Regarding the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository



These are sad days. The Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository will close forever on Aug. 31. The depository is a court-ordered collection of documents used in years of litigation against tobacco companies. There's a lot of history in those tens of millions of pages. One researcher is visiting for the last time and recalls what came out of those pages. He writes: 
The warehouse, open to the public for 23 years, will close on Tuesday, ending an unprecedented court-ordered, industry-funded central collection of the legacy of a product that, according to the surgeon general, has killed more than 20 million Americans and continues to kill more than 400,000 a year.

Most of the documents have been put online by the University of California at San Francisco, which used software to lift them from company websites, and the physical copies will be destroyed.

In these boxes, Minnesota lawyers found evidence that tobacco companies had known for decades that smoking caused cancer, that nicotine was addictive and could be manipulated, and that filter and “light” cigarettes were not safer. The files revealed that tobacco companies targeted children and conspired to hide damaging evidence in ways that a federal court declared to be racketeering. Though the original documents dated to Minnesota’s 1994 lawsuit, they were released to the public in 1998 under a settlement between the state and five tobacco companies just before the case went to a jury.

“I can tell you that juries, when they see this stuff laid out, there’s no doubt there was a conspiracy intended to defraud the American public,” said Michael Cummings, a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, who has testified in more than 100 trials.

“They were adjudicated as racketeers — held in the same regard as gangsters,” said Sharon Eubanks, the former U.S. attorney who led the case. “It never would have happened if we didn’t have those documents.”

The files gutted a half-century of Big Tobacco’s defenses.
Big Tobacco’s defenses means lies, deceit, misdirection, etc. This is just a gentle reminder that companies will not hesitate to lie or deceive to protect their profits, no matter how many people die. Corporate morality holds that money talks and corpses walk, unless they can sue and get their hands on the documents.


By Germaine, the upbeat one 

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