Warning: May Cause Lawsuits

The brother-in-law of a friend of mine died recently. He was 76, a good age considering his lifestyle. He had spent many years from morning till night sitting in a corner with his Spanish red wine, smoking and watching television. It was not a way of life that attracted me, but it was his choice and he stuck to it with a fine determination.

No doubt if he had followed doctors’ orders from the moment he first came to their attention (he had suffered, not surprisingly, a progression of serious illnesses) he would have survived a few years more. Clearly he did not think the bargain a good one: twenty years of abstinence for an extra four years, shall we say, of boredom. In a way I admired him for his utter rejection of what most people would consider common sense. A world ruled by common sense would be intolerable in its smug dullness.

The other admirable thing about the deceased was that he would have never claimed, never have dreamed of claiming, that his mode of life was anything but his own choice; he was responsible for its consequences, up to and including his death. He had made his bed, in fact his deathbed, and he was content to lie in it.

Compare his dignified acceptance of his own fate with the conduct of the widow of a man called Michael Johnson in Florida, who brought an action there against the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company for the wrongful death of her husband.

Michael Johnson died in 1996, aged 36, of lung cancer. He had been a chain smoker since he started to smoke aged 13, that is to say from 1973. The allegation against the company was that it willfully concealed from Mr. Johnson both the dangerous and the addictive nature of its product, to which he became helplessly and hopelessly addicted. After the jury awarded the widow $7.3 million, and his son by a former marriage $9.6 million, in compensatory damages, the plaintiff’s lawyer said that Mr. Johnson couldn’t give up smoking and smoked till the day he died. The jury also awarded $23.6 billion to the widow in punitive damages, an award that is unlikely to survive appeal.

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