By Gail Kalinoski, Contributing Reporter
Philip Morris USA won’t have to pay for annual chest scans after a 10-person jury in Boston unanimously rejected claims made in a federal class action lawsuit against the tobacco giant, seeking a court-ordered medical monitoring program for currently healthy smokers of Marlboro cigarettes.
The jury rejected the claim made in the 10-year-old case that Marlboros were defective and “unreasonably dangerous.” The plaintiffs claimed that the cigarettes could have been manufactured with fewer carcinogens to make them safer. The lawsuit, the third of its kind to go to trial and filed on behalf of tens of thousands of smokers, was pushing for Philip Morris to pay for annual low-dose computer tomography (LDCT) scans that can pick up early signs of lung cancer and reportedly lower the risk of lung cancer by as much as 20 percent,
according to topclassactions.com.
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The scans cost about $500 per test and would have required Philip Morris to pay out about $5 million each year to test roughly 10,000 smokers, the legal web site noted. Those seeking to be covered had to be at least 50 years old, have purchased Marlboros in Massachusetts and have smoked at least a pack a day,
Bloomberg reported.
The Bloomberg story noted that in his closing argument, plaintiff attorney Kevin T. Peters told the jury, “You’re about to deliberate about the most dangerous consumer product ever invented. It’s a product intended to addict its users and intended to addict children.”
The attorneys for PM USA stated the product wasn’t defective and smokers knew the hazards of smoking. They also claimed that government regulators have never found Marlboros to be more dangerous than other cigarette brands, according to the Bloomberg report.
After the verdict, PM USA issued a press release saying the plaintiffs failed to persuade the jury that Marlboro cigarettes were defective.
“Today’s unanimous verdict again demonstrates that these types of medical monitoring claims are meritless. The jury soundly rejected that Marlboro cigarettes are defectively designed,” Murray Garnick, Altria Client Services senior vice president and associate general counsel, said on behalf of PM USA. “This was the third case of its kind to go to trial, and in each the jury ruled in favor of Philip Morris USA.”
