1st Secondhand Smoke Lawsuit Goes to Trial

A $5-billion lawsuit by flight attendants who say passengers’ smoke harmed their health went to trial Monday, with an attorney accusing the tobacco industry of singing a “phony song” about the dangers of cigarettes.

Stanley Rosenblatt, a lawyer for the 60,000 current and former flight attendants represented in the class-action case, opened the landmark trial by accusing the industry of trying to mislead the public into believing that the hazards of smoking and secondhand smoke are still disputed.

Rosenblatt begged jurors to tell the industry: “The game is over.”

In their lawsuit, nonsmoking flight attendants blame cigarette smoke in airline cabins for lung cancer, respiratory problems and heart disease.

Smoking has been banned on domestic flights since 1990, and four-fifths of U.S. airline flights to and from other countries are now smoke-free

This is the first tobacco class-action case to reach trial, and the first secondhand smoke trial. It could prove to be the only class-action tobacco case to be decided by a jury, because the proposed $368-billion nationwide settlement--if approved by Congress and the White House--would limit such suits.

In at least 20 other tobacco liability suits so far, the industry never paid a cent in damages.

Tobacco lawyers will have their chance to address the jury today. The industry denies that cigarette smoke causes any ailments, and says flight attendants can’t prove they suffer any higher rate of illnesses than the general population.

Rosenblatt said those defenses follow a pattern of four decades of lies, deceit, manipulation and denial of unfavorable research and damaging government reports.

“They hid and they distorted and they lied about this information,” he told the six-member jury. “The evidence will show it is a phony song. There is no more research needed.”

Rosenblatt promised to give jurors a historical overview, starting with a 1953 report in the medical journal Cancer linking cigarette tar to cancer in mice.

He cited depositions in April from executives of the four biggest cigarette makers denying tobacco addiction, despite a Brown & Williamson memo from 1963 calling nicotine an addictive drug.

Rosenblatt also charged that the tobacco industry used its political might to get what it wanted after Jesse Steinfeld, President Nixon’s surgeon general, expressed worries about secondhand smoke.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. wrote to Nixon to congratulate him on his reelection in 1972, reminded him of its campaign contributions and asked why Steinfeld was still on the job, Rosenblatt said. He was gone a short time later.

More recent government reports saying 435,000 smokers and 3,000 nonsmokers die each year from the effects of smoke are denied by the industry, he said.

“They knew that secondhand smoke caused disease in nonsmokers, and they hid and they distorted and they lied about this information,” Rosenblatt said. “They could have been straight with the American people. They could have been honest with the American people.”

Those remarks raised one of more than a dozen objections from tobacco attorneys, prompting Rosenblatt to roll his eyes and groan in exasperation.

“Sometimes objections are tactical. I want you to understand that,” Rosenblatt confided to jurors.

“Objection!” tobacco attorneys shouted.

Outside court, the defense attorneys had no comment on Rosenblatt’s opening remarks, but Dan Donahue, a Reynolds senior vice president attending the trial as a spectator, rejected the assertions about industry lies.

“That’s the same old refrain that we have heard on every single case we have tried,” he said. Jurors in other tobacco cases “reject those contentions, and we think that’ll be the case here as well.”