On Wednesday, the nation's major tobacco companies lost the first class-action lawsuit to reach a verdict when a Florida jury decided that the companies had conspired to hide the dangers of smoking. The decision, which allows for both compensatory and punitive damages, could give hundreds of thousands of smokers or their families in Florida the opportunity to make billions of dollars of claims on...

US Food And Drug Administration nicotine regulation documents have been aggregated at one site within the Government Printing Office Web site. The documents are available in both text and .pdf format. They are: "Regulations Restricting the Sale and Distribution of Cigarettes and Smokeless Tobacco to Protect Children and Adolescents" (final rule, released August 28, 1996); and "Regulations...

The University of California, San Francisco Library and the American Legacy Foundation recently released the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), a collection of more than 20 million previously private documents from tobacco industry files. Ranging from approximately the 1950s to recent years, LTDL offers searching, viewing, and downloading of documents, covering projects central to the...

In a major victory for cigarette manufacturers and a setback for the Clinton Administration, the nation's highest court ruled Tuesday that the government does not have the authority to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug. The case, on appeal from the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, concerns the sweeping new regulations introduced by the Food and Drug Administration in 1996 with the...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has prepared a report analyzing the impact of the proposed tobacco settlement's impact on consumers and industry. In the report, CBO estimates the reduction in smoking under various scenarios if the settlement is implemented. The report also examines the impact of regulation on public health provisions, tobacco industry payments, and targets for teen smoking....

This week's In the News examines the November 16, 1998 $206 billion settlement reached between tobacco industry leaders and eight US states. The twelve resources discussed provide press releases, opinion, and background information on the economics of tobacco production and consumption in the US. Following increasing pressure from anti-tobacco activists at the state level, Philip Morris...