The purpose of this research is to examine the proposition that cigarette advertisements aimed toward women are in violation of the First Amendment. The plan of the research will be to show that the ads represent an instance of harmful speech and that, as such, they are in direct violation of the First Amendment guarantee to be protected from such speech.
The 1990s were a watershed of advocacy against what is routinely called Big Tobacco and in favor of consumers. In 1997, the state of Mississippi obtained a settlement in the amount of $368.5 billion to cover litigation against US tobacco firms. In 1999, the US Dept. of Justice sued Big Tobacco under the Racketeer-Influenced & Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), accusing the major companies of fraudulently concealing the health risks of smoking of which they were well aware; that lawsuit is pending as of May 2004.
The efforts against Big Tobacco reflect criticism of its business practices and concern about the health and well-being of tobacco users. Four monographs in particular give an account of the $368.5-billion settlement, explaining from different points of view the multistate coalition of public- and private-sector lawyers and industry whistle-blowers arrayed against the $50-billion tobacco industry. Mollencamp, et al., acknowledge that the settlement of the Mississippi case was significant but note that critics felt that its provisions, which restricted tobacco marketing and promotion but which also banned punitive damages in future litigation, did not punish the industry enough. An important feature of such criticism is that opponents of Big Tobacco have successfully made use of internal industry documents acknowledging tobacco's harmful health effects, even though executives of Big Tobacco were on the record in 1994 as being unaware of any such effects. The exposure of the false testimony lent power to the Dept. of Justice suit in 1999.
The focus on fraud has prove...