” he said. “I think that has been the mistake other plaintiffs’ lawyers have made. . . . Ultimately the key is presenting evidence which will demonstrate to the jury and the American public just how incredibly skillful and successful and manipulative the tobacco industry has been over the past 40 years.”

Part of Rare Group

Broin likes that kind of talk. It has been more than six years since she was diagnosed. She appears to be among the 13% of lung cancer victims who survive the disease. She is still working--flying only nonsmoking flights to nonsmoking airports. She is quiet about her crusade; most of her colleagues don’t even know who she is.

She still cannot bring herself to be as vociferous as Young. But sometimes, after she has been particularly outspoken, she will call her anti-tobacco cohort.

“Patty,” Broin will say, “you would have been proud of me.”