Get Real – The Only Fraud is in Claim of Plaintiffs that they Thought Cigarettes were Harmless

Excerpted Arty:  Mayola Williams sued Philip Morris for fraud on behalf of her husband, a two-pack-a-day smoker of Marlboros for 45 years. Jesse Williams died of lung cancer more than nine years ago. Philip Morris makes Marlboros. She argued the jury award was appropriate because it punishes Philip Morris’ misconduct for a decades-long “massive market-directed fraud” that misled people into thinking cigarettes were not dangerous or addictive.

Williams, according to his widow, never gave any credence to the surgeon general’s health warnings about smoking cigarettes because tobacco companies insisted they were safe. Only after falling sick did Williams tell his wife: “Those darn cigarette people finally did it. They were lying all the time.”

….. I have to first tell you if you read that and did not laugh out loud you have no sense of humor.  This lady is a liar and a comically bad one at that.  Hollywood may write the way she lies but they do not have to win court cases with their flimsy plots.   LONG LONG LONG before a guy (who I estimate at about 65 when he died) dies from something like cigarettes thre are unmistakable symtoms.  I have a friend who is a chronic smoker and he at 59 has mid stage emphysema.  Any real excertion causes the sympathetic muscles of the chest to be called in to help effect breathing. 

The term coffin nail was originally used as a metaphor for something that increases your risk of death.   The idea was first expressed in an ode by Pindar (the pseudonym of John Wolcot) in 1792: “Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt.”

Cigarettes were largely unknown in the English-speaking world before the Crimean War when British soldiers began emulating their Ottoman Turk comrades, who resorted to rolling their tobacco with newsprint.

I am sure it was almost instantaneous that cigarettes attained the joke name COFFIN NAIL.  This such an obvious play on words with coffin = coughing nails and the tacit assumption that cigarettes were not good for ones health.  So its safe to say that between 1850 and 1900 cigarettes were widely known not to be good for ones health.

These cigarette lawsuits where the plantiff claims they did not know excessive cigarette usage was unhealthy  are simply insulting to our collective intelligence.   Not one dime should ever be awarded ANYWHERE for cigarette usage.  There is no sense in encouraging stupidity.