Chain smoker's widow awarded $23bn in punitive damages in Florida

> She's now one of the richest people in the world because her husband ignored well known health warnings.

I don't think she gets that much money.

First of all, there's a cap on the punitive damages in many states, so even if a higher sum gets awarded, it is automatically reduced.

Secondly, I believe the punitive damages aren't always paid out to the plaintiff, just the compensatory damages.

Looking at the wording of the actual article, it seems to state that the defendant has to pay it, but it doesn't say how much (if anything) the widow receives.

Disclaimer: IANAL

the issue is that the tobacco companies knew that their product is both addictive and deadly, but they did not warn their customers of either of these aspects. The fact that cigarettes are widely known to be harmful is immaterial. If you sell a product that is going to kill the end user, you should warn them.

I try to look at the tobacco situation by analogy to make some sense of it. One similar set of products would be alcohol. We know alcohol is a poison. We know alcohol impairs judgement and co-ordination. We know alcohol can be addictive, at least psychologically. Not all of the down-sides of alcohol have always been known, or well known. On the other side, in moderation, many people enjoy and approve of consuming alcohol, and more importantly, the prohibition years and the rise of organized crime taught us some lessons about what happens when alcohol is made illegal.

Another issue worth considering is based on known effects, and a good analogy is the old X-Ray Shoe Fitting machines [1], sometimes called "Fluoroscopes" or "Pedoscopes". When their use started in the 20's and 30's, most people simply did not know about the dangers of radiation exposure. Similar harm was done with most situation involving radiation, including nuclear weapons testing and medical evaluations, up until the 1970's when the dangers of radiation exposure started becoming better known.

The history of asbestos use and harm is another useful analogy. The use of asbestos was very wide-spread, but it took a long time for the general populace to become aware of the harm. Similar could be said for the use of lead in paint, and many other things.

Tobacco is a more dubious case due to profit motives leading the tobacco industry to actively promote known-harmful products, and actively deceive the populace to hide the harm of their products. Unlike alcohol, nicotine is physically addictive, and the tobacco industry has quite intentionally made their products more addictive. The more non-industry research that gets done on how addictive tobacco products really are, the worse the problem looks. It's hellishly difficult to quit, and worse, the modified tobacco products which are geared towards addiction make breaking the habit even more difficult.

A new complete prohibition against tobacco would most likely fare about as well as the past complete prohibitions against alcohol and cannabis, namely, leading to the rise of a black market, increased incarceration, and violent organized crime. The current approach to decrease the use of known-harmful products is to increase taxation, typically called "Vice Taxes." Unfortunately, this approach mostly fails to deter use, and the profit motives of the industries still exist.

Since vice taxes and other restrictive laws have failed to put an end to the tobacco industry or the harm it causes, the result as seen in this punitive award of $23B is similar to the history of punitive awards against the asbestos industry. At present, one of the most valuable search terms on Google is "Mesothelioma" and these days, you can't watch TV without seeing advertisements for law firms specializing in asbestos related Mesothelioma cases. If the same trajectory continues, then the tobacco industry will become unprofitable due to punitive damages awarded due to the harm caused by their products. In other words, the massive punitive damages awards are an attempt to destroy the profit motives of an industry selling harmful products, and hence put an end to the industry itself.

The only thing that hasn't been tried yet with the tobacco problem is the same type of "sales prohibition" that have been levied against the asbestos industry. At present it's still legal to own asbestos, and mine asbestos, but selling asbestos is extremely difficult due to laws preventing its sale for just about every known purpose. If more wide-spread "sales prohibitions" were enacted to prevent most or even all sales of tobacco products, beyond the existing prohibitions against sales to minors, the harm of tobacco products would be a mostly solved problem since it would prevent the industry from being profitable.

Though it will take many more years, many more laws, and many more multi-billion dollar punitive rewards, we are watching the slow motion train wreck of a harmful industry dying. Whether you consider the end of a harmful industry to be a good or bad thing is your personal choice, but the harm is no longer debatable so it seems the end is nigh.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

I had the same reaction, but it's mostly because I didn't know the actual definition of punitive damages, and that I therefore thought she had just been made (almost) as rich as Mark Zuckerberg.

According to Wikipedia: Although the purpose of punitive damages is not to compensate the plaintiff, the plaintiff will receive all or some portion of the punitive damage award.

Still, that's an impressive number.

Because the jury said so.