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“The states’ legal crusade against the tobacco industry will one day rank as one of the worst developments in American public law in the twentieth century,” wrote Michael DeBow, a professor of law at Cumberland School of Law, Samford University.

In 1998, Philip Morris and other major tobacco companies settled a lawsuit brought by 46 states and five territories, promising them an astounding $243 billion over 25 years, and then approximately $18 billion a year in perpetuity. The cost of this so-called Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) is entirely passed through to smokers; it is not paid by “tobacco companies.” The agreement has already dramatically increased the retail price of cigarettes.

The MSA was supposed to end litigation against tobacco companies, but lawsuits continue to be filed anyway, with irresponsible juries awarding millions and even billions of dollars to smokers who knew the risks but continued to smoke anyway. Besides thousands of frivolous civil suits pursued by lawyers who long ago forgot the meaning of justice, the U.S. Justice Department is still pursuing a legal case against the tobacco industry initiated by the Clinton administration.

The MSA also “loaded the gun” for trial lawyers to go after other industries, generating approximately $13.75 billion in projected payments to lawyers. It was, wrote DeBow, “the largest transfer of wealth as a result of litigation in the history of the human race, a transfer that is being and will continue to be financed almost entirely by smokers paying higher prices for cigarettes.”