Liggett Split Bonanza For Tobacco Foes Anti-Smoking Groups, State Attorneys Move To Get Look At Records Of Secret Meetings

Critics of the tobacco industry, along with lawyers representing both private citizens and states, have moved quickly to exploit the Liggett Group’s dramatic decision to split from the rest of the tobacco industry and acknowledge that cigarettes are both hazardous and addictive.

“We want to ratchet up the pressure,” said William Novelli, director of the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids, which coordinates youth-related anti-tobacco activities for 115 religious, civic and health groups.

Novelli’s group, which is based in Washington, said on Friday that it planned a range of lobbying efforts based on Liggett’s unprecedented admissions that cigarettes are addictive and that the industry markets cigarettes to children.

From the industry perspective, though, the real action was in several states where anti-tobacco lawyers hastily sought access to Liggett’s records of secret meetings attended by industry lawyers, some dating from the 1950s.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco said it received notices on Friday that courts in Mississippi and Florida had scheduled hearings for Wednesday on the documents, which Reynolds and other companies argue are protected by rules guaranteeing the privacy of lawyers’ work for their clients.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers have said they expect the documents to provide conclusive evidence that the industry conspired to hide what it knew about the health hazards of smoking from both the public and the government.

“The documents Liggett is sending first are the ones that most clearly show there was crime and fraud being committed,” said Don Barrett, the lawyer in a Mississippi case involving claims that a barber’s death from lung cancer was caused by secondhand smoke. If a court review of the documents from Liggett, a unit of the Brooke Group, concludes that industry lawyers conspired in meetings to mislead the public, a judge could eliminate the industry’s right to keep the records private.

Meanwhile, Barrett and other lawyers have begun receiving materials that Liggett is free to provide because the papers do not involve dealings with the other companies’ lawyers. In Florida, the motion for release of the documents covering the industry lawyers’ meetings was filed by the state in a lawsuit it has brought seeking compensation for Medicaid spending on tobacco-related illnesses.

“The whole situation is up in the air,” said Daniel W. Donahue, a lawyer for R.J. Reynolds, which is owned by the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp. Donahue said that Liggett had refused to share information about what it was doing with the documents and that the rush to deal with them simultaneously in many states was “irrational.”

The lobbying push by the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids will start with an opinion survey this weekend to determine whether Liggett’s admission that the industry focuses its marketing on teenagers had increased the percentage of children who believe the industry advertising is meant for them. (In August, 60 percent said yes.)

The industry has denied that it markets to children and ridiculed Liggett’s statement, saying that Liggett is in no position to comment on the industry’s advertising practices. The struggling company, which makes the L&M, Chesterfield and Eve brands, has all but ceased its own advertising.

Novelli said the National Center wanted to bolster support in Congress for regulations by the Food and Drug Administration intended to curb the sale and marketing of tobacco to minors. Novelli said his group was organizing campaigns for both state and congressional investigations of industry practices.