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Tobacco is a dirty weed
I like it.
It satisfies no human need
I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen.
I like it.
The message above by the well-known writer Anon. is not the message of the book I just read called “The Runaway Jury” by the well-known John Grisham. Mr. Grisham specializes in legal thrillers in which a whole lot of surveillance takes place. Everybody listens in on everybody else, using tiny microphones hidden in flower pots, belt buckles and even ice cream cones (well, they’re working on that one). In every case the overheard conversation comes through loud and clear and reveals crucial information to the recipient. I myself don’t recall being all that lucky when I eavesdropped on suspicious people during investigations, but occasionally between the grunts and groans and sighs and moans, something intelligible would be heard and alleviate our suffering. When that happened we listeners would exchange high-fives and backslaps and whoops that “Hey, this stuff works after all!”
If you have a miraculous surveillance system that picks up mouse squeaks at a hundred yards you have to have a mastermind to run it. Mr. Grisham usually does and he provides one here. This time it’s a sinister character named Rankin Fitch (inspired by Atticus Finch, the hero of To Kill A Mockingbird?) Couldn’t be; it’s just too outrageous to contemplate. But Mr. Grisham does display a sense of humor in this book, so maybe…
The evil Fitch spreads his web all over a Mississippi town where an epic lawsuit is being fought out between Big Tobacco and anti-tobacco lawyers hoping for a payday that will put the companies out of business and themselves on Easy Street. The scenario is as usual: the widow of a confirmed smoker sues a tobacco company for his wrongful death. Up to this point Fitch has won eight such trials without a loss. Even so, he can’t be overconfident about the one at hand. One loss will open the floodgates. The trial lawyers of the country will mobilize, will recruit an army of complainants and will pour through the breach in the walls to bankrupt the companies and enrich themselves.
Interestingly, Fitch himself is not a lawyer. He is an operator who works behind the scenes, mainly zeroing in on the jury in each case. He is surrounded by jury consultants advising him which panelists should be accepted to serve, and which shouldn’t be. He also deploys an army of investigators to probe into the backgrounds of the selected jurors to find weak points which can be exploited to influence their votes. If he can’t get something on a juror, maybe he can finding something on some member of their families that he can use to swing their vote. In a civil trial, which this is, he needs only four jurors voting his way to win his case, in which a verdict for the plaintiff requires at least a nine-to-three majority.
Fitch skirts the law pretty closely in his activities, but his opponents aren’t noticeably more scrupulous in their ways of doing things. The battle is between Big Law and Big Tobacco and no holds are barred.
Mr. Grisham makes it clear that, although he’s by now one of the most prominent lawyers in the country, he doesn’t have any illusions about his colleagues in the profession. A gang of greedy opportunists ready to follow the money trail wherever it leads, is how he characterizes them in one page after another describing their shenanigans.
But even though he’s choosing between Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee Grisham is enough of an ideologue that he finds it necessary to maintain that one set of highbinders is preferable to the other in this case and deserves to win in court. Being a politically correct type he comes down on the anti-tobacco side. I haven’t any intention of revealing the outcome of the book here, but that doesn’t apply to revealing the mindset of the writer.
In spite of all the devious maneuvering of the book’s characters, I found that the really interesting part was Grisham’s explanation of his reasons for choosing sides between them. It’s the addiction, he says, through his characters. Nicotine is addictive and the tobacco companies know it is, so they’ve loaded their products with plenty of it to keep the profits flowing while the helpless tobacco junkies smoke themselves into a cancer ward and after that into a nameless grave. It’s a crime that calls out for vengeance and Nuremburg trials.
But what about this addiction? Why is it that millions of people have been able to quit smoking with no ill effects? Has anyone ever compared a smoker going cold turkey with a drug addict doing the same? To see this is to see the difference between so-called addiction and the real thing. The drug addict really suffers; he has withdrawal pains that are really unbearable; he convulses and above all he begs for a fix. Giving up smoking by comparison is a day at the beach.
Confronting this, Grisham’s mouthpieces don’t try to deny that other substances, which are much more addictive and dangerous than tobacco, in particular alcohol, are far more life-endangering than tobacco could ever be. No one’s ever caused a fatal accident driving under the influence of tobacco. So why isn’t there any campaign to bankrupt the breweries and distilleries? The answer is that there was one but it didn’t work. It was called Prohibition, but its failure meant it just wouldn’t be cool for anyone to try to do it again. Such a one would be labeled a bluenose at best and that is totally non-P.C. The label would be accurate though; the tobacco crusaders of today are the “drys” of the Twenties reincarnated. The same urge to regulate other folks that inspired them drives their successors today. And just to think in Revolutionary days tobacco (yes) paid for our independence. We haven’t used it for money since, but we did use it to get us through a lot more wars. Where’s the gratitude? You won’t find it in this book, but there should be some. Tobacco has its good side, just like any other painkiller that eases the load we all carry staggering along life’s highway.. So light one for me, Red. I quit years ago.
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