Minnesota Opens Its Case Against Cigarette Companies

The state of Minnesota opened its historic case against the nation’s cigarette companies on Monday, describing newly obtained evidence of the tobacco industry’s attempt to market its products to teenagers and its failure to research the possibility of a safer cigarette.

Michael Ciresi, the state’s lead lawyer, referred to 11 documents dealing with the importance of young people to the industry’s business. For example, a 1969 report from Philip Morris research director Helmut Wakeham described research that had been done on why 16- to 20-year-olds begin to smoke. A 1978 Brown & Williamson document stressed the importance of high school students to the company.

Because 90% of all smokers start by age 18 and many become tied to a particular brand early on, the teen market is of considerable importance to cigarette companies, even though they consistently deny that they market to people younger than 18.

Ciresi told jurors that cigarette companies “treated America’s youth as a commodity”--as replacements for the 400,000 smokers who die yearly.

The documents Ciresi referred to are among 33 million pages of internal industry papers that Minnesota has obtained during 3 1/2 years of pretrial discovery. He said the state would prove its case through those materials.

Each time Ciresi read one of those documents, many of which were shown on a large movie screen, he concluded by declaring: “Ladies and gentlemen, those are their words, not mine.”

But Peter Bleakley, the lead attorney for Philip Morris, contended that Minnesota would be unable to prove that they suffered additional costs as a result of the conduct of any cigarette company.

Bleakley acknowledged at the start that industry lawyers might be facing a hostile audience, judging by the responses some jurors gave during jury selection.

“The defendants understand that most of you don’t like smoking very much and some of you don’t like cigarette companies,” he told the jury.

Minnesota maintains that the industry now owes the state and co-plaintiff Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Minnesota $1.77 billion in damages for added health-care costs attributable to smoking, plus added damages to the state for violations of consumer fraud and anti-trust laws.

Minnesota’s is the first of 41 similar cases expected to go to trial. Already, the industry has settled others filed by Mississippi, Florida and Texas for a total of $30 billion.