End of the road for 'light' cigarettes after epic US tobacco case

By Sam Knight and agencies

America's big cigarette makers must stop describing their products as "low tar," "light," "ultra light" or "mild," according to the decision of a long-running legal battle with the US Government - but they will not have to pay billions of dollars on campaigns to stop people smoking.

*Marlboro Lights have now been rebranded Marlboro Gold for instance.

Although the US Department of Justice formally won the case, the judge, US District Judge Gladys Kessler, said she could not force the tobacco makers to pay for $14 billion (£7.4 billion) of anti-smoking remedies because of an appeal ruling in a separate case that limited their financial liabilities.

Instead, the tobacco companies, which include Philip Morris USA, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company and British American Tobacco, will have to change their labels, put all the documents used in the seven-year case on their websites until 2016 and take out television and full-page newspaper advertisements to explain the changes.

The punishments, set out alongside Judge Kessler's strongly worded ruling — she found that the companies deliberately set out to "increase and perpetuate addiction" — were widely perceived as little more than a slap on the wrist for the tobacco companies.

In late afternoon trading, shares in Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, gained over 3 percent, Reynolds rose over 2 percent, while Carolina Group, the owners of Lorillard Tobacco, another of the defendants, was up over 1 percent.

"Although they lost, they won. It’s a victory for the tobacco companies," Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management, told Reuters.

The 1,653-page ruling was the culmination of a civil case brought the Department of Justice in 1999 in the wake of the massive settlements made by the American tobacco industry to individual states in the mid-1990s. The largest firms paid a total of $246 billion (£130 billion) in compensation for deceiving customers about the harmful effects of smoking.

In her ruling, Judge Kessler agreed that the big tobacco companies had systematically sought to hide the true effects of smoking from consumers, particularly through the marketing of so-called "light" cigarettes.

The Government had prosecuted the companies under the Rico Act, anti-racketeering legislation introduced in the 1970s to extract large financial penalties from gangsters.

"They distorted the truth about low tar and light cigarettes so as to discourage smokers from quitting," she wrote. "They suppressed research. They destroyed documents. They manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction."

The companies pursued profits "with little, if any, regard for individual illness and suffering, soaring health costs, or the integrity of the legal system," Judge Kessler found.

Officials at the Department of Justice had originally advised that the tobacco industry should pay $130 billion (£69 billion) to fund a national campaign to reduce the size of America's smoking population. Prosecutors had also wanted the court to impose fines on big cigarette companies if youth smoking rates failed to fall.

Read more:  Time Online UK