A Sydney lawyer holds the key to a multi-billion case against Big Tobacco
Ben Hills reports
IN the global battleground of smoking litigation, an obscure middle-aged English lawyer living in retirement in Sydney's leafy Lane Cove has become the world's most wanted witness.
Nicholas Basil Cannar is his name, and he holds in his head so the United States Justice Department believes the secrets of how the tobacco industry for decades concealed what it knew of the dangers of cigarettes, deceived millions of people into disease and premature death, and planned the destruction of documents that could have delivered them justice in the courts.
Every breath you take. How a company tried to avoid paying more than $1 billion to people it killed and injured.
Ben Hills investigates
FIRST he took aspirin, then he inhaled steam, then his doctor gave him some antibiotics. But there was no relief from the pain and the shortness of breath, so one day when he found himself gasping for air after the exertion of picking up a parcel from the floor, Reg Day went for a CAT scan and learnt a new word mesothelioma.
Where there’s smoke
Ben Hills
YOU could be forgiven for thinking that the global tobacco industry was already on its last gasp if you check out web sites such as the one operated by the Tobacco Research Centre at the Northeastern University law school in Boston. Barely a day goes by without some new blow to the industry: a New York jury awards $US5.27 million ($7.9 million) to a model who was fired after complaining about second-hand smoke at the agency where she worked; Boston bans smoking in restaurants and bars; a Ugandan High Court judge rules that smoking in public places is a violation of non-smokers' constitutional rights; a jury in Oregon awards a smoker $US150 million in punitive damages against Philip Morris; a judge in Illinois orders the same company to pay $US10 billion damages to Illinois consumers of "light" cigarettes; the European Community files a lawsuit against RJR Nabisco alleging it is involved with Italian and Russian mobs, Latin American drug lords, and in dealings with Iraq which enriched Saddam Hussein's family, in violation of UN sanctions.
The relentless toll of the the widow-maker. The women left behind when asbestos killed their husbands, a winemaker, a State governor, an asbestos company executive, a worker.
Ben Hills
TWENTY years ago it was rarer than leprosy. Doctors could graduate and practise all their lives without seeing a single case of mesothelioma. Today Australia is in the middle of an epidemic of this strange and terrible man-made cancer - in fact we have the second highest incidence of it in the world, after South Africa.
It has killed more people than AIDS, yet it gets only a tiny fraction of the media coverage, only a few per cent of the research funds. At last count, 2,015 people had been registered dead or dying of the disease, and cases are being reported at the rate of almost one a day. By the end of the decade, this and other asbestos-related diseases will have claimed 16,000 Australian lives.