Big Tobacco is Still Targeting Kids

By Michael Connor

MIAMI (Reuters) - America's biggest cigarette makers are still doing business the same old way and targeting teenagers as customers, a plaintiffs lawyer told jurors weighing potentially massive damages for sick Florida smokers, anticipating the industry's arguments for leniency.

Opening the high-stakes punitive penalty portion of a landmark class-action suit, attorney
Stanley Rosenblatt said Philip Morris Cos. Inc. (NYSE:MO - news), the No. 1 cigarette
maker, and the other defendants were rich and have made little change in the way they have
conducted their business for decades -- public relations offensives notwithstanding.

``They're still on the same page they have always been on,'' Rosenblatt said in a Miami
courtroom. ``Even, if they have changed, that does not free them from paying for wrongful
behavior for decades.''

In April the jury awarded $12.7 million in compensatory, or actual, damages to three
representatives of the massive class. Each member of the class can pursue compensatory
claims in separate lawsuits.

Punitive damages, which Rosenblatt had not specified, could go as high as hundreds of
billions of dollars, by some forecasts. Such damages are meant to sting wrongdoers and to
deter other businesses from hurting people, Rosenblatt said.

Much of the testimony in coming weeks of the class-action, the first to come to a verdict
against tobacco companies, will turn on the finances of the cigarette makers and the harm
their products have done.

A punitive damages decision was not expected for three or four weeks.

Rosenblatt said cigarette makers were still running flashy, iconoclastic ads in Entertainment
Weekly, Rolling Stone and other magazines with significant teen-age readership and had
stopped well short of owning up to the health risks of smoking.

``This is an industry which still ... targets youths and children,'' he said.

In Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by cigarette makers seeking to
remove the trial's presiding judge, Robert Kaye of Miami-Dade County Circuit Court.

Without comment or dissent, the high court turned down the latest effort by tobacco
companies to disqualify Kaye on the grounds he might be biased against the industry
because he was a former smoker. As such, he might benefit from any cash damages
awarded in the lawsuit.