Word: settlements
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...settlement promises to speed up what was happening anyway. Cigarette consumption in the U.S. has been declining for years, but on mostly unregulated foreign shores business is brisk. American cigarette sales internationally are rising 3% to 5% a year, and companies such as RJR are grabbing half their revenues there already. There's nothing to suggest that will change soon...
...another wave of consolidation--or even wholesale corporate restructuring--across the industry, as cost cutting becomes paramount. Some lawyers will lose out as the industry redirects some of the $600 million it spends annually on legal expenses. Remarkably, the industry will find some savings on its tax bill: the settlement costs are deductible...
Last week's proposed settlement between the industry and the public's representatives, if its often murky words can be satisfactorily translated into federal statutory language, gives real hope of at last reining in the cigarette makers' unconscionable conduct, in which the nation as a whole has too long been complicitous. Some key points to bear in mind about the deal...
...punishment money is the least important part of the package. It cannot resurrect all those millions of dead smokers or cure those now terminally afflicted. Besides, current high cigarette excise taxes already cover much of the states' public-health outlay to care for sick smokers. The settlement price is really meant to put a dent in the American tobacco industry's bottom line. But by gradually jacking up the retail price of the 24 billion packs they sell in the U.S. annually and saving much of their present multibillion-dollar-a-year advertising, promotion and merchandising budget (thanks to restrictions...
...industry's survival depends on it. However, by making cigarettes less accessible and more costly to youngsters, by deglamorizing the habit through less seductive ads and a ban on brand-name promotions, and by stigmatizing it with a broad antismoking ad campaign paid for by the industry, the settlement materially strengthens the Clinton Administration initiative to discourage teen smoking. It is, in effect, a vigorous exercise in preventive medicine that is both sound public policy and shrewd politics. Remember, though, that kids smoke in part because it's dangerous, not in spite of it, and forbidden fruit, no matter...