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muriel_volestrangler

(101,150 posts)
Sun May 22, 2016, 08:30 AM May 2016

Wow. Buried in a legal pro-tobacco argument: "terrorist suspects, arms dealers, Jews..."

The article is "How big tobacco lost its final fight for hearts, lungs and minds", about the tobacco companies losing their appeal against the new packaging rules in the UK and EU. The lawyer making the case for tobacco in front of the judges was incredibly offensive (and thus, I suppose, inept).

As well as:

In hearings last year, Anderson, on behalf of his client, Japan Tobacco International – which alongside Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco brought the case against the government – expressed outrage at the idea this could happen without financial redress. “However strong the objective for taking property away, you will normally compensate,” he told Green. “Your lordship will remember the slave owners were compensated when slavery was abolished.” It was an unfortunate example. Big tobacco’s profits were built on slavery: even many smokers would feel queasy with this argument. But the case was not really about compensation, the manufacturers maintained. Rather, it was about preventing bad law that would have repercussions for other industries – a favourite big tobacco argument.

he came up with this:

But all of these arguments, Anderson implied, fell on deaf ears because of what he called the “myth of tobacco exceptionalism” – the view that manufacturers are “uniquely devious”.

He told the court: “We have been trying at the bar to imagine whether we can think of any other group of legal or natural persons, terrorist suspects, arms dealers, Jews, in respect of whose evidence one might even begin to think that one could tenably say, ‘Well, of course, in looking at this evidence I have been very careful because I know from the past that these people are a bit devious and a bit unworthy, and the only thing they’re really interested in is subverting public health.’?” Yet last week’s judgment, running to 1,000 paragraphs, confirmed in excoriating detail just how determined big tobacco has been down the decades to achieve precisely this goal. It noted how the court had been made aware of some 14m internal tobacco industry documents that had been revealed as a result of a raft of legal settlements in the US. Among the treasure trove, its attention was drawn to a damning internal memo from Marlboro manufacturer Philip Morris, written as far back as 1981.

There's a lot more in the article about the tobacco companies marketing to youth, despite what it claims. But this lawyer's idea of an argument seems to be reaching for offensive comparisons.
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Wow. Buried in a legal pro-tobacco argument: "terrorist suspects, arms dealers, Jews..." (Original Post) muriel_volestrangler May 2016 OP
They have been forced to make in public the arguments they make in private. bemildred May 2016 #1
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