Tobacco companies misled public

For more than three decades, the tobacco industry used public relations strategies to keep people smoking, a professor of history at Stanford University testified Monday.

In the first local tobacco lawsuit trial since the Florida Supreme Court opened a floodgate of individual smoker suits in 2006, Dr. Robert Proctor testified about the "history of what the tobacco industry knew and didn't know."

Starting with explorer Christopher Columbus, whose sailors had a hard time putting down tobacco, Proctor described memos, media interviews and studies -- paid for by the industry -- in which tobacco executives denied that cigarettes caused cancer.

"It was part of their denial routine," he said.

Stella Koballa, 77, of Daytona Beach smoked for nearly 50 years, starting with Lucky Strikes in 1949 when she was 16 years old. In 1996, Koballa smoked her last butt, when she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Koballa's first trial ended with a hung jury when the panel couldn't agree on the meaning of addiction. She is seeking an unspecified amount of damages in the first of 150 local cases filed against tobacco companies to go to trial.

To prove the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds used deception in making and selling cigarettes that made her sick, Koballa's lawyers asked Proctor questions about the history of the tobacco industry.

Proctor also described the growth of lung disease during the same period, testifying that smoking now accounts for 400,000 deaths in the United States each year, with lung cancer responsible for 160,000 deaths.

"There was a time when there was very little cancer in the lung," Proctor said, referring to 140 known cases of lung cancer in 1900.

Ben Reid, a lawyer for R.J. Reynolds, has attacked Proctor's views, pointing out the doctor never studied Koballa's smoking habits.

"That is true," Proctor said.

Koballa's lawsuit, which seeks damages for product liability as well as fraud and conspiracy, was made possible by a 2006 state Supreme Court decision that dismantled the Engel class-action lawsuit verdict of $145 billion in favor of smokers.

Of the 36 tobacco trials that have been heard statewide since then, a dozen decisions have been reached in favor of tobacco companies. Verdicts have ranged from $1 million to more than $50 million.

Koballa's lawyers argue the tobacco company should be required to pay punitive damages for wrongdoing. The plaintiffs claim the tobacco industry "deliberately carried out a campaign of doubt and disinformation which clouded the issue for addicted smokers."

In 1964, when the Surgeon General of the United States came out with a report that found smoking was a cause of lung cancer, Proctor testified, the tobacco industry responded through lobby groups and public relations efforts "to ridicule and denigrate" the findings."

There were strategies to "give people a reason to continue smoking" and statements of health risks that Proctor described as misleading.

Anne Browder, a spokeswoman for the industry-funded Tobacco Institute, appeared in a television interview in 1984. Smoking, she said, "is not the cause of any disease."

Browder suggested the causes of cancer and other illnesses were a mystery.

She described smokers' "freedom of choice," adding "the vast majority (of smokers) do not get these illnesses." Proctor's opinion of that and other statements were that they were less than honest, he said.

The jury was also shown a memo from 1926, in which salespeople were encouraged to seek cigarette sales from younger smokers.

"School days are here," the memo begins. "And that means big tobacco business for somebody. Let's get it."

Reid argued on behalf of the cigarette maker there is no evidence that R.J. Reynolds "had anything to do with (Koballa) beginning to smoke when she was a youth."

The trial continues today with a marketing expert. The jury is expected to begin deliberating later in the week before Circuit Judge Robert K. Rouse Jr.