Even his admirers conceded that the late Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice was a man of considerable temper. And nothing made him madder than the lawsuit then-Attorney General Mike Moore filed against tobacco companies in 1994.
“This was a bogus deal cooked up by a handful of greedy trial lawyers and a group of states attorneys generals to basically shake down the tobacco industry,” Republican Fordice fumed in 1998.
Democrat Moore filed Mississippi’s lawsuit to recover public costs for treating sick smokers, and he used private lawyers to handle the case. The lead attorney was one of Moore’s closest friends and top campaign contributors, Richard “Dickie” Scruggs of Pascagoula.
Moore has always said the lawsuit should be understood at face value.
And, for the past several years, he has pointed to Mississippi’s efforts to persuade current smokers to quit and to dissuade would-be new smokers from starting.
Those efforts have come primarily through The Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi, a private, nonprofit group for which Moore continues to serve as chairman of the board, even after he chose not to run for re-election as attorney general in 2003.
The Partnership has paid for a host of programs, including smoking cessation, school nurses and anti-tobacco advertising aimed at elementary school children and teenagers. Critics say the Partnership has been a not-so-subtle tool to promote Moore’s political future — an assertion Moore calls untrue.
Now, the program’s future is in doubt.
The Partnership had received $20 million a year, by order of a Gulf Coast chancery judge, since December 2000. The money comes off the top of the tobacco companies’ annual payments to the state.
This past week, the judge reversed her earlier order and said the Legislature should decide whether to set aside money for the Partnership.
If all anti-smoking efforts disappear, critics could claim that Mississippi’s lawsuit had little to do, in the long run, with reducing tobacco use.
Mississippi was the first state to sue cigarette makers, and within a few years, nearly every state filed similar claims. By the late 1990s, Moore helped negotiate a multibillion-dollar settlement that covered most states and a separate agreement for Mississippi.
This state is supposed to receive annual payments as long as tobacco companies exist. Projections said the state would collect $4 billion over the first 25 years.
A separate deal says cigarette makers would pay $1.4 billion to the private attorneys who sued them on behalf of Mississippi. The money does not come out of the state’s collections.
In November, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and other health groups released a report saying that most states were using only a fraction of the money from tobacco settlements and taxes to prevent smoking. The report said only Colorado, Delaware, Maine and Mississippi were spending at least the minimum levels of anti-smoking money recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said this past week that if Mississippi lets its anti-smoking programs fade away, “more kids will smoke, more citizens of Mississippi will die from cancer, and Mississippi’s taxpayers will pay more in health care costs.”
The question now is whether anti-smoking efforts will survive, through either the Partnership or new state-sponsored programs — or whether Moore’s critics will dismantle the health programs and make Fordice’s words about Mississippi’s tobacco prophetic: “Any idiot can see it’s all about lawyers’ fees. Public health has been a smoke screen.”
Local News
Fate of Miss. anti-smoking program revives questions about purpose of tobacco lawsuit
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