ABUSE IT, LIMIT IT, OR QUIT IT
Smoking is a choice — don’t blame the cigarette makers.
Smoking is bad for you. So is living in a smoggy city and breathing fine particulate matter into your lungs. So is drinking alcohol in large quantities, or too frequently. So is eating fast food and sugary cereal every day. Sitting too long is the “new smoking”: a sedentary work life will slowly cripple your cardiovascular system. Unless we all move to the country, practice manual labour and subsist on a diet of organic kale, we’re doomed to die before our time.
Alternatively, we can go on making unhealthy choices and then sue the daylights out of every corporation when our bodies begin to fail. We’ll all be rich: 20 years from now, we’ll strike billion-dollar settlements with Esso, Smirnoff, McDonalds, Kellogg’s, and the employers who chain us to our desks (watch out, Postmedia). When our eyesight fails, we’ll sue smartphone makers who “forced” us to stare at our mobile devices every waking minute of the day. Why didn’t they warn us that texting is addictive?
Ridiculous? Sadly, no. In what is being hailed as a “historic” decision, this week the Quebec Superior Court awarded $15.5 billion in a class-action lawsuit against tobacco manufacturers Imperial Tobacco, Rothmans, Benson & Hedges and JTI-Macdonald. The companies have appealed, but if it stands, the judgment could have dire implications for businesses from soda makers to marijuana dispensers.
The case was brought on behalf of over one million Quebecers who either developed lung disease or were unable to quit smoking. One of the key issues was knowledge of the risks, which to a reasonable person seems pretty high: the judgment cites a survey which found that “By at least 1963, there was an exceptionally high level of awareness, 88 per cent, among the Quebec population of reports or information that smoking may cause lung cancer or have other harmful effects. Even before then, in 1954, 82 per cent of the Quebec population was aware of reports that smoking may cause lung cancer. … Since the first relevant survey identified in 1979, over 80 per cent of the population indicated that smoking is a habit and 84 per cent reported it is very hard to stop smoking (in 1979). By 1986, the majority of the population considered smoking to be an ‘addiction.’ ”
With such a level of awareness, wouldn’t consumers be able to make informed choices about smoking? Apparently not. Justice Brian Riordan wrote that “the conclusion that smoking ‘may cause cancer or other harmful effects’ does not satisfy the Court: the minimum acceptable level of awareness should be much higher than that, for example, ‘is likely’ or ‘is highly likely.’ ” Going even further, the judge also held that tobacco companies had a duty to disclose the risks, including addiction, as soon as they were aware of them. “The companies’ omission to pass on such critical, lifechanging information about the dangers of smoking was incontestably capable of influencing a consumer’s behaviour with respect to the decision to purchase cigarettes. It need not be shown that no one would have smoked had the companies been forthcoming. It suffices to find that proper knowledge was capable of influencing a person’s decision to begin or continue to smoke. How could that not be the case?”
How indeed? Because knowing something is bad for you doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t do it. Despite knowing that smoking is unhealthy and addictive, kids still light up at recess behind the local high school and office workers still puff away on the sidewalk in -40 degree weather. The same holds true for other unhealthy lifestyle choices. For decades, public health authorities, television programs, magazine articles and now blogs have harangued consumers about the dangers of various foods, and habits: too much fat and too little exercise will take their toll. The paradox is that in some ways, we are sicker than ever, with a steady increase in obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes, particularly among the young.
If this week’s tobacco judgment stands, it would open the floodgates to litigation against any company which did not “disclose” that its product could negatively impact health if consumed in great quantities, despite such knowledge being disseminated by the media or other means. Then there’s the question of addiction: if tobacco companies can be fined billions of dollars for knowingly selling an addictive product, what about the potential legalization of marijuana, another smokable, habit-forming drug? Wouldn’t this be a tad, uh, contradictory?
Ultimately, like any vice, cigarette smoking is our choice: we can abuse it, limit it, or quit it, even if that’s not easy to do. What we shouldn’t do is blame others, including cigarette makers, for the decisions we make. While we know more in 2015 than in 1972, we knew enough, even then, to make responsible choices — that is, if we chose to do so.
$15B award against Big Tobacco should make other industries nervous