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'Pegger Takes On Big Tobacco

A Winnipeg woman is hoping to succeed where all other smokers have failed in the fight against Big Tobacco.

Deborah Kunka has filed a class-action suit alleging the industry has intentionally misled the public about the health effects of smoking cigarettes and targets children to maintain their profits.

Kunka, says the lawsuit, began smoking cigarettes in 1976 when she was 12 years old "after seeing various discount cigarettes advertisements which portrayed smoking cigarettes as 'glamorous' and 'prestigious' and which failed to adequately warn, or warn at all, about the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes."

Kunka, says the lawsuit, continues to smoke cigarettes a pack of cigarettes a day despite suffering chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, severe asthma and reversible lung disease.

"Though she repeatedly tried, her addiction to nicotine precludes her from quitting," says the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, which has yet to be certified, names as defendants 15 Canadian and international tobacco manufacturers and the Canadian Tobacco Manufacturer's Council.

The lawsuit has been filed on behalf of "all individuals, including their estates" who purchased cheap cigarettes manufactured by the defendants.

The defendants, says the lawsuit, "targeted children in their advertising, promotional and marketing activities in Manitoba with the object of inducing them to start or continue smoking cigarettes" and undermined legislative and regulatory efforts to prevent children from smoking cigarettes.

'NOT AN EASY CASE'

While some state governments have succeeded in forcing tobacco companies to reimburse them for health- care costs associated with smoking cigarettes, "no smoker claim to my knowledge has ever been paid," said Kunka's lawyer Tony Merchant in a phone interview from his Regina office.

"It's not an easy case ... Big Tobacco has been very successful in avoiding liability over circumstances that everybody in the nation knows -- that nicotine and cigarette smoking cigarettes causes a raft of problems for people and the companies over time have succeeded in not letting people in the marketplace really understand that."

So what makes Merchant think this lawsuit will be different?

"What's going on is wrong," he said. "My belief is the courts will see this mounting array of evidence of wrongdoing by companies, evidence that they were deliberately keeping information from the marketplace, setting forward with plans to deceive. It's a societal claim that ought to succeed."

Parties interested in adding their names to the lawsuit can contact Merchant.



Other cigarettes news and tobacco market events you can find at links bellow:

   • Cigarettes & Tobacco News

   • CigarettesPro.com Tobacco News

   • CigarettesBox.Com Cigarettes News





The term cigarettes, as normally employed, refers to a tobacco cigarette, but can be utilized like devices holding in other herbaceous plants, such as eugenia caryophyllatums. A cigarette is differentiated from a cigar by its modest sizing, utilization of treated leafage, and paper wrap, which is usually white hot, though other coloring materials are sometimes usable. Cigars are mostly compiled totally of whole-leaf tobacco plant.

Rates of cheap smokes changes widely, and have altered substantially over the course of human history since cigarettes were 1st wide used in the mid-19th century. While rates of smoke have over time leveled off or turned down in the highly developed world, they continue to up-rise in evolving states. Nicotine, the main psychotropic chemical substance in baccy and therefore cigarettes, has been shown to be psychologically habit forming, although it does not generate a physiologic addiction.

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