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49 6 “Everyone” Agreed! Matt’s hopes for the November 18, 1996, consensus-seeking meeting were modest: “I had no faith that the public health community was prepared to make choices or that they had thought through their priorities . But I believed, perhaps naively, that if we could cut through the rhetoric, we could develop—not a full consensus, because there’s no such thing in our community—but a pretty broad consensus.” However modest Matt’s goals, the meeting was not to reach them; it fell midway between a missed opportunity and a disaster. At the outset, Stan Glantz and Julia Carol made manifest, by their body language and the deliberate way they positioned themselves at the table before saying a word, that they were there to place their bodies and souls in the path of any talk of compromise. Stan occupied the center of the table; Julia took one end. As Matt ruefully recalled, “Lest anyone be fearful about Stan’s ability to dominate, Julia could drill you down at the other end.” He went on: “Stan skillfully took the floor and drew very harsh rhetorical lines as an advocate: you were for good (no compromise) or you were for evil (compromise)—as opposed to a substantive debate about the issues. Stan almost single-handedly cowed others.” But Glantz and Carol did evoke a responsive chord in several others at the meeting, especially on the issue of civil justice and opposition to any liability protection for the tobacco industry. Matt was jarred by an opening salvo from the current president of the American Lung Association , a passionate volunteer who spoke of the moral imperative that the tobacco companies be held accountable at law for their crimes and that the rights of their victims not be extinguished Such feelings were to be expected from Allison Zieve, the Public Citizen litigator, reflecting Ralph Nader’s searing vision that of the three branches of government entrusted with the public welfare, two— the Congress and the presidency—had been bought and bonded by 50 Smoke in Their Eyes corporate campaign money, leaving the courts and the tort liability system as the single uncorrupted bulwark against corporate hegemony. And if the tobacco industry—that emblem of corporate mass murder— were to be granted any form of immunity, the floodgates would open wide to wash away legal accountability for all lesser corporate criminals . But the outpouring of such feelings from a Lung Association volunteer was a signal that a pragmatic weighing of public health priorities , and a balancing of public health against civil justice goals, was a threshold many of Matt’s colleagues—not just Glantz, Carol, and the Naderites—could not cross. In desperation, toward the close of the meeting, Matt offered a hypothetical settlement in which every serious tobacco control public health policy that was advocated by the movement was agreed to by the industry, in return for a large cash settlement of all the lawsuits against them. He asked if there was a consensus that such an agreement would be acceptable. Carol was the first to respond: “I can’t think of anything wrong with your hypothetical.” Then she paused, and added. “But I’d be against it.” It was clear Carol was struggling. She had difficulty articulating precisely why she would be against it. Glantz jumped in, on the attack. His opposition wasn’t based on public health arguments; it wasn’t Public Citizen’s argument for preserving the integrity of the civil justice system. It was, essentially, the rhetoric of the successful guerilla warrior: “You fight the bastards to the bitter end, and whoever’s left standing, wins.” As Stan would later refine this argument: The fundamental reality of tobacco is that the way to beat them is to beat them, not to make a deal with them. I have never found a single instance anywhere, anywhere, where a compromise with the industry served the public health. Never. So my general strategy is to look at whatever they don’t like, whatever they’re fighting the hardest, and run straight at it. If you were Captain Picard on the starship Enterprise and searched the whole universe for the place where the tobacco industry was the most powerful , it would be under that dome downtown, in the United States Congress . They’re there in large part because of the tobacco industry. And when you’re a ragtag bunch of guerrillas, you don’t go charging to the Pentagon if you...

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