Big Tobacco wins again! One of the last remaining $multi-billion class-action cases against tobacco companies that would have awarded plaintiffs $145 billion was recently won by Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds and their affiliates (Philip Morris owns Kraft Foods, the largest packaged-food company in America).

Big Tobacco has some of the best lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants that money can buy. You have to admire them even though you might hate them. They do what Big Tobacco pays them to do - win cases brought against tobacco companies by people who have been harmed by smoking cigarettes and using other tobacco products.

Several years ago, the heads of the largest tobacco companies gave sworn testimony at a Congressional hearing that they never knew smoking was harmful - despite all the scientific evidence since the 1950s and despite data hidden in their secret company files which clearly showed that tobacco tar was carcinogenic and that nicotine induced addition. My connection with tobacco began as an occasional smoker in World War II, but I soon stopped.

In 1950, as an administrator at Sloan-Kettering Institute, I purchased 500,000 animals for cancer research. Hundreds of medical scientists and technicians induced cancers in the mice, rats, hamsters, and other animals, and then tried (without success) to cure them with different natural and synthetic substances obtained from all over the world.

Tobacco tar was a fool-proof method of starting a cancer on any inner or outer part of any animal. Cigarette-smoking machines collected tar from 20 cigarettes at a time, and a tiny dab of tar would always cause a cancer to grow at a predicable rate. After observing this, it was fairly easy to give up all forms of tobacco.

Decades later, I found out that tobacco naturally contained a radioactive substance, polonium, which along with other carcinogenic substances in smoke particles that were being trapped in lung tissues, would get into the blood where they would be distributed to other parts of the body.

Subsequently, the Nassau County Health Department held hearings to get public input to a smoking-restriction regulation that was being considered. Big Tobacco sent a batch of their "expert" scientists and lawyers up from down south tobacco country to tell us how wrong the proposed regulation was. They came, dressed in three-piece expensive suits, with briefcases loaded with literature - and testified that cigarette smoke was totally harmless - because their experiments showed (and they had reams of data to prove it) that as a smoker sucked extra oxygen through the smoldering end of a lit cigarette, the light brightened considerably as the temperature shot up to 600ºF. This high temperature, they claimed, transformed all the carcinogenic smoke compounds into nontoxic substances before they passed through the smoker's lips and into the lungs. When I commented that this was remarkable, but would they kindly tell how the smoker's throat and windpipe was able to avoid instant incineration when exposed to such a high temperature. We were never enlightened, because they all hastily packed up and left quickly.

The most widely read article I ever wrote was one that was published in The Science Teacher journal. It was translated into Chinese and republished on a single sheet that was (I found out later when someone sent me a copy that a Chinese-American friend translated) nailed up in hundreds of villages throughout rural China. It was a spoof, entitled "The Benefits of Smoking" in which I pointed out that tobacco supported many diverse jobs and industries in our civilized societies: farmers (tobacco-growers still get federal subsidies), warehouses (tobacco must be stored and "cured" before being shipped), lumbermen (tree-fellers, paper-makers, packagers paper-makers, truckers, advertisers, (writers, artists, cartoonists), tax collectors (state and federal), tax evaders (cigarette-revenooers?), and other tobacco law-enforcers, retailers, wholesalers.

Tobacco wins!