Federal judge won’t delay decision in long-standing tobacco case

A federal judge on Thursday said she won’t delay an order in a 12-year-old lawsuit against the tobacco industry while other courts decide newer cases challenging tobacco marketing restrictions and graphic cigarette warning labels.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington issued the decision in a case in which America’s largest cigarette makers — including Philip Morris USA, maker of top-selling Marlboro cigarettes — were found to have concealed the dangers of smoking for decades.
Kessler has said she wants the industry to pay for ads, in broadcast and print. She has not said what corrective statements should be included in those ads, where they must be placed or for how long. That’s the decision Kessler was considering delaying.

She asked the parties last November for input on whether she should delay her decision pending other lawsuits challenging marketing restrictions and new warning labels that the Food and Drug Administration proposed under authority it gained in 2009.

Kessler said that the corrective advertising that the Justice department wants the industry to pay for under a 2006 ruling is “significantly different from the verbal and pictorial advertisements” required by the FDA. She also noted that tobacco companies have brought two newer challenges to regulations the FDA proposed using its new authority.

In her decision Thursday, Kessler wrote: “It is perfectly clear” that the challenges to the FDA regulations “will not end (if ever) for an extremely long period of time.”

The tobacco companies wanted Kessler to delay her decision because the government’s proposed corrective statements would likely be subject to many of the same objections raised in newer challenges to federal tobacco regulations. Meanwhile, the Justice Department argued that postponing a decision would harm smokers, potential smokers and young people.

The government wants the companies to admit that they lied to the public about the dangers of smoking and to pay for an advertising campaign of self-criticism. Its proposed corrective ads would cover the addictiveness of nicotine, the lack of health benefits from “low tar,” ‘’ultra-light” and “mild” cigarettes and the dangers of secondhand smoke. The companies have argued the statements are inflammatory, inaccurate and “designed solely to shame and humiliate” the companies.