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“They all have the basic factual allegation that tobacco companies engaged in consumer fraud when they put out marketing to represent that so-called ‘light’ cigarettes would in fact deliver less tar and nicotine to smokers and would also be less hazardous than regular cigarettes,” said Edward Sweda,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], senior staff attorney for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at the Boston-based Public Health Advocacy Institute, which helps attorneys with tobacco litigation.
“They made those representations knowing that was not the case.” The lead plaintiff in New Hampshire is Karen Lawrence of Manchester. Lawrence could not be reached yesterday. According to the suit, Lawrence bought and smoked an average of 1? to two packs a day of Marlboro Lights for nearly 30 years. Lawrence switched from regular Marlboro brand cigarettes to Marlboro Lights about 1973,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], believing that light cigarettes presented reduced health risks.
“Through the misrepresentations associated with Marlboro Lights (Philip Morris) represented that these cigarettes contained lower levels of tar and nicotine and were,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], thereby, less harmful by using words such as‘Lights’and ‘Lowered Tar & Nicotine’,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],” Lawrence’s attorneys wrote. The lawsuit claims that Philip Morris developed a way to control the amount of tar and nicotine that registers in machine tests ? which are used to determine whether a cigarette can be marketed as light ? while still delivering the same amount of tar and nicotine to consumers and producing smoke that is more toxic than smoke from regular Marlboros.
Lawrence asked the judge to certify a class that includes everyone who bought Marlboro Lights in New Hampshire since Philip Morris first started selling them in 1971. Lawrence estimated that the number would be in the hundreds of thousands. Lawrence is asking the judge to make Philip Morris pay triple the amount of either any actual damages or $1,000 per class member, plus a refund of the money customers paid for Marlboro Lights and any profits the company made from the cigarettes.
In addition to Douglas’s firm, Douglas, Leonard and Garvey,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Lawrence is represented by attorneys in St. Louis and Chicago from the firm of Korein Tillery,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], a leader in tobacco class action suits. Philip Morris argued that a class action suit is inappropriate, since each individual plaintiff must prove that a false statement by Philip Morris caused an injury and specify the amount of that injury.