The choice retaining the tobacco defendants liable was based on proof that the tobacco industry knew smoking and nicotine were addictive, manipulated tobacco items to make them more addictive, and claimed “light” and “low” tar products were fitter than popular products although they knew that was false. Judge Gladys Kessler, who presided over United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc. et al. , found that, “…over the procedure greater than 50 years, defendants lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public, adding smokers and the youth they avidly sought as ‘alternative smokers,’ about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke.
”Public health groups including the American Cancer Society ACS, American Heart Association, American Lung Association, Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, and the Tobacco Free Kids Action Fund played a key role as intervenors in the case and made thoughts about the corrective statements the tobacco businesses must ultimately make following greater than a decade of appeals. Cliff Douglas, ACS Vice President for Tobacco Control and Director of the ACS Center for Tobacco Control, calls the ebook of the corrective statements by the foremost tobacco businesses a significant victory for public health. Douglas said, “In its ruling, the federal court depended on the potential of the American Cancer Society and other public health groups in the fight to combat the tobacco epidemic on this country and to carry responsible the tobacco industry for many years of fraud and conspiracy and misleading the general public and health gurus about the deadly health effects in their products. What this case has succeeded in doing is to ultimately force the tobacco industry to ’fess up to what it has known and done for the past 50 years. The industry has intentionally addicted thousands and thousands of folks with a product it knew would kill as many as half of them years before their time.
