Tobacco and Public Health - TCSC Indonesia

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEGISLATION TO CONTROL THE TOBACCO EPIDEMIC
◆ cooperation of the ministries of finance, agriculture, and sports with the health
ministry
◆ international developments, such as the decision of the British government and the
European Union to ban tobacco advertising and promotion, thus making South
Africa’s action part of a global trend (Saloojee 2001).
Judicial action
No account of tobacco-control legislation would be complete without recognition of
the role of litigation as a tool to obtain the objectives of legislation and to seek damages
for the vast illness and death inflicted by tobacco (Daynard 1993). In 1984, a brilliant
young lawyer, Professor Richard A. Daynard of Northeastern University Law School in
Boston, launched the Tobacco Products Liability Project (TPLP). Describing Daynard’s
development of the TPLP, the historian, Richard Kluger, explains the strategy of litigation
as having arisen from Daynard’s drafting of the first worksite smoking control
statute in the town of Newton, Massachusetts. Kluger writes:
Foreseeing an endless campaign to put across such measures in the state’s 350 other such
municipalities, Daynard sought a more telling way to combat the health problem. Given the
tobacco industry’s record of fierce resistance to legislative action against it, he honed a strategy
relying on the judicial branch of government, which seemed less susceptible to the companies’
infiltration (Kluger 1996, p. 559).
The mission of the Tobacco Products Liability Project was to force the media and the
public to recognize the magnitude of the danger of tobacco ‘by focusing on the suffering
of particular individuals, thereby helping to counterbalance the $52 billion spent
annually… which promoted this catastrophic epidemic’ (Kluger 1996, p. 559).
As Daynard explained in 1993, these suits allege that the products are unreasonably
dangerous in that their risks exceed any possible benefits, that the tobacco companies
have failed to give full warnings, that they have lied about the dangers, and that they
have failed to pursue safer product designs (Daynard 1993). Later, he would add that
the tobacco companies denied the addictiveness of tobacco and targeted young people
as their market.
At the time that Daynard launched the TPLP, no plaintiff had ever recovered damages
from a tobacco company for the morbidity and mortality caused by tobacco. In
the 18 years since then, many suits have been won or settled, and litigation has been
pursued in many countries, including Canada, Finland, Australia, the United Kingdom,
and others.
When Daynard established the TPLP, no one could have anticipated the powerful
effect this movement would have. Initially, product liability suits were brought in the
United States on behalf of individual plaintiffs. Then class action suits were filed. For
example, Broin v. Philip Morris was a class action suit on behalf of 60 000 flight attendants
who were sick from exposure to dense environmental tobacco smoke in airplane cabins.