Woman dying of lung cancer sues tobacco makers

HASLETT (AP) - A longtime smoker who's dying of lung cancer is suing several tobacco makers.

Coreine Wendling's suit accuses the companies of violating a long-standing state law that criminalizes selling, manufacturing or giving out cigarettes that contain ingredients foreign to tobacco or harmful to one's health, the Lansing State Journal said in an article yesterday.

The crime is classified as a misdemeanor. But Wendling and her Southfield attorneys, Geoffrey Fieger and Bill McHenry, think the 1909 law, which was revised in the 1930s, will let them win a judgment against tobacco companies.

"If I don't do anything," Wendling says, "I'll die a victim."

Wendling, 59, started smoking at age 15 and smoked for 39 years. She quit five years ago, five years after doctors had told her she had emphysema. In January, the Haslett resident learned she had lung cancer.

Shortly after the diagnosis, one of her four sons, Mark Letherer, uncovered the Michigan law while researching tobacco lawsuits on the Internet.

He contacted McHenry, who said he'd review the archaic state regulation.

Wendling's suit was filed July 21 in U.S. District Court in Kalamazoo, seeking at least $75,000 in damages. The companies are expected to respond to the suit by Oct. 13.

A spokesman for one company named in the suit, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., downplayed the suit's legal strategy.

"The claim of adulterated cigarettes is just a novel approach by a plaintiff's attorney and is just nonsense," spokesman Steve Kottak said.

The suit also names Philip Morris Inc., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., B.A.T. Industries and the Tobacco Institute, the industry's now-defunct public relations and lobbying arm.

McHenry said the suit was follows a different strategy than other tobacco lawsuits.

"We have found and cited a Michigan statute that prohibits exactly the kind of tobacco companies are selling," McHenry said.

Charles T. Smith II, a product liability expert and lawyer from suburban Washington, D.C., agrees the Michigan law could work against the tobacco companies.

"They found something lying dormant all those years that could bite tobacco," he said.

Wendling, a former nurse, says she was addicted to cigarettes and still craves them, even after the radiation, the chemotherapy and the oxygen tubes.

She'd like to see every pack of cigarettes taken off the shelf. She says she lives each day feeling like she's breathing with a plastic bag over her head.

"It's terrible, one of the worst ways to die," she says.

Last summer, a Florida state jury issued a $145 billion award to members of a class action suit brought on behalf of all Florida residents who were made sick by smoking. Tobacco companies have appealed that verdict.

The tobacco companies, under a separate 1998 settlement, will pay $206 billion to 44 states over the next 25 years to compensate states for the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses of Medicaid recipients. Four other states settled separately for an additional $40 billion.