On one hand, a popular movement to relax prohibitive laws is chipping away at restrictions on the use of one relatively benign substance.
On the other, monumental lawsuits and education campaigns have penalized the producers and shamed the users of a toxic product.
Some time in the next several years, both movements will arrive at their destinations. Marijuana and tobacco will change places.
Tokers will eventually be free to consume government-sanctioned and taxed marijuana with only minor restrictions. And smokers will be driven underground, forced to buy baggies of tobacco on the black market, after the industry is driven out of business by the weight of legal campaigns against it.
This week is another milestone on the latter front, as closing arguments begin in a Quebec class-action suit against tobacco companies.
Lawyers rounded up about a million Quebec smokers and created a bloc of plaintiffs who have been pursuing a case for the past 16 years. They got to trial two years ago and have been arguing since then. Their claim for $20 billion in damages will be in the judge’s hands shortly.
The Quebec case is the furthest advanced in Canada, but there are similar assaults on the tobacco industry in almost every other province. Just last week, there was a fresh update from the bench on the progress — or non-progress — of the B.C. suit.
The NDP government laid the groundwork for the case in 1997 by passing a law that set the table for a slam-dunk win over tobacco companies in a damages suit. The companies challenged the validity and won on some key points, forcing several rewrites of the bill. The government’s actual lawsuit against the companies started a few years after that, spurred by the mega-billion-dollar settlement in the U.S. The 14-year history of the case has been marked by challenges and counter-challenges every step of the way.
The B.C. government lost one such skirmish last week. It wanted two specific legal issues to be determined by the judge in advance of the trial. Justice Nathan Smith declined to do so, saying they will have to be argued in court with the rest of the evidence.
When that will be is anyone’s guess. The judge noted: “Almost 14 years after the litigation began, there have still been no examinations for discovery nor has a trial date been set.”
Two earlier preliminary applications on various matters were appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada and each one took about five years.
The judge said: “I have no doubt that any decision made now on a point of law will follow a similar appellate path.”
Nonetheless, he agreed with the defendants on one point they made: “That after almost 14 years, the interests of efficient and timely resolution will be best served if the parties simply get on with moving this matter toward a trial in which all legal and factual issues can be decided on their merits.”
If they ever get to trial, it will take years more.
The government claims the companies knew the risks from smoking and ignored them, sold cigarettes knowing they were addictive and hazardous, and made false representations to minimize the risks.
The defendant companies, most of the national and multinational firms, claim the government knew all those risks yet continued to supervise and tax what was always a legally marketed product. They claim the government makes more from tobacco than it pays in health-care costs of smokers, and shouldn’t be allowed to profit from its own wrongdoing.
The anti-tobacco push is as strong as the pro-marijuana thrust. Slowly but surely, the switch is underway.
Some day, Big Marijuana will be sponsoring curling bonspiels, just as the cigarette companies did in the old days.
And motorcycle gangs will be busted for selling cigarettes on street corners.
