But of course. And if you fall off a 200 foot cliff, it’s just that last foot of the fall that hurts. Until you hit the ground you were doing fine!

Oh wait; it’s the first foot. It’s the slip.

“Addiction was simply the excuse…she knew they cigarettes were harmfull…clients who contradict their own sworn testimony”

Beautiful example of the PR I’m talking about. Blame the customer. Accept the word “addiction” but then trivialize it. Ignore the facts of addiction; redefine the term to suit Big Tobacco’s interests. Shift the focus to the customer; blame the customer. Never, ever, mention Big Tobacco’s real use of addiction: to get and keep the customer chemically dependent on the product. To design and engineer product as a highly optimized drug delivery device. And cover that up for decades. Shift the focus away from that. Blame the customer.

Its really not too much to ask for the plaintiff to get their stories straight prior to taking the stand, and needless to say, (and despite the plaintiffs attourneys claims to the contrary) juries don’t much care for plaintiffs who appear to change their stories to suit their case at trial.

With respect to addiction, I think it was fairly well established at trial that Ms. Rosen was addicted to cigarettes. That wasn’t really the main issue at trial here, and that wasn’t why the case was dismissed. There was also no debate here about whether or not Ms. Rosen “could” quit. . .by her own admission, she DID quit for six full years from 1983-1989 and for at least one other shorter period after that.

The large issue was whether or not it was fair to assign liability to the defendant for Ms. Rosen’s injuries, even though Ms. Rosen only smoked their cigarettes in limited quantity for a short period of time, 50 years earlier. The judge decided that considering everything she knew about smoking, and considering the remoteness of the injury from the plaintiffs’ alleged bad actions, and considering that she stopped (and started) smoking multiple times in the ensuing decades, there was insufficient evidence to assign liability. Since Ms. Rosen could (and did) quit, addiction alone could not be the proximate cause of injury in this case. Put more simply, Bower’s “unbroken line of cars” theory just doesn’t hold water given the facts of this case.

Now, common sense would suggest that if Ms. Rosen were injured by smoking that she should attempt to blame the company that manufactured the cigarettes she smoked for the last 20 years. . .ie the ones that most likely actually caused her injury. So why didn’t she do that here? Why didn’t she blame the makers of the cigarettes that actually gave her the cancer, instead of the ones she smoked a few packs of when she was 14? The answer is that she couldn’t do that because of assumption of risk issues. *Those* cigarettes carried warning labels. She clearly knew they cigarettes were harmful otherwise she wouldn’t have quit smoking them. “Addiction” was simply the excuse used by the plaintiff to try and connect her current injury with the defendant.

To make a clearer analogy, it would be like me blaming my cirrhosis on Budweiser, even though I’ve been a drunk living on nothing but rotgut whisky for 45 years, because for one summer when I was 14 years old, I used to get drunk on Bud beers at camp parties.

The rhetoric comes in two forms, hard and soft.

Hard is outright denial: it’s not addictive. If people can quit, it’s not addictive. But people can and do quit cocaine and heroin. Does that mean they’re not addictive?

Soft: well it can be hard to quit but people do. No outright denial, just incredible mimimizing. Of course, it can be hard to quit cocaine and heroin but people do. Does that mean those substances are without power over people’s lives?

Behind the rhetoric is the strategy: shift the focus, shift the blame; give an inch, gain a decade.

Shift the focus from product to customer: talk about addicted customer, not addictive product. Talk about the behavior (”smoking is addictive”), not the what the product used as designed does to the customer.

Shift the blame: it’s the customer’s fault he didn’t break his addiction, never the industry’s fault it engineered the product as a highly optimized drug delivery device. Oh, he could have quit. His disease is his fault because he didn’t quit.

Give an inch: appear to have conceded the point, make a big deal about that in fact: look how reasonable we are. We’re a “responsible tobacco company”. Gain a decade: while saying “addictive” somehow that becomes the customer’s fault, there’s nothing wrong with engineering a product for addiction or peddling a lethal, highly addictive product.