Repercussions in court

Press, 17 January 1986, Page 16

Repercussions in court

From

THOMAS LAND,

an author and

correspondent on global affairs, in Geneva.

The United Nations World Health Organisation (W.H.0.) predicts a wave of legislation in Western Europe and North America shifting liability for the costs of smoking from the taxpayer to the tobacco companies. The organisation has committed the collective support of the medical profession to the global anti-smoking campaign in its fight against the tobacco companies before the courts. In Sweden, the National Social Insurance High Court has just accepted that passive smoking is a potential cause of lung cancer which can be classified as industrial injury. The decision, won posthumously by a lung-cancer victim, is expected to have wideranging social and industrial repercussions.

In the United States, a wave of about 30 product liability and personal injury lawsuits is about to be brought before the courts seeking to establish the responsibility of the tobacco industry for the ill health and deaths of smokers. All these cases rely on mounting scientific evidence linking smoking and various ailments including lungcancer in a causal relationship.

A front-page editorial in “Tobacco Alert,” a publication of the W.H.O. published in Geneva, declares: “One of the most encouraging signs of the changing social climate in regard to smoking is the way in which judges and juries are revising their attitudes to liability suits. In some ways, such changes reflect the growing power of the consumer to make his voice heard in the courts. “But it also indicates the extent to which even such conservative bodies as the legislature in North America and Western Europe have come to accept the sheer weight of the ; medical evidence for the association between smoking and major diseases. “The financial experts of the world’s stock exchanges have also studied the evidence and, as a consequence, cigarette stocks have shown sharp price declines' as nervous investors await the outcome of the lawsuits : against the major tobacco companies.”

Success at the courts by the antismoking lobby, says the W.H.0., may well encourage governments to consider new forms of legislation to shift the medical costs linked with smoking to the tobacco industry. At present, the bills are paid by the taxpayer. A single North American smoker is reckoned to cost his employer alone an extra $9OOO a year in health and life insurance, absenteeism, wasted time, and cleaning.

The verdict of the Swedish court has already led to . widespread demands for a ban on smoking at the workplace. It has provided fresh grounds for non-smokers to refuse employment in smoke-pol-luted industrial premises. A rash of new claims is now expected for industrial damages by non-smokers who believe that they have contracted lung cancer dr other diseases from passive smoking in the company of tobacco-addicted workmates.

This is likely to induce employers to avoid the whole issue by insisting that all their employees refrain from smoking. The trend has been established in North America, where perhaps one-third of the biggest companies give preference to the desire of nonsmokers to work in a smoke-free atmosphere. The current crop of cases awaiting hearing before the courts may well encourage the trend.

The tobacco industry’s standard defence to litigation rests upon an assertion of the smoker’s right to smoke. The industry also denies the existence of any scientific evidence establishing the link between ill health and smoking. But “World Health,” another journal of the W.H.O. published in Geneva, observes a trend discernible in North American court decisions “to award compensation if a product is determined to be dangerous. Even if a manufacturer has not been found to be negligent, a product is still assumed to carry an implied warranty that it is safe. Furthermore, (health) warnings on labels do not automatically exempt manufacturers of liability.”