By T. J. Ray, Oxford, Mississippi
In those days I thought image was important, and I liked the image presented by several colleagues who smoked pipes. Despite the desire and the money I wasted, I never got the hang of smoking. Couple that with my distaste for cigarette smoke and my gagging at the whiff of cigar smoke, I played the fool for a while.
All that is another way of saying that I don’t like smoking. I often asked my dad not to smoke, but I’m not sure his emphysema killed him, though it surely contributed to it. He never considered suing a tobacco company, just as he didn’t join the group lawsuit against the asbestos companies. During the Big War, he worked in a shipyard where asbestos was used a lot. His argument was that the asbestos producers didn’t set out to harm him.
And all that leads me to the announcement that a Florida jury has awarded three hundred million dollars to a lady who sued a tobacco company. “Cindy admitted her fault to the jury,” her attorney, Robert W. Kelley, said in a statement. “But Philip Morris refused to accept any responsibility for her emphysema, even though she was an addicted customer for 25 years.”
A jillion dollars for continuing to do something voluntarily for decades? I’ve stood in tobacco stores and convenience stores and watched folks purchase packs of smoke. Never have I seen a gun pointed at their heads. And year after year after year they do the same thing, often in the face of advice from their doctors to stop smoking. Even after their lung X-rays show the cloud gathering in their body.
From 1938 till 1974, subsidies were as integral to tobacco farming as rich soil and a damp climate. By 1977 tobacco production was growing without subsidies to farmers, mainly for export. Given the illogic of the woman in Florida getting three hundred million, one wonders if the day will come when a U.S. Company is sued by someone in another country for getting lung cancer.
The topic here is rather smoky; when does the individual accept personal responsibility for risking his or her own life? For instance, if a man takes a handful of aspirin each day because he heard it helps prevent heart attacks, should he be able to sue Bayer Aspirin when the pills eat a hole in his stomach? Or, if a person chooses to drink heavily, is it acceptable to file a lawsuit against the whiskey manufacturer when he becomes an alcoholic? Or, will the kid in San Francisco who uses marijuana excessively from free clinics be able to sue the city for his drug addiction? Just one more: why should McDonald’s be liable for someone spilling hot coffee in a lap after they leave the store?
I wonder how many ashtrays were on the table in that Florida jury room.
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THANKS, T.J. I grew up smelling smoke on dad’s clothes and never thought anything about it – and today no one seems to think much about it either. My father lived to nearly 93 and smoked a pipe, cigars, even chewed tobacco. Finally he went to cigarettes until one day his wife said, as she pulled out the last cigarette from the pack, “This is the last one for me.” That’s all it took, dad quit too. That was probably close to twenty years before he died – of old age. Personally I am glad I never started the habit of smoking. I wonder if today’s tobacco might be more potent than it used to be or were smokers back then more potent than what they were smoking?
THE WORDWRIGHT