Tobacco companies finally tell truth

For decades, tobacco companies denied cigarettes caused cancer. They denied cigarettes were made to be addictive. They denied cigarettes kill.

Even after a federal judge ordered them to finally tell the truth 11 years ago, cigarette companies continued to delay, delay, delay.

But Big Tobacco’s day of reckoning finally arrived Sunday with a wave of fullpage newspaper ads that list the deadly dangers of smoking — straight from the horse’s mouth. Similar ads were scheduled to begin airing Monday evening on primetime television shows. Smoking kills, on average, 1,200 Americans. Every day.

The words stand starkly alone in the ads. There are no photos of people tethered to oxygen tanks, or lying on their deathbeds, or unable to talk because they lost their tongues to cancer.

While fighting the judge’s ruling, the industry won an agreement that it wouldn’t have to show pictures of anyone who’s suffered or died from its lethal products. It also got out of having say: “Here is the truth.”

It’s clear Big Tobacco didn’t want to come clean. The ads begin: “A federal court has ordered R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Philip Morris USA, Altria and Lorillard to make this statement about the health effects of smoking.”

More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes and alcohol, combined.

Stop a moment and absorb that jawdropping fact.

Tobacco companies produce a product that every year kills more people than murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes and alcohol — combined.

How is that even possible? Why are tobacco companies allowed to continue making a product that kills so many people?

Government exists to help keep us safe, after all. Why hasn’t Congress stood up to the industry’s political swag and swagger? Failing to do so leaves some smokers doubting the dangers of cigarettes.

You’d have thought liability lawsuits would have brought down the industry by now, as with asbestos, silicone breast implants and a host of other deadly products and pharmaceuticals. But even as they pooh-pooh the danger, the industry’s silkstockinged lawyers tell juries that people knew the risk and made the choice to keep smoking.

Sadly, it’s true. No matter the warnings, between 15 and 20 percent of Americans continue to smoke, many of them young people.

So why don’t they quit?

Cigarette companies intentionally designed cigarettes with enough nicotine to create and sustain addiction. It’s not easy to quit.

“In short, Defendants have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted,” U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in 2006.

The judge’s ruling came in a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit that accused tobacco companies of racketeering and defrauding people by lying about the health effects of smoking and second-hand smoke. There is no safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke.

Even today, tobacco companies continue to make enormous profits by producing, selling and distributing cigarettes around the world.

So not only are they killing people with cigarettes here, these death merchants are exporting their deadly wares to unsuspecting people in other countries.

All cigarettes cause cancer, lung disease, heart attacks, and premature death — lights, low tar, ultra lights, and naturals. There is no safe cigarette.

It took 11 years for tobacco companies to finally tell the truth. During those 11 years, who knows how many more lives were lost and how many more young people got hooked.

It’s feared the marketing won’t work because newspapers and prime-time television don’t reach as many people — especially young people — as the settlement once anticipated.

But the ads, which will run repeatedly over the next year, will still reach tens of millions of people who vote. And by the time next Election Day rolls around, we expect voters will want to know why members of Congress continue to let tobacco companies kill so many people.