A federal judge has ruled in a landmark case that shows categorically that Big Tobacco Lied to Public . . .

A federal judge ruled yesterday that tobacco companies have violated civil racketeering laws, concluding that cigarette makers conspired for decades to deceive the public about the dangers of their product and ordering the companies to make landmark changes in the way cigarettes are marketed. . . . . . . In the opinion, which runs 1,742 pages and was more than a year in the drafting, Kessler wrote that there is “overwhelming evidence” of most of the charges leveled at the industry — that it conspired to violate, and indeed violated, federal racketeering laws. “In short,” she wrote, “defendants have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.”

Basically, Taboacco companies have known for a loooooong time that they were selling deathsticks and that their products had a direct link to the illness and deaths of millions, causing billions of dollars worth of damage to the economy and to the health of everyone (smokers and non-smokers alike). They have increased the amount of nicotine in their deathsticks in an effort to increase the addictiveness of the evil instruments of greed and death and they have falsely used terms like “low tar” and “less nicotine” and “light” knowing that the opposite is in fact the case. They hid relationships between witnesses and their companies – the ol’ pay for research schemes as well as much worse – and they destroyed documents and did as much or much much much more evil than had previously been imagined.

“Put more colloquially and less legalistically, over the course of more than 50 years, defendants lied, misrepresented and deceived the American public, including smokers and the young people they avidly sought as ‘replacement smokers,’ about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke,” she wrote. Kessler added that the companies “suppressed research, they destroyed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction . . . and they abused the legal system in order to achieve their goal — to make money with little if any regard for individual illness and suffering, soaring health costs, or the integrity of the legal system.”

Unfortunately, the ruling was hamstrung in terms of the penalities. The judge imposed penalties and restrictions regarding future behavior and practice in marketing but was unable to apply the multibillions of dollars in penalties the Justice Department had originally sought.