Tobacco's First Loss

• Share

"The doctors couldn't get her to stop. Her husband couldn't get her to stop. - She wasn't going to take orders from anybody."

-- DONALD COHN, ATTORNEY FOR THE LIGGETT GROUP

"Rose Cipollone had the upper lobe of her lung cut out. She still continued to smoke. Doesn't that suggest some kind of a dependence?"

-- MARC EDELL, ATTORNEY FOR THE CIPOLLONES

Rose Cipollone was intensely stubborn, especially about her cigarette habit. The New Jersey housewife often ordered groceries she did not need just to get a fresh pack of smokes delivered. She ignored her husband and children when they started urging her to quit in the early 1950s, waving them away when they showed her magazine articles with headlines like CANCER BY THE CARTON. She did make the concession of switching in 1955 from Chesterfield straights to L&M filters, which were advertised at the time as "just what the doctor ordered." But Cipollone kept on smoking even after developing a malignant tumor that forced surgeons to remove part of her right lung in 1981. She continued sneaking puffs after the entire lung was taken out in 1982, and finally quit about a year before her death from cancer, at 58, in 1984.

Yet Cipollone's name will not be lost among the cancer statistics, because as a final gesture, she turned her stubbornness against the tobacco companies that sold her the cigarettes. She and her husband Tony filed a liability claim, which she made him promise to pursue after her death, though no one had ever won such a case against a cigarette maker. Last week the five-year-old lawsuit made history when a six-member federal jury in Newark ordered the Liggett Group, maker of the Chesterfield and L&M brands, to pay Tony Cipollone $400,000 in compensatory damages for its contribution to his wife's death. Of more than 300 lawsuits filed against tobacco companies since 1954, this case was the first in which the defendant was held at least partly liable or ordered to pay damages. "The myth of the tobacco industry's invincibility has been shattered once and for all," declared Alan Darnell, an attorney for Cipollone.

Anti-tobacco forces celebrated the verdict as a breakthrough. John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University who heads the Action on Smoking and Health group, called the decision the "most important legal development involving tobacco since the cigarette companies were forced off television ((in 1971))." Product-liability experts predicted that the case would provide a boost in confidence and a how-to manual for the plaintiffs in 110 similar cases now being pursued in the U.S. Before long, the verdict could prompt fresh lawsuits as well, since cigarette foes like Banzhaf estimate that smoking contributes to the premature deaths of some 350,000 Americans each year.