Tobacco Litigation

You can sue the tobacco companies for intentionally designing cigarettes to addict smokers, for adding features and chemicals that make cigarettes more addictive, for lying about the dangers of cigarettes.

In many states, the law recognizes that multiple causes can contribute to an injury or death. So, for example, a smoker could be at fault for being unable to quit while the tobacco company is also at fault for targeting that smoker when he or she was a child and intentionally addicting that child to a deadly drug. 

Nothing in a modern cigarette is accidental. Tobacco companies spent billions of dollars over more than a century researching, studying and fine-tuning their products all for one goal: profit. The chemical additives and design features in these cigarettes are intended to make smoke inhalation easier, deliver nicotine to the smoker’s brain faster, and thereby addicting the smoker for life. Cancer is a byproduct of these companies’ deliberate design decisions, but they denied the link between smoking and cancer for half a century.

Not necessarily. The tobacco industry knew far more than what was revealed in the initial warnings. These warnings were not voluntary, but required by the government. And those warnings don’t give them immunity to target children for a deadly addiction, and then defend themselves by saying the addicts should have quit when they became adults. That may reduce the fault assigned to the tobacco company, but it is not a get out of jail free card. In addition, the warnings did little to counteract the tobacco industry’s sales tactics. For example, almost all of the tobacco companies sold cigarettes with “filters” even though the filters do not actually reduce any health risk. They sold “light” or “mild” cigarettes even though those were just as harmful to smokers as the “regulars.” And the industry hired scientists and spokespersons to publicly cast doubt on the warnings.