8 lawsuits filed against tobacco companies

An Albuquerque law office and two out-of-state law firms filed eight lawsuits in First Judicial District Court this week on behalf of New Mexicans who have developed illnesses, cancers or died after using tobacco products from several major companies.

The plaintiffs from across New Mexico include a woman in Santa Fe suing on behalf of her husband, who died of cancer caused by cigarettes in 2019.

“People today I don’t think have a good understanding that tobacco companies knew for decades that their product was addictive and caused cancer, and they went on a nationwide campaign to get people addicted to cigarettes and people today are suffering,” said Anthony Bruster, an attorney based in Southlake, Texas, who filed three of the lawsuits.

The Jaramillo Law Firm in Albuquerque and the Alvarez Law Firm in Coral Gables, Fla., filed the other five. These types of lawsuits have been filed for decades.

Several of the lawsuits name Philip Morris USA Inc. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. as defendants. These are the same companies at the center of the massive 1999 Department of Justice lawsuit that ultimately found several major American tobacco companies violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

In 2006, a judge ruled the companies conspired

to cover up evidence about the health risks of tobacco, as well as marketing products to children.

The lawsuits also name Liggett Group LLC, formerly known as the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, the fourth-largest tobacco company in the country.

One of the lawsuits was filed on behalf of an Otero County man who began smoking cigarettes at 9 years old. He was “exposed to the tobacco companies’ effort to deny and distort the truth that cigarettes were addictive and poisonous in hopes of creating a new generation of smokers who would become addicted for life,” according to the suit.

The man stopped smoking in 2020, but only after he was diagnosed with metastatic throat cancer.

The lawsuits also contain dozens of pages on the history of specific tactics these companies used to cover up the health risks of cigarettes and the addictive nature of nicotine.

All eight of the people named in the lawsuits began smoking sometime between 1952 and the early 1980s, years after an article published in the American Medical Association’s journal in 1950 identified prolonged tobacco use as a factor in the cause of lung cancer, according to the suits.

The lawsuits also cite tobacco industry public relations campaigns and feature scientific research paid for by the companies in their advertisements.

They name a number of local as well as corporately owned stores that sold cigarettes to the plaintiffs, including Allsup’s Convenience Stores LLC.