ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 7, 1997 TAG: 9704070111
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
Anti-tobacco activists say that the seemingly unending supply of potentially damaging internal documents has left the industry more vulnerable than ever before.
When lung cancer killed Jean Connor at the age of 49, the Florida woman left three grown children and a sister committed to avenging her death.
Dana Raulerson recalls looking up to her older sister, whom the family called Jean Faye, who took up cigarettes in her teens so that she could be like glamorous movie stars.
``I remember her standing in front of the mirror with a pencil to pretend she was smoking to get the right look,'' said Raulerson, the family's representative in its case against the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.
For most of her life, Connor's usual brand was Salem and she smoked two or three packs each day.
Before she died in 1995, Connor filed a lawsuit against RJR, the company that makes Salem. She claimed that the company's products caused her illness, and that the company and others in the tobacco industry lied about the health risks and addiction caused by smoking.
That trial begins today in Jacksonville, Fla., and it could prove to be a turning point in the legal battle over tobacco.
Anti-tobacco activists say that the seemingly unending supply of potentially damaging internal documents has left the industry more vulnerable than ever before. That view gained support last year when Grady Carter of Florida won a $750,000 judgment against Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co.
Carter's lead lawyer, Norwood S. Wilner, is now representing Connor's family. He is trying to prove that the first case was not, as a tobacco industry spokesman scoffed, a ``one-in-a-row'' fluke.
RJR, like the rest of the beleaguered industry, has never paid a judgment in suits such as Connors' - Carter's is being appealed - and expects to win this one as well.
``Jean Conner was aware of the risks of smoking,'' said RJR spokesman Nat Walker. ``She ignored many different warnings from many different sources about smoking.''
Therefore, Walker said, her family cannot claim that the company had a duty to warn her. Also, Walker said, ``Connor's addiction claim is unfounded because the first and only time she attempted to quit, in 1993 ... she succeeded.
``Whether cigarette smoking is called an addiction, a habit or something else, people can and do quit,'' Walker said.
No one says that Connor is the anti-tobacco movement's ideal plaintiff. ``There is no best or worst victim,'' Wilner said. ``She was not a perfect person, and neither am I.''
Her sister, Raulerson, acknowledges that the divorcee never seriously tried to give up tobacco until her mid-40s, when she tried to get plastic surgery and two doctors demanded she quit first. Connor, suffering from chronic bronchitis, had been frightened by another sister's recent diagnosis of breast cancer and so she followed the doctors' advice.
It was too late, however. Two months after quitting, she was diagnosed with cancer.
Raulerson said that her sister, like almost all smokers, started in her teens - too young to make an informed choice.
Connor's case is only one of many legal attacks against which the tobacco industry is defending itself. Twenty-two state attorneys general have sued the industry, contending they should be reimbursed for the Medicaid expenses of citizens who smoked.
Other trial lawyers have pulled together 15 class-action suits at the state level, trying to consolidate large populations of smokers for complex liability trials.
The Food and Drug Administration is attempting to regulate cigarettes and chewing tobacco as drug delivery devices, and the Justice Department is exploring perjury charges against the companies and their executives for statements made in congressional testimony and government filings.
In light of this complex web of litigation, a straightforward product liability suit brought by a single smoker might seem almost quaint - and, perhaps, foolhardy.
But Wilner says he plans to follow the same strategy that won the Carter judgment and rely heavily on corporate documents from various firms to prove there was an industry-wide conspiracy to suppress evidence of tobacco's dangers.
He recently caused a tremor to shoot through tobacco stocks by claiming that, for this trial, he had received new and devastating RJR papers. They include a 1962 memorandum by researcher Alan Rodgman that reviews a number of studies and states: ``Obviously, the amount of evidence accumulated to indict cigarette smoke as a health hazard is overwhelming. The evidence challenging such an indictment is scant.''
To show what he says the company knew of the addictive nature of tobacco, Wilner says he has such documents as a 1972 memorandum on ``the crucial role of nicotine'' in the tobacco business.
In that memo, RJR official Claude E. Teague Jr. wrote: ``In a sense, the tobacco industry may be thought of as being a specialized, highly ritualized and stylized segment of the pharmaceutical industry. ... Happily for the tobacco industry, nicotine is both habituating and unique in its variety of physiological actions.''
The company counters that neither document is new, having been presented in prior litigation.
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