Tobacco litigation worldwide

doi:10.1136/bmj.320.7227.111

From trainee to consultant, BMJ Group offers doctors around the world tailored information, special events, learning resources and recruitment services at every step along their career path.

... by doctors, for doctors, for patients
We are open for entries!

Online learning

BMJ Learning

High-quality CME / CPD for doctors and other healthcare professionals. BMJ Learning features hundreds of accredited, peer-reviewed learning modules in text, video, and audio formats. Find out more

Courses and Qualifications

BMJ Masterclasses

BMJ Masterclasses, led by experts, help clinicians to use the latest evidence and recent guidelines in practice and meet their CPD/CME requirements. Find out more

Exam Preparation

The leading provider of online exam preparation, helping over 167,000 healthcare professionals to pass their exams. Find out more

onExamination

Search all BMJ education articles:

From

Limit by

This article has a correction

Please see: Tobacco litigation worldwide

Access to the full text of this article requires a subscription or payment. Please log in or subscribe below.

Richard A Daynard, professor (Rdaynard@lynx.neu.edu)a,
Clive Bates, directorb,
Neil Francey, barrister at lawc

^a Northeastern University School of Law, 400 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02116, USA
^b Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), London EC2A 4HW
^c Wentworth Chambers, 180 Phillip Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

Correspondence to: R A Daynard

Accepted 23 August 1999

Editorial by Davis

Tobacco litigation has transformed the prospects for tobacco control, first in the United States and more recently worldwide. It has forced tobacco companies to sit at the bargaining table with tobacco control advocates, has produced settlements under which the industry is committed to paying about $10bn each year to reimburse American states for healthcare expenditure caused by tobacco, and it has generally put the industry on the political defensive. For example, the millions of pages of internal documents from the tobacco industry that are now open for public inspection in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in Guildford, England, as a result of the Minnesota state litigation continue to fuel exposés of industry misconduct, and only a fraction of the material has yet been analysed.

This article describes tobacco litigation in the United States and reviews developments elsewhere. It concludes with the bleak picture in Great Britain.

Summary points

Tobacco litigation is transforming the prospects for tobacco control worldwide

Litigation in the United States is moving forward on several fronts, including individual cases, class actions, third party reimbursement actions, and secondhand smoke cases

Other countries have followed suit, with governmental actions in courts both in the United States and locally and with private individual, class action, and reimbursement cases

Australia has seen a major ruling on the dangers of environmental tobacco smoke, and there is currently a viable smokers' class action

Britain has not been hospitable to tobacco litigation, with a recent negative judicial decision forcing a group action to be abandoned

Methods

We examined the reported judicial decisions in tobacco litigation, and we collected and analysed other legal documents in other tobacco cases.

Cases in the United States

Tobacco litigation, even in the United States, has not been easy or uniformly successful. Indeed, for the first 42 years of litigation, from 1954 to 1996, the industry maintained …