From MSNBC.com…
Tobacco lawsuit cites long-ago cigarette giveaways
By Denise Lavoie, AP Legal Affairs Writer
BOSTON—Marie Evans recalled she was 9 years old when she first started getting free cigarettes in the Boston housing project where she lived.
At first, she traded them for candy, but she said she started smoking them herself at age 13. Four decades later, Evans died of lung cancer.
Now, an unusual lawsuit is set to go to trial in Suffolk Superior Court, accusing the maker of those cigarettes — Lorillard Tobacco Co. — of deliberately trying to entice black children to become smokers by handing out free samples in urban neighborhoods.
Opening statements are scheduled Friday in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Evans’ son against Lorillard, the nation’s third-largest tobacco company. Willie Evans alleges that the firm used an illegal marketing strategy to get his mother to begin smoking Newport cigarettes, which led to a lifelong addiction.
In 1957, when Marie Evans first began receiving the free samples, Massachusetts law prohibited giving cigarettes to children. The lawsuit alleges that Lorillard broke that law in its zeal to attract new smokers. The giveaways in urban neighborhoods were “designed to attract African-American children and teenagers and to place cigarettes in their hands,” the lawsuit states.
The company’s attorneys say there’s no evidence Lorillard gave Evans cigarettes.
The lawsuit is believed to be the first in the country to accuse a cigarette-maker of targeting black children by giving away cigarettes in urban neighborhoods, said Edward Sweda Jr., senior attorney for the Tobacco Product Liability Project at Boston’s Northeastern University School of Law.
“This case really describes the whole history of one child being exposed to a deliberate marketing campaign of putting an addictive and deadly product into the child’s hands, literally, with the foreseeable result that at some point soon thereafter she would start using that product, get addicted to it, and unfortunately, 40 years later, come down with fatal lung cancer,” Sweda said.
Cigarette giveaways were a common promotional tactic across the industry from the 1950s through the 1980s, Sweda said. The practice became more widespread after cigarette ads were taken off the air in the early 1970s before tailing off in the 1990s, he said, citing Federal Trade Commission data.
Gregg Perry, a spokesman for the Greensboro, N.C., company, said Lorillard would not comment before the trial.
During a court hearing in August, Lorillard’s attorneys said that the family had not presented enough evidence to prove that the company was responsible for Marie Evans’ addiction and the effect it had on her health. Lorillard attorney Andrew McElaney also said there is no evidence to “support the finding that Lorillard Tobacco Co. gave Marie Evans cigarettes.”
In depositions before her death in 2002, Evans recalled getting free sample packs of Newports during giveaways in or near the Orchard Park housing complex in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. She said she received samples from a “Newport van” 25 to 50 times.
“At no time during any of these giveaway events did any Lorillard agent and/or representative refuse to give Marie Evans samples of Newport cigarettes because of her age,” her son’s lawsuit states. “She started smoking Newport cigarettes in part because she had access to them at no cost on a frequent basis through the Newport cigarette giveaway events conducted by Lorillard.”
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