MPR: Minnesota Tobacco Trial Has National Impact

Minnesota Tobacco Trial Has National Impact
By Bob Collins
May 8, 1998

When tobacco companies agreed to settle 40 state lawsuits against them last June, it did so with astonishing enthusiasm considering it was going to cost them more than $368 billion. Critics, who are naturally suspicious of anything the companies find acceptable, had few arguments against the settlement until the Minnesota tobacco trial started. When the trial began, momentum toward a national deal stopped, and the settlement collapsed.

BY THE TIME THE PROSECUTION RESTED ITS CASE IN MARCH, the national settlement of 40 similar state lawsuits was dead. Congress is about to debate a much tougher proposal that strips the tobacco companies of much of their business, limits their ability to advertise, and kills an attempt to protect them from future liability suits.

As prosecutors mounted their case in Minnesota, the tobacco industry lost most of its political support in Washington.

Through the rulings of Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick, Minnesota gave the national debate 26 million documents detailing how tobacco ran its businesses, what they put in the cigarettes, and how they tried to prevent people from finding out any of it.

The trial also provided a lesson to other states: how to sue tobacco.

David Logan: It ends up providing a road map for other institutions, the states, or insurance companies to make the same kind of arguments in individual suits and individual states.

David Logan is a law professor at Wake Forest University

Logan: I think it's already spurred a large number of insurance companies to step forward who might have well been reluctant, had not the case gone as well as it appears to have gone for the plaintiffs in Minnesota.

The impact of the Minnesota trial was obvious last month when a group of Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations sued the companies. They'll argue virtually the same themes as Minnesota Blue Cross has. Minnesota health care organizations such as Allina and Health Partners, who had shied away from following Blue Cross and Blue Shield initially, launched their own lawsuits armed with the evidence the Mike Ciresi team uncovered. Richard Daynard of the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University says the Minnesota trial will launch dozens of other suits and tobacco will be hard pressed to make them go away with more out-of-court settlements.

Daynard: I think that brings out other insurers; it brings out large corporate employers who self insure their employee health care costs. I think the flood gates are open.

But Greg Little, an attorney for Phillip Morris, says Minnesota was the perfect place for a suit against tobacco, a situation other states - and other institutions - will have a hard time duplicating.

Little: I doubt there will ever be a situation where the combination of pre-trial publicity, an attorney general who's running for governor who seems almost on a daily basis to be holding press conferences about the case. Court rulings that really have almost uniformly gone against the industry. I don't know that there will ever be another situation quite like this.

Law Professor Michael DeBow at Cumberland University thinks Minnesota provided little more than an airing of the internal company memos. He says the original national settlement was going to die with or without the trial, and any lawsuits that are filed by emboldened plaintiffs following the Minnesota case won't make much difference.

DeBow: I don't know how many times you can bring the industry to its knees with lawsuits. You can only put a bullet through its head so many times. Whether you have 40 suits or 400, the potential for exposure to the tobacco companies right now is enormous. Many others may join the party, but it won't change the dynamic of a settlement very much

The flood of new lawsuits doesn't guarantee courtroom victory, even with the exposure of the millions of documents in Minnesota. Tobacco companies have never lost a state-initiated lawsuit. During the Minnesota trial, tobacco won court skirmishes in Iowa, Florida, and Indiana.

In Iowa, the Supreme Court substantially limited the state's ability to recover damages in a case very similar to Minnesota's.

Iowa attorney general Tom Miller thinks the Minnesota case has given his case some life.

Miller: Those documents are important to us, particularly the state's Rico County, and the ongoing fraud count...especially the documents concerning kids.

Many tobacco critics want a jury verdict in Minnesota. They think the Ciresi team has damaged the companies enough to warrant the first courtroom win for a state. Settlements - more than jury verdicts - have the potential to change the way tobacco does its business.

For example, if advertising restrictions are part of any settlement in the Minnesota case, Congress will likely impose them nationally.

George Annas at Boston University's School of Law says advertising restrictions are virtually unenforceable on a state-by-state basis.

Annas: They really have a choice now of doing this state-by-state. Minnesota will be the fourth state if Minnesota enters into a settlement. Or we can do this through Congress, in conjunction with the tobacco companies. And it seems to me it has to be done by Congress.

For years, tobacco's biggest fear was that government would regulate it. With settlements in Florida and Texas, that is now a certainty.

Hamline University law professor Joe Daly says the game changed when the Supreme Court ordered tobacco to make internal memos public.

Daly: It's going to be highly regulated, just like drugs. We're going to force them to reveal how their product is made and we're going to force them to stand by their product just like we make everybody stand by their product and reveal the dangers.

Iowa attorney general Tom Miller says the documents pried loose in the Minnesota case have opened the window on the tobacco company's business. He says politicians have looked inside. When the tougher Congressional bill was reported out of Senator John McCain's committee last month, it was on a 19-to-1 vote. He says that sort of congressional unity against the companies never would've happened before last January, when the Minnesota trial began.

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