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Review by Lloyd Armour
When the CEOs of Big Tobacco sat before a House committee and denied that nicotine was addictive, America's credulity snapped like a rotten rubber band.
Everyone who has ever smoked knows how excruciating it is to try to quit, just as every smoker knows that cigarettes are bad for one's health. At the end of World War II, half the adult population smoked. Tobacco was the number one non-food crop in the U.S.
In a Memphis hospital room in 1993, Attorney Michael Lewis stood looking at the emaciated face and body of a family friend and, upon taking his leave of the room to return to Clarksdale, Mississippi, began to wonder -- as lawyers are wont to do -- how much it was costing families and taxpayers to provide the kind of intensive care that cancer patients require toward the end of their days.
Even before he left Memphis, Lewis was toying with an idea. Since Big Tobacco nearly always won in court skirmishes -- it had lost only twice in decades -- why not change the focus in the courts? Instead of arguing that tobacco kills folks, he would get his home state of Mississippi to sue the companies to recoup public money spent treating people -- the aged and indigent -- who got sick from smoking.
Lewis decided to take the idea to an Ole Miss friend who happened to be the attorney general for the state, Mike Moore. Thus was born a small southern whirlwind that barely rustled the leaves of tobacco in the far-flung fields of agriculture and commerce. But the little wind was to get help from unexpected sources.
This book does a masterful job of detailing the trials and tribulations that occurred before that day when Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore stood in front of a microphone in a Washington hotel and announced that Big Tobacco had just conceded the biggest legal battle in history -- $368.5 billion.
The story is not altogether finished, but it is amazing to read how it got to the place it is now.
Lloyd Armour is a retired newspaper editor.
©1998, ProMotion, inc.
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