Tobacco Litigation as Cancer Prevention: Dealing with the Devil

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Abstract
Tobacco companies have come to personify the devil, and strategies to exorcise tobacco smoking from the United States proliferate. Tobacco's demonic status is even reflected in popular fiction. John Grisham's latest bestseller, The Runaway Jury, for example, is a broadside attack on tobacco companies. He opens the book by noting that tobacco companies “had been thoroughly isolated and vilified by consumer groups, doctors, even politicians.”1 This was bad, but it was getting even worse: “Now the lawyers were after them.”1 Physicians often see trial lawyers as predators, but choosing sides between lawyers and big tobacco has, at least recently, seemed . . .