Tobacco Twist

In June, a federal judge awarded a legless Kansas City man $15 million because cigarettes caused his illnesses. Now two Kansas lawyers are complaining that their clients can’t lose their legs cheaply enough.

Prairie Village attorneys Rex Sharp and Isaac Diel have journeyed to the southwest quarter of the state to file a petition in Seward County District Court that accuses the five major tobacco companies of a worldwide price-fixing conspiracy that has forced Kansas smokers to cough up too much money for their cigarettes.

According to the class-action lawsuit, the tobacco companies — Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, British American, Lorillard and Ligget — agreed in 1993 to a pricing scheme that would eliminate healthy competition and hoard profits. For years, the lawsuit claims, these companies met covertly through a “Committee of Counsel” made up of their in-house lawyers.

Sharp and Diel are demanding compensation for all Kansas residents who have puffed on a cigarette since 1993. That could be 600,000 smoking Kansans, according to Sharp’s estimates. Damages in the case, which is in its early stages, could reach $45 billion.

The lawsuit makes no complaint about the health effects of cigarettes, which cause cancer and in some cases require the removal of body parts. Another Kansas case focused precisely on that. In 1994, David Burton sued R.J. Reynolds and Brown & Williamson in Kansas City, Kansas, federal court after he lost his legs to peripheral vascular disease, ostensibly caused by a four-decade smoking habit. The trial finally finished in February 2002, when a jury awarded the 67-year-old Burton $198,400 in damages. In June, U.S. District Judge John Lungstrum added $15 million in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds.

Burton’s lawyers spent the better part of eight years fighting for access to tobacco firms’ documents. They ultimately persuaded a jury that R.J. Reynolds, maker of their client’s Camel cigarettes, had deceived the public for half a century about its product’s addictiveness and health risks.

Burton lawyer Greg Leyh refers to the 1953 “gentlemen’s agreement,” an infamous roundtable decision among tobacco executives to avoid testing that might have resulted in the development of safer products. At that time, tobacco executives met in New York’s Plaza Hotel and agreed that such testing would negatively affect their empires. Then they released the “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers,” an empty promise to study smoking risks.

Sharp and Diel accuse tobacco executives of making another pact in 1993. Their contentions are based partly on the statements of a turncoat tobacco lawyer named Lawrence G. Meyer, who has also played a big role in health-related cigarette lawsuits. In 1998, Meyer testified for the state of Washington, confirming the existence of a secret “safer cigarette” and of the industry’s “Committee of Counsel,” on which he served from 1974 to 1986.

Sharp and Diel say the “big five” tobacco firms have made pricing decisions as one body, resulting in inflated cigarette costs that violate state and federal anti-trust laws.

“There are a number of other states that have price-fixing cases against the tobacco companies on file,” Sharp said in a statement to the Pitch, adding that his is the most advanced case in Kansas.

Wary of the tobacco industry’s legal power, Sharp and Diel agreed only to written interviews with the Pitch and declined to elaborate on their complaint. “Tobacco companies are known to be aggressive litigators and have a public-relations machine that is second to none,” Sharp said in an e-mail to the Pitch. “It is best for plaintiffs to pursue and prove their case in court.”