Tobacco Lawsuit Bill Advances

With overwhelming bipartisan approval, the Assembly on Thursday helped clear a path to the courthouse door for California to recoup from tobacco companies the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends on treating smokers’ illnesses.

A bill by Speaker Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno) proposing to amend the state’s product liability law to allow state and local government to sue cigarette makers was sent to the state Senate on a 59-11 vote.

Upon final passage and signing by Gov. Pete Wilson, the measure could take effect immediately, allowing California to join 22 other states in bringing suit against tobacco companies.

Though his critics have charged that he could have sued all along, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren has maintained that he needs a change in the law to take the tobacco companies to court. Wilson has expressed a similar view.

Lungren is “pleased legislation is moving through the system,” his spokesman, Rob Stutzman, said after the vote.

Earlier, the attorney general obtained, without going to court, an agreement with the Liggett tobacco firm for state access to internal company documents that could be used as evidence in lawsuits against other tobacco companies.

At stake for California is an estimated $350 million--reduced from earlier estimates of $600 million--in taxpayer funds spent each year treating tobacco-related illnesses through the state’s Medi-Cal program for the poor.

Bustamante said his measure, once enacted, would “remove any real or imagined impediments” for Lungren to sue and that it “moved California taxpayers one step closer to getting their money back from tobacco companies.”

Assemblyman Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside)--one of the 11 GOP “no” votes--said it was unfair to single out one industry for exposure that had been previously exempted from product liability. Furthermore, he said, litigants could use the measure to sue tobacco companies going “all the . . . way back” to the year the liability protections were enacted in 1987 and “that ain’t fair, folks.”

Bustamante’s bill (AB 1603) is one of three introduced this year designed to give California a share of proposed tobacco industry settlements with other states as evidence mounts that some companies misled the public on the health risks of smoking.

A measure by state Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco) would delete from state law the word “tobacco” from a list of products protected from liability lawsuits--a favor granted as part of the 1987 “napkin deal” between lobbyists and Democratic legislative leaders meeting at a Sacramento restaurant.

Another current bill, by Sen. Byron Sher (D-Stanford), would allow lawsuits against tobacco companies based on false claims and concealed knowledge of the dangers of smoking. The Kopp bill has passed the Senate; Sher’s measure is before a Senate committee.

Democrats speculated that many Republicans joined them in support for Bustamante’s bill because they can no longer afford, politically, to be portrayed as tools of tobacco interests. Bustamante won 18 GOP votes for his measure--a high count among Republicans who normally shun anti-business measures.

However, a Republican analyst who asked not to be named said Republicans simply backed the Bustamante bill as the “less onerous” of the three dealing with tobacco liability.

Unlike the other two, Bustamante’s bill would only allow governments, not individuals, to sue tobacco companies for monetary losses.