Cornered Read Free Page B

much greater resources into the battle. “The antismokers want to get their message out, but we just want to kill them,” said “Bhopal” Coale of the tobacco companies. “If our methods work there won’t be any need to get the message out.”
    Simultaneously, the Clinton administration would lead a sustained attack on the industry through the youthful commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, David Kessler. For the first time in its ninety-year history, the FDA would be cleared by the courts to regulate tobacco as a drug.
    In the end, neither side was anxious to go into court. A group of plaintiffs’ lawyers from Mississippi launched negotiations with the industry that would climax, in the summer of 1997, with a congressional proposal to radically change the way the companies had been doing business. After four decades of denying that smoking causes cancer, the industry’s leaders backed down and signed the biggest liability settlement in U.S. corporate history, promising to pay out $368.5 billion over twenty-five years.
    *   *   *
    N ONE OF THE DINERS at Antoine’s that December evening would have imagined such an ending. Yet the early signs were there. On one side was an undisciplined guerrilla force, armed with an array of untried legal theories but able to move with lightning speed, energetic, motivated, and mischievous. On the other side were the larger, better equipped, and more experienced lawyers of the tobacco companies whose invincibility in court over four decades was legendary, but whose success had become a handicap. They could move only in blocks, their tactics were well known, their weapons old, and their leaders exhausted. This is the story of three tumultuous years that led to an astonishing truce in the century-old tobacco wars.
    A federal court would rule that Gauthier’s class-action suit was too big to be managed in one trial and had to be broken up into smaller trials in state courts. But its effect, even out of court, was devastating to Big Tobacco. For two years, it generated a barrage of antismoking propaganda unprecedented in history. And it was this lawsuit that prepared the ground for the mass offensive by the states’ attorneys general to recoup medical costs.
    The results were a surprise, but the uprising was inevitable. Big Tobacco had become so rich and powerful, no part of government at any level would take it on. Only the lawyers of the plaintiffs’ bar had the wit, the strength, and the prospect of big rewards to make it worth their while. Like all uprisings, it had several small beginnings. One of them occurred in a tiny Mississippi town on the edge of the Delta at the end of the 1980s, during the final phase of the Second Wave.

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    A NOVEL OBSERVATION
    â€œM R . R OSS : I feel that in time an objective study should be made into … cigarette smoking … to make certain that people who use [cigarettes] do not place an overdue burden on the others that do not use them and that the payment they make should be equal to the costs they create.
    M R . S ATTERFIELD : That is a novel observation, I must confess.”
    â€” An exchange in 1969 between Arthur Ross, then chairman of the Franklin National Bank, and Congressman David Satterfield of Virginia during hearings to ban cigarette advertising on television
    Â 
    H OLMES C OUNTY , Mississippi, is depressingly poor—fifth from the bottom on the federal poverty scale. One reason is the land. The county lies sixty miles to the north of Jackson, the state capital, on the edge of the Mississippi Delta. But, in contrast to the Delta’s fertile floodplain, Holmes County’s red clay is unworkable and barren. Small landowners raise a few cattle and a hog or two, but in high summer the land is abandoned, blanketed in great cascading sculptures of kudzu. The county seat is Lexington, a tiny town of 20,600 built around a central square. It has a