AMA GOES TO WAR AGAINST TOBACCO FIRMS

The tobacco companies are predators, says American Medical Association President Lonnie Bristow, and smokers are the lambs. "It's time to end the silence of the lambs," Bristow said in describing a new report charging that for 30 years, the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. hidevidence that nicotine was addictive. This week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association is devoted to the report, a review of almost 10,000 pages of documents from the company. The JAMA report charges that lawyers for the firm routinely labeled internal research as "privileged" to avoid having to reveal the information to anyone suing the company over health problems. "We've seen a lot of this information before," says TIME's Anastasia Toufexis, "but never so much compiled in one place. The biggest impact will probably come in the courtroom. These 10,000 pages will give a lot of ammunition to lawsuits against the tobacco companies." A Brown & Williamson spokesman accused the AMA of engaging in "a cherry-picking exercise" in pursuit of its agenda to wipe out smoking.