Noted. Accepted. It never happened.
Airman - our system of jurisprudence allows for mitigating factors. that is, one doesn’t necessarily have to find one party completely e-vile and the other driven snow. I agree that you’d have to be an idiot to not understand at some level that smoking is bad for you. But the very act of purchasing certain cigarettes being marketed as less bad for you suggests that while you may have some awareness of danger, you were trying to minimize it. and given that the companies knew it to be a false assumption, I’m not willing to give them a complete pass on it (‘good on you, you really pulled the wool over their eyes’).
The cig companies did wrong (again). they should be held accountable for that. The cig smokers assumed a risk, they, I"m sure, have suffered consequences 'cause of it. but their assumption of some risk should not absolve the cig company of all culpability.
I wonder about this myself, because I sure don’t see more than five percent of the cigarette marketing that I used to see back in the day. No TV and radio ads (of course), but also very little in the way of print ads and mass marketing of any type. Maybe I don’t read the right magazines, but how can tobacco companies be marketing to kids at this stage of the game? Or anyone? I can’t remember the last time I saw anything like a cigarette ad, even in print.
product placement is one way. When I saw Big BIrd lighting up…
seriously, product placement, there’s still some in print.
Really? I happen to agree with you that Big Tobacco are very much Not Nice People, and I thoroughly look forward to their lawyerly mauling. This being said, I think we might need to find reasons to enjoy this other than “No one has a right to make money by causing harm to his fellow citizens.”
Airman Doors was quite right to point out that beer is harmful - and while it isn’t as addictive as cigarretes (I’m willing to be shown I’m wrong on that point), there still is a clear potential for addiction. Ben and Jerry’s makes a fine, high-quality product that will contribute to the slow, painful and expensive deaths of many Americans. Should these products be banned? Should their manufacturers be penalized? Clearly, a degree of harm is done here.
And what of handguns? Used responsibly, they’re harmless, which isn’t something one can say of cigs - but many guns are not used responsibly, and the result is horror and tragedy. Should we ban guns?
My own feeling is that we have to acknowledge a continuum - a certain degree of harm, in exchange for a certain degree of benefit to the users of the product. This seems to be the traditional way of making these decisions. Move too far along the spectrum towards harm, and we ban the good in question. I would position the line such that guns are banned, but beer and cigs are not - you might put it elswhere.
My point here, put at far too great length, is simply this: we cannot just say “harm, therefore wrong.”
perhaps, but I’d sure want to say “Harm and lie about the risks involved, therefore wrong”
Your average 15 year old hasn’t been saturated with anything for two generations now.
Those of us who’ve been alive since the 1964 Surgeon General’s report - we’re already smokers, ex-smokers, or never having smoked. There will be some movement between the first two groups, but essentially none from the third group to the first.
Exactimundo. The tobacco companies lied and misled; they shouldn’t blame anyone else for that.
Here’s something from the Cato website:
So there was the state of play as of 1950, the year that the FTC banned health claims from cigarette advertising. They did it not because of a finding that cigarettes were harmful, but rather because they ‘found’ that while cigarette smoking in moderation by people of normal health wasn’t appreciably harmful, no brand’s cigarettes were any more or less healthy than any other’s.
It’s also true that an awful lot of people at the time thought smoking was bad for you, but it was very much a matter of, “well, you’ve got your opinion, and I’ve got mine,” in the idyllic 1950s; there was no strong evidence to prove that cigarettes were indeed ‘coffin nails.’
Thanks; it’s really the only one I’m making. The law is often right, and it’s more than occasionally an ass; not being a lawyer, and operating in an area that’s as unclear to me as this one, I’ll let Bricker explain the laws. I’ll be happy if the legal result, averaged over the period, comes to about where I see the moral reckoning balancing out.
In an era where more activism on the part of government was an easier sell, I’d really like to see the government (1) buy up or buy out all the producers and importers of tobacco products, (2) establish a permanent government monopoly on the mass production or importation of such products, (3) keep making and importing the same consumer tobacco products that are made now, but (4) eliminate all tobacco advertising, paid product placement, etc., and just let tobacco use drop to whatever level it ultimately drops to, in an environment free of tobacco ads. But for now that’s a pipe dream, needless to say. (Although if we ever get single-payer universal health care in the U.S., that might change fast.)
No kidding. With these types of class-action suits, who gets anything besides the lawyers?
Oh please, they’re cigarettes not bloody crack. People stop smoking every day, particularly eighteen year olds who haven’t habitually had a cigarette in their hands for umpteen years…
Regarding the OP, I’m stuck between my dislike of money-grabbing, death-dealing corporate monsters and people who use their services then whine about it later - and of course everyone hates the lawyers (apologies Bricker & co!). Can’t we all just agree to hate both sides for once?
I haven’t the foggiest. But at least one poster in this thread made the claim about someone who couldn’t quit.
This actually doesn’t surprise me. Heroin is much more dangerous than cigarettes are, so the impetus to quit should be much greater. And the effects of heroin are often much more immediate than the effects of cigarettes. It’s much harder to internalize the problems that might arise 20 or 30 years down the road.
Airman Doors, please consider this hypothetical:
Every day you pass a restaurant that sells cheeseburgers. They contain a dangerous substance – let’s call it “cholesterol” – and on the burger wrapper is a warning: “THIS BURGER CONTAINS CHOLESTEROL, WHICH IS REALLY REALLY BAD FOR YOU. IT’LL EVENTUALLY KILL YOU DEAD IF YOU KEEP EATING THEM.”
But, you figure one won’t kill you, so you eat one, and it’s really, really tasty. You decide, screw it, you’re going to eat one of these every day, and accept that your life expectancy will drop from 80 years to 50 years.
Then, after a year of this, as you’re considering whether or not to try quitting, they come out with a new product – Chesseburger Lite. The ads all say: “Half the Cholesterol of our normal burger!” The burger still has the same dire warning label, but heck, eating these will probably kill you when you’re 65, not 50, right? It’s clearly implied that the burger, while still dangerous, has less of the stuff that’s killing you than the original. Heck, you still love the taste of the burgers, so you figure switching to Cheeseburger Lite is a good compromise. Age 65, here you come!
On your 45th birthday, you find out that “Cheeseburger Lite,” despite the claim of “half the cholesterol,” will STILL likely kill you when you’re 50, no different than the original kind. And the burger company knew it the whole time, even when they were running the “Less Cholesterol!” ads.
Are those grounds for a lawsuit? I’d think so.
-P
I wouldn’t. If you ingest something clearly harmful, no matter what they tell you it’s on you. My life expectancy is, let’s say, 75 years. I could die 20 years early whether I smoke or not. Should I feel cheated that my number came up in spite of living a perfectly clean life? Who do I sue then?
The point is that there is a reasonable expectation that smoking will, in fact, shorten your life. But who’s to say by how much, and who’s to say that you were not going to kick the bucket anyway? If I stuff my face with McDonald’s and then change over to a vegetarian diet and die at 50 of a heart attack, is my family right to blame the food? Should they sue the farmers for their products?
Your example is something akin to the correlation/causation argument. In this case the causation is that people are sick, and the correlation is that they’re all either morons, liars, or golddiggers. I suspect liars.
Airman, it seems that the fundamental disagreement we have is that you feel that once a general warning of danger has been given, the degree of the danger no longer matters, even if deceptively represented. I confess it’s hard for me to understand that way of thinking, so maybe I’m misunderstanding you. Let me try another shorter hypothetical, then, to try to understand your position.
Say the warning label on a pack of cigarettes said “Danger! Guaranteed 100% likely to cause cancer if smoked for 20 years.” Then a new kind of cigarette came out with the label “Danger! Guaranteed 75% likely to cause cancer if smoked for 20 years.” You switch to the second kind, only to find out after 15 years that, no, the second kind is also 100% likely to give you cancer, and the cig company knew it all along. What about then? Maybe I’d be wrong, but I’d assume that in such a blatant case, even you’d think the smoker had a good legal claim. (If I’m wrong, then we have so little in common on our thinking here, that I’d be best off ceasing to bother you.)
To me, “tar” vs. “less tar” is analagous enough to “100%” vs. “75%” that I’d treat them as similar cases in regards to lawsuits.
Or, to put it another way. Say a pack of cigs has the same dire warning label it has now, but also says “WAY MORE TAR than our normal brand.” You switch to those, and you die of lung cancer from the increased tar a month later. Your next-of-kin discovers that WAY MORE TAR really is that lethal. Does it matter? I mean, heck, they told you it was dangerous, right there on the label! They didn’t have to tell you how dangerous it was. You ingested something clearly harmful – is it still on you?
Regarding the specifics of your last post, I don’t find them relevant to my argument. I’m (generally) not talking about discovering cause after the fact. I’m talking about a company’s responsibility to accurately convey the degree of risk of using their product, as opposed to simply warning you that there is a risk.
-P
If I tell you that you have a 100% chance of getting killed tomorrow or a 75% chance of being killed tomorrow, are you somehow reassured that you have a meager 1 chance in 4 of surviving until Thursday? Hell no. Anyone with even a shred of common sense under those circumstances would stay home.
Apply that same principle to smoking and that is why I don’t buy the “we were fooled because it said Lights” argument. It is, in fact, lighter, in the same way that a McDonald’s cheeseburger is lighter than a Hardee’s Monster Burger. Neither one of them is something that you would eat for the health benefits.
For those arguing the moral non-culpability of cigarette companies, between 1998 and 2004, the amount of nicotine (both the addictive and the useful component of smoking) in cigarettes has been increased by 10-36%. My brand has gone up 30%. Why, one wonders, would a company do so if it did not desire its consumers to keep consuming, and to ensure that new consumers get addicted more quickly?
YOu still haven’t acknowledged, Doors, that to equate the warning label to perpetual carte blanche and legal immunity is just Not How It Works. Consumers should still have recourse to the courts.
All I can do is relate exactly what he told me- he wants to quit, but has realized he’s become addicted. I know he’s not lying to me because [SUB]I accidentally read his journal where he says the same damn thing.[/SUB]*
Oh, and also, there are the studies that show that it is, indeed, as addictive as crack, like the one I quoted earlier, so blow me.
*[SUB]Yeah, I’m a bit ashamed of that. And boy would I have been furious if my mom had read my journal way back when.[/SUB]
I’ll add that there are a number of “warnings” that are legally meaningless. An implied warrant of merchantability stands no matter what legalese a retailer throws up around it. A “not responsible for falling rocks” on a truck is legally just a sign; they are responsible. And so on.
Apropos of nothing perhaps …
I believe I recall an episode of the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder many, many years ago where the debate was on the dangers of smoking. One of the participants was Betty Freidan who said “If you can tell me that by not smoking, I will live forever, then of course I’d quit immediately.”
I smoked light cigarettes for 26 years and I never once for even a millisecond considered them to be less dangerous than regular cigarettes. They simply tasted better.
I quit 3 & 1/2 weeks ago. I also never thought they were not addictive.
OK, I’m willing to acknowledge your point. However, as you conceded my points earlier, are you willing to say that the judges allowing these types of lawsuits to go to trial have no basis to do so? We can thus amend my OP to this: The lying golddiggers have every right to sue, and the judges that buy their bullshit and allow it to go to trial enable them to abdicate their own personal responsibility.
There. That gives me even more to work with.
It makes no difference. If you’re a smaoker worried about your future you can quit. Thousands do it each day, millions each year. If you’re not a smoker, don’t start. Nobody makes you light it.
It still comes down to personal responsibility.