Widdick v. Brown & Williamson
"The Tobacco Conspiracy Trial"
Lung Expert Cross-Examination Begins With Few Concessions to Brown & Williamson
(May 27) Plaintiff lung expert Dr. Allan Feingold returned to the stand for his third straight full day of testimony, this time for a sometimes argumentative cross-examination by Brown & Williamson attorney John Nyhan.
Before his cross-examination began, Feingold explained an alleged industry-wide conspiracy by tobacco companies to conceal the addictiveness of nicotine. Using some of the previously-secret Brown & Williamson documents that first surfaced in the public in 1994 and 1995, Feingold showed that the company and its corporate parent, British American Tobacco, conducted a series of secret experiments from 1959 to 1964 that explored and confirmed the addictive nature of nicotine. Brown & Williamson allegedly concealed the results of its research from the Surgeon General, who was then seeking information for his 1964 report. Feingold defined nicotine as a drug, an addictive substance that causes physical dependency by effecting a change in the brain.
In an effort to deflect a possible Brown & Williamson attack, plaintiff attorney Norwood Wilner pointed out to Feingold that in his prior work in asbestos cases he testified that nicotine was not addictive. Feingold responded that it took time for him, as well as others in the medical community, to accept nicotine as being addictive, and not a habit.
Defense attorney Nyhan first challenged Feingold's qualifications as an expert in multiple, non-medical fields and questioned his objectivity as an expert witness. The doctor conceded that he has earned more than $2 million as an asbestos defense expert but stressed that he was not charging for his work on this tobacco case. He also admitted to having a close friendship and long-standing working relationship with Wilner.
Nyhan then reviewed various claims by preeminent scientists and doctors in the 1950s and 1960 that there was a real controversy over whether smoking caused cancer. Feingold said that these doctors' statements were all wrong and insisted that at that time there was ample evidence of a causal link between cancer and smoking. Then Nyhan focused on the press coverage on the smoking-cancer connection in the 1960s. Producing various articles from Newsweek, Time, Life, The New York Times,, and the Florida Times Union, Nyhan tried to show that even 30 years ago, people were informed about the hazards of smoking and the increased risk of lung cancer among smokers. Nyhan also pointed out to Feingold that a June 1954 Gallup poll showed that 90 percent of its subjects said that they had heard that smoking causes cancer.
This evidence was designed to show that, contrary to the claims of his family, the late Roland Maddox could have (or should have) been aware of the dangers of smoking at least 30 years before his death because it was widespread information. Feingold admitted that quitting smoking was beneficial at any age and that if Maddox had stopped smoking in 1960, it more likely that he would not have developed lung cancer. Feingold's cross-examination is expected to resume when court resumes Thursday morning.
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