담배회사 소송 걸기
"흡연 - 다시 생각해 봅시다."
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위의 글에서 미국에서 일어나고 있는 담배회사에 대한 소송과
보상 타협에 관한 소식을 전한 바 있습니다. 말미에 한국에서
공익을 위한 사업으로 취지가 되어 있는 한국담배인삼공사
(이전의 전매청)가 국민에게 담배라는 독극물을 국민에게
팔음으로써 일어나는 현상에 대하여 잠깐 언급한 적이 있습니다.
재술하자면, 한국으로 담배를 수출하는 외국의 담배회사를 걸어
미국의 여러 단체들이 소송을 걸어 이겼던 것처럼 한국의 단체들이
소송을 걸려면 우선 한국담배인삼공사의 건부터 해결을 해야
하겠다는 말씀입니다. 한국담배인삼공사가 사기업화 되면
한국 정부는 담배의 판매에 대한 모든 부담을 벗어 버릴 수
있습니다. 물론 그래도 과거의 판매에 대해서는 책임을 전부
피할 수는 없을 것입니다. 그러나 미국의 담배회사들처럼 다음과
같은 점에 대해 책임추궁을 받는 것은 지식이나 사전 의도의
결핍으로 무죄를 주장할 수 있을 지 모릅니다.
1. 미국의 담배회사들은 직, 간접 흡연이 여러가지 질병의 원인이
되는 것을 알고 있었음에도 불구하고 소비자를 의도적으로
오도하거나 현혹시킴으로써 소비자가 제품의 하자에 대해 적절히
대응할 수 있는 경고를 주지 않았다. 이로 말미암아 개인은 질병과
사망으로 피해를 입었고 시, 주, 연방 정부는 흡연으로 인한 질병의
치료에 엄청난 돈과 인력을 투자해야만 했다. 이는 모두 담배회사의
의도적인 소비자 현혹이 그 이유가 된다고 보여지는 바 담배회사는
이를 보상할 의무가 있다.
2. 담배회사들은 니코틴의 중독성과 독성에 대해 자체내의 실험실의
연구로 이를 입증하는 결과를 알았음에도 불구하고 이를 일반과
관련 당국에 보고하지 않았다. 오히려 니코틴의 중독성을 이용해
니코틴의 효과를 상승시키는 물질을 개발하여 담배에 포함시키거나
니코틴의 배율을 인위로 조작함으로써 흡연자가 니코틴의 중독에서
헤어날 수 없도록 담배를 제조하였다. 그럼에도 불구하고
담배회사들은 향정신성 의약품 (=마약)에 준하는 의약법의 규제를
받지 아니하고 담배를 화학적으로 조작하여 파는 등 실질적인
약물판매행위를 하여 왔다.
3. 니코틴의 함량을 인위적으로 (유전자 조작등을 통하여)
증가시키지 못하게 되어 있는 미국 국내의 법을 의도적으로
위반하기 위하여 미국 담배 회사들은 남미에 있는 농장등에 조작된
유전자를 가진 담배 종자를 판매하였으며 이를 미국에 재수입하거나
다시 제 3국에 판매하는 탈법행위를 하였다.
4. 청소년은 흡연이 금지 되어 있다는 법을 알면서도 비밀리에
청소년의 흡연에 대해 연령별 취향과 습성을 조사하였다.
담배회사들은 이 자료들을 청소년들을 담배에 중독시키기 위한 자료로
이용하였다. 청소년들이 특히 심볼로 우상화하는 디자인 (카멜,
말보로 따위의 디자인, 즉, 조 카멜(Joe Camel)이란 만화화된 주인공과
말보로의 카우보이등) 을 사용하는 전략을 폈으며 또 청소년에게
흡연 중독을 일으키기 쉽게 니코틴과 수십, 수백종에 이르는 다른
함유물을 통해 청소년과 처음 흡연자들을 위한 브랜드등을 내 놓았다.
5. 미국내의 흡연이 거센 금연운동에 부딪히자, 남성대상의
판매전략에서 이탈하여 여성, 흑인등을 대상으로 삼았다. 이런 목적
달성을 위해 감성적인 여성의 취약점을 이용하고 빈곤층, 사회의
저변층이 흑인 코뮤니티등을 집중 공략하였다. 이로써도 판매가
부진해지자 한 편으로는 막대한 돈을 투자하여 와싱톤 정가에 로비를
하고 (의사협회 다음으로 미국 2위의 로비단체임), 한 편으로는
정부를 앞세워 시장개방 압력을 주어 외국시장을 공략하였다.
담배회사들이 미국에서 어떤 경로로 소송을 당해 패소하고,
막대한 돈을 지불하더라도 일괄 협상안을 정부와 타결시키는 것이
낫다는 생각을 갖게 되었는지 알아 보고 싶은 분들은 다음에
적은 책들을 읽으면 도움이 될 지 모릅니다. 한국도 미국
담배회사들에게서 수십 빌리온 달러를 보상받는 날이 오기를
고대합니다.
1.
"Cornered : Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice "
Peter Pringle / Hardcover / Published 1998
Review
Amazon.com
Billed as the "Mother of All Lawsuits," the legal action taken against the tobacco industry in 1994 had all the
trappings of an epic battle, and Cornered: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice often reads like reporting from
the front lines--which, in many ways, it is. On one side, deeply entrenched, rested the mammoth legal
forces representing the tobacco industry, hardened by nearly continual attacks since the early 1950s and
supported by enormous war chests that usually allowed them to hang on until their opponent ran out of
financial and legal resources. On the other side, mounting their attack, sat 65 of the most famous and
feared trial and personal-injury lawyers in the country--complete with monikers such as "The King of
Torts," "The Master of Disaster," and "The Asbestos Avenger"--who were willing to pool their resources,
talent, and expertise (and attempt to table their competitiveness and often their hatred for one another) in
order to reap the massive payoff that the $50 billion dollar industry could supply. The opportunity for such
a confrontation came after Merrell Williams, a Louisville paralegal, stole roughly 4,000 pages of confidential
tobacco-company documents and handed them over to the Mississippi attorney general, Michael Moore.
Moore, later joined by 39 other states' attorneys general operating on a different front, sought to go after
the tobacco industry to receive payment for Medicaid bills to treat those with smoking-related diseases.
These documents exposed the Achilles' heel of Big Tobacco, opening the door to the eventual $368 billion
settlement. Despite the staggering numbers, the deal has been labeled a sellout by many health groups and
lawmakers alike. Investigative journalist Peter Pringle meticulously details the entire complicated trial in
Cornered, and his countless interviews with the major players allow him to paint vivid portraits of the
lawyers and lawmakers, many of them brandishing egos as large as the settlement itself.
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2.
"The People Vs. Big Tobacco : How the States Took on the Cigarette Giants"
Carrick Mollenkamp (Editor), et al / Hardcover / Published 1998
After nimbly sidestepping any and all lawsuits for more than four decades, the tobacco industry received
what could prove to be a mortal blow when Merrell Williams, a Louisville paralegal, stole thousands of
pages of confidential documents from the law firm where he worked and handed them over to Michael
Moore, the attorney general of Mississippi. These confidential documents proved that the Brown &
Williamson Tobacco Corporation, a client of the firm, knew the dangers associated with smoking
cigarettes, and that they had lied repeatedly to the public about the risks. Once these documents were
released via the Internet and numerous anonymous mailings, the blood was in the water. A coalition of 65
top American trial lawyers attacked the tobacco industry from one side, while Moore and 39 other states'
attorneys general pounced from the other, eventually resulting in a $368 billion settlement--the largest in
American history. The People Vs. Big Tobacco: How the States Took on the Cigarette Giants is a
blow-by-blow account of how the "Mother of All Lawsuits" was eventually settled, who the major players
were, and what the settlement actually means for the future of Big Tobacco. The lawsuit settlement has
since been railed by many health organizations and policymakers as a sellout, but there is no doubt that the
tobacco industry has been permanently altered. Though more big-league legal wrangling is sure to come,
The People Vs. Big Tobacco is an excellent analysis of the battle as it currently stands.
----------------------
3.
"Cigarettes : What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You :
The First Comprehensive Guide to the Health Consequences of Smoking"
Elizabeth M. Whelan (Editor), American Council on
Synopsis
From impotence to diabetes, cataracts to psoriasis, the proven dangers of smoking go well beyond heart
and lung disease. Here, for the first time in one complete volume, noted experts detail all the known health
threats of smoking. Twenty eye-opening chapters--all carefully reviewed by independent health
experts--explain clearly and honestly how cigarette smoking can affect the body from head to toe.
----------------------
4.
"For Your Own Good : The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health"
Jacob Sullum
Politics and Current Events Editor's Recommended Book, 04/01/98
In this controversial book, Jacob Sullum demolishes the leading claims of the antismoking movement; their
assertions have been advanced, he says, because the movement's principals would like the government to
take control of the tobacco industry. Have you heard that secondhand smoke is bad for you? "There is no
evidence that casual exposure to secondhand smoke has any impact on your life expectancy," writes
Sullum, a drug policy expert and senior editor at Reason magazine. The debate over smoking is really more
about the nature of liberty--how should a society restrict the choices of its members?--than it is about
public health. Ex-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop is certain not to like For Your Own Good, but Sullum
makes a powerful and provocative case against America's public health crusaders.
National Review, Mark Cunningham
...makes a compelling case that non-smokers also ought to be concerned about the principles promoted by
the anti-smoking crusaders.
From Kirkus Reviews , 05/11/98
A somewhat predictable libertarian attack on antismoking efforts. Gadflies can perform an important
service when public debate is one-sided. In this volume Sullum, a veteran journalist and senior editor of
Reason magazine, assumes this mantle and boldly leaps into the ongoing tobacco wars but is only partially
successful. On one hand, he presents a thorough overview of the history of tobacco use and efforts to
restrict it, is straightforward about the dangers, and makes a serious effort to shift the grounds of debate
from public health to political freedom. On the other hand, he�s too willing to focus attention on his
opponents rather than on the issue, replicating the ad hominem and straw-man attacks for which he
criticizes the antismoking movement. Sullum's argument is that efforts to eliminate smoking are tyrannical
and run roughshod over the traditional distinction between other- and self-regarding actions that classical
liberals use to distinguish between behavior that should and should not be subject to public control. This is
a legitimate concern that has been shoved aside too easily, and his charge of collectivism should not be
dismissed as quaint and archaic. However, after clearing the smoke away from the fundamental issue of
political values, he asserts his libertarian position rather than arguing for it. Without recognizing that some
individual behavior is appropriately restricted, identifying the criteria that distinguish that behavior, and
assessing where smoking falls in relation to those criteria, Sullum is just circling the issue his book needs to
address. If, as Sullum sarcastically concludes, ``freedom is the most pernicious'' risk factor for disease and
injury in the eyes of antismokers, a more disciplined analysis of smoking in relation to freedom is badly
needed. (8 pages b&w photos) (Radio satellite tour) -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved.
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5.
"Cigarette Confidential : The Unfiltered Truth About the Ultimate American Addiction"
John Fahs
Synopsis
An investigative journalist cuts through the haze of propaganda--and reveals the real story behind one of the
most addictive and deadliest substances known to mankind. This is a high-speed chase down Tobacco
Road that does for cigarettes what Beyond Beef did for the meat industry and Sugar Blues did for sugar.
----------------------
6.
"Ashes to Ashes : America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War,
the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris"
Richard Kluger
Book Description
No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes -- mankind's most common self-destructive
instrument and its most profitable consumer product -- with such sweep and enlivening detail.
Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands
of the historical process -- financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal -- are woven
together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health
investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever more stridently as Americans debate
whether smoking should be closely regulated as a major health menace.
We see tobacco spread rapidly from its aboriginal sources in the New World 500 years ago, as it becomes
increasingly viewed by some as sinful and some as alluring, and by government as a windfall source of tax
revenue. With the arrival of the cigarette in the late-nineteenth century, smoking changes from a luxury and
occasional pastime to an everyday -- to some, indispensable -- habit, aided markedly by the exuberance of
the tobacco huskers.
This free-enterprise success saga grows shadowed, from the middle of this century, as science begins to
understand the cigarette's toxicity. Ironically the more detailed and persuasive the findings by medical
investigators, the more cigarette makers prosper by seeming to modify their product with filters and
reduced dosages of tar and nicotine.
We see the tobacco manufacturers come under intensifying assault as a rogue industry for knowingly and
callously plying their hazardous wares while insisting that the health charges against them (a) remain
unproven, and (b) are universally understood, so smokers indulge at their own risk.
Among the eye-opening disclosures here: outrageous pseudo-scientific claims made for cigarettes
throughout the '30s and '40s, and the story of how the tobacco industry and the National Cancer Institute
spent millions to develop a "safer" cigarette that was never brought to market.
Dealing with an emotional subject that has generated more heat than light, this book is a dispassionate tour
de force that examines the nature of the companies' culpability, the complicity of society as a whole, and
the shaky moral ground claimed by smokers who are now demanding recompense.
Synopsis
A monumental history of the controversial American tobacco industry, centering on one of its principal
components--Phillip Morris--this book tells the story of the cigarette--modern society's most widespread
instrument of self-destruction and most profitable consumer product--with great authority, sweep, and
enlivening detail.
Card catalog description
Ashes to Ashes is a monumental history of the American tobacco industry: its awesome and ironic success
in developing the cigarette, modern society's most widespread instrument of self-destruction, into
America's most profitable consumer product: its energized, work-obsessed royal families, the Dukes and
the Reynoldes, and their battling successors like the eccentric autocrat George Washington Hill and the
feisty Joseph F. Cullman: its generations of entrepreneurial geniuses: its cunning business strategies and
marketing dazzle: its deft political power plays: its relentless, often devious attacks on antismoking forces in
science, public health, and government. And there is the weirdly symbiotic relationship of an industry
geared at any cost to sell, sell, sell cigarettes, and an American public habituated to ignore all warnings and
buy, buy, buy. Here is how the leaf that was the New World's most passionately devoured gift to the Old
grew into humankind's most dangerous consumer product, employing whole rural populations, fattening
tax revenues, and spawning a ring of fiercely competitive corporate superpowers; how tobacco's peerless
public-relations spinners, applied their techniques to becloud the overwhelming evidence of the cigarette's
lethal and addictive nature; and finally, at this historic moment in the cigarette wars, how both the besieged
industry and the aroused public-health forces nationwide are maneuvering as the battle rages ever more
ferociously.
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7.
"The Cigarette Papers"
Stanton A. Glantz (Editor), et al
From Kirkus Reviews , 03/15/96
An eye-opening expos� of the workings of the tobacco industry, based on the leaked internal documents of
a leading cigarette company. The setup is that of a thriller: In the spring of 1994 an express-mail box filled
with 4,000 pages of tobacco-company documents turns up on the doorstep of longtime industry critic
Glantz (Medicine/Univ. of California, San Francisco); the return address read ``Mr. Butts,'' the name of the
fast-talking cigarette from Doonesbury. Glantz assembles a team of medical doctors and policy analysts to
comb through the papers, which he lodges in the special collections division of the university library so that
Brown & Williamson, the tobacco company in question, cannot block public access to them. The
documents are astonishing, describing research projects with codenames like ARIEL (which sought ways
to boost the nicotine kick of a cigarette), giving a behind-the-scenes look at the company's maneuverings
around various lawsuits and congressional inquiries, and showing beyond any doubt that B&W, at least,
was well aware of the cancerous effects of smoking decades ago, although it continues to maintain that
``causation has not been proved'' and that nicotine is not addictive. (Smokers may also be interested to
know of B&W's experiments with various additives, including benzo(a)pyrene, cocoa, and deer tongue, a
plant substance known to cause liver damage in test animals.) The editors' commentary helps make sense
of the often arcane papers, which are couched in the language of law, chemistry, and medicine; even with
their help, however, this makes for tough slogging. ``Stall any disclosure by industry as long as possible,''
one B&W memo urges. Difficult as it is to work one's way through this book, the labor yields disclosures
of the sort that doubtless makes for an industry insider's worst nightmare--revelations that will add new
fuel to the widening debate about smoking. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Synopsis
Based on the 4,000-page document containing internal tobacco industry information which arrived at
Professor Glantz's office at the University of California, San Francisco, in May 1994, The Cigarette Papers
shows that the tobacco industry's conduct has been more cynical and devious than even its harshest critics
have suspected. Giving readers a sense of what the tobacco industry says when it thinks no one is
listening, this book will forever alter our perception of tobacco industry tactics. Illustrations.
Booknews, Inc. , 11/01/96
Examines 30 years' worth of secret internal tobacco industry documents from one tobacco company, plus
other material subpoenaed by Congress, quoting extensively from the documents and adding background
and context to demonstrate that the industry has known for decades that smoking is addictive and causes
disease and death. Discusses agricultural chemicals and additives, legal concerns facing the industry, and
the nonsmokers' rights movement. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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8.
"Tobacco Advertising : The Great Seduction (Schiffer Book for Collectors)"
Gerard S. Petrone