ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 1, 1996 TAG: 9602010031
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MIAMI
SOURCE: Associated Press
In a major setback for the tobacco industry, a Florida appeals court on Wednesday gave class-action status to a lawsuit filed on behalf of people who are addicted to cigarettes or whose health has been impaired by smoking.
The lawsuit, one of several such actions against the tobacco industry, applies only to Florida residents. It seeks to force the industry to pay billions of dollars in damages, and create a fund to diagnose and treat smoking-related illnesses.
``This is a very significant lawsuit, one of perhaps five lawsuits that are pending,'' said John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is executive director of the anti-smoking organization, Action on Smoking and Health.
``It is significant because as far as I know, it is the highest state court to rule on this so far as a class action ... and because it opens the way for class-action lawsuits in most of the other states,'' he said.
Other similar lawsuits against the tobacco industry have been filed in Minnesota, Mississippi and West Virginia.
A federal district court in New Orleans has certified a lawsuit against the tobacco industry as a class action, but that appeal has not been heard.
The Florida lawsuit, certified as a class action by the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami, is against 13 cigarette manufacturers and industry organizations.
One of the largest, R.J. Reynolds, will challenge the ruling in court, said the company's senior vice president, Daniel W. Donahue. ``It's too early to decide, but we'll do something,'' he said.
The Miami attorney who filed the lawsuit, Stanley M. Rosenblatt, also filed a class-action lawsuit in 1991 on behalf of airline flight attendants, nonsmokers who said their health had been damaged by working in a smoking environment. That case is still pending.
The six initial plaintiffs in the lawsuit ruled on Wednesday include 74-year-old Miami Beach pediatrician Howard A. Engle, who claimed he tried to stop smoking scores of times, and Robert Angell, a 61-year-old North Dade County man who lost his larynx to cancer and smoked his last cigarette as he was wheeled into the operating room in 1984.
The lawsuit charges that cigarette manufacturers have known for more than 25 years that nicotine is addictive and that smoking causes disease, but have ``intentionally suppressed scientific and medical evidence.''
Philip Morris U.S.A. said it will ask for a rehearing by the panel and by the entire Third District Court of Appeal and, failing that, will ask the Florida Supreme Court to review the decision.
Cases brought by smokers against the cigarette companies inevitably turn on highly individual and personalized issues such as injury, reliance and comparative fault, the company said, and by their very nature are not capable of being tried in one massive class action.
LENGTH: Medium: 59 linesby CNB