Judgment Against Philip Morris Is Upheld

Okie01: The lawyers decide nothing. The trial determined that the tobacco companies were liable. Is there any reason tobacco companies should be shielded from responsibility for the damage they have caused?

Whatever damage they caused the plaintiff was incurred only after full forewarning. A company should not be penalized simply for marketing a legal product. Period.

With all due respect, your position is absurd.

"The government should get out of the warning business. Let the companies try to devise a warning that will be sufficiently dire to discourage people from abusing their product. For tobacco, no such warning is possible. The difference between tobacco and alcohol is one of degree. But at some point, the activity moves from being actionable to not being actionable. I suspect that that point falls some point between tobacco and alcohol (or tobacco and fast food, for that matter)."

We disagree not at all here...except for that last assertion that the 'activity' becomes actionable. To me, the only reason that tobacco use is suddenly an actionable activity is that trial lawyers have browbeaten the system into submission, getting onto the bench themselves to the extent that it is now acceptable in far too many jurisdictions to bring a case which even fifty years ago would have garnered laughter from the bench and sanctions for a frivolous case.

I don't think that tobacco is healthy, nor do I think it is the business of government to be mandating warning labels on everything. But I do think that, if warning labels are on a product, that should be quite enough to constitute a user's waiver of liability for the company producing it. If Winchester sold guns with "explodes on first use" clearly die-stamped into the barrel, we would not advocate the user being able to sue that company for their own stupidity. The same is true here, no matter how trial lawyers have been able to bend the law into agreement with their theories of "actionability."

"From what I've read, the Tobacco Companies knew the damage their product was doing long before the warnings were required by law. Smokers who got hooked before Big Tobacco was required by law to warn of the health consequences seem to have a good case. And heck, if they weren't required by law to put the warnings on the packs, I doubt they'd be there today."

Yeah, and no one would know that cigarettes are harmful to this day without the printed warnings. What a load! Long before warnings existed on packs of cigarettes, they were referred to as coffin nails. This is purely and simply yet another way for these scumbag ambulance chasing lawyers to get their claws around money that they, or the family of the deceased, clearly do not deserve. Are you familiar with free will? Almost anything can be made addictive within the human mind, but we all have the power to halt self-destructive behavior. 'Nuff said.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.