Finland’s Supreme Court has rejected a lawsuit in which Tampere resident Pentti Aho had demanded that a tobacco company pay FIM 460,000 in damages for diseases caused by smoking.

   

After Aho’s death of cancer of the larynx, the lawsuit was pursued by his widow and son. Lamenting the court’s decision, the Aho family’s lawyer Erkki Auerjärvi called it a great victory for the international tobacco industry.

The precedent is the first

of its kind in all of Europe.

   

"The tobacco industry was afraid that a different decision would have opened possibilities for similar cases in other European countries. The Finnish tobacco case has been followed very closely Sweden, Norway, and Denmark."

The decision was welcomed

by Gavin Little, CEO of British American Tobacco Nordic. Little would not say how much the trial had cost the company, but reports are that the figure was in the neighbourhood of FIM 50 million.

   

Little said that enlightened Finnish consumers are aware that there are certain risks involved in smoking.

   

He also said that his company gives out information about the dangers, and works actively to discourage smoking among young people.

   

The Finnish ruling came on the same day as another decision, in the United States, in which a Los Angeles court awarded USD 3 billion in punitive damages to a smoker suffering from lung cancer who had sued Phillip Morris. Little said that he was not worried; he noted that many court decisions in the United States have been overturned on appeal.

The Secretary-General of Finland’s

National Cancer Society, Liisa Elovainio said that she hopes that the Supreme Court decision does not give people the impression that tobacco has been declared harmless.

   

Elovainio points out that tobacco companies have been downplaying the harm caused by smoking for decades. "On the other hand, methods of treatment of cancer are developing tremendously, possibly giving false hope that serious cancers from tobacco could be easily overcome through medical means."

The Supreme Court found

that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between Aho’s smoking and his disease. Aho had smoked one pack of cigarettes a day for more than 40 years.

   

However, the court also ruled that because the harm caused by tobacco had been known and openly discussed between the years 1940 and 1980, the tobacco companies had not been negligent by not issuing warnings about the dangers of tobacco.

   

The court also ruled that while some of the cigarette advertisements of the company Oy Rettig Ab, which was later taken over by BAT, were deceptive, Aho had taken a conscious risk. The court also felt that Aho’s illness was not caused by the advertising.

   

Current Finnish law bans all tobacco advertising.

A key issue in the Finnish

case and similar ones in other countries has been if there is a medical cause-and-effect relationship between smoking and lung cancer and certain diseases or if, as the tobacco companies claim, smoking simply constitutes a statistical risk factor among others.

   

In US court cases the dispute has also involved the addictive properties of nicotine and claims that the tobacco industry has deliberately tried to get smokers hooked. The addiction aspect did not come out in the Finnish case.

   

The majority of the judges of the Finnish Supreme Court concluded that Aho’s health problems were not caused exclusively by smoking, and that it is possible for non-smokers to get cancer of the larynx.

The court found fault in tobacco advertising

in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of Rettig’s advertising from the ‘50s claimed that "cigarettes make you feel better".

   

However, the court also found that a causal relationship had not been established between the advertising and Aho’s health.

   

In the 4-1 split decision, the court found before the passage of the tobacco law of 1978 tobacco manufacturers did not have a legal responsibility to warn consumers about the dangers of smoking.

One of the five judges

submitted a dissenting opinion: she would have awarded Aho’s widow two thirds of the sum she had asked for. The judge felt that Rettig was negligent in its failure to inform consumers about the health hazards of smoking and that it had engaged in deceptive advertising.