No, this is largely political payback by Lorillard for making all of the payments to the Tobacco Litigation Settlement Fund, a shakedown of the industry by the unified States Attorneys General. In exchange for giving the states huge piles of money, the states agreed to keep the courts from also awarding the actual people with cancer any money.

In summary: Nanny-nanny boo boo, the Attorney General got there first...

peco wrote:

I used to smoke menthols.  They were cheaper, as a teen, because those assholes who never bought their own cigarettes but always hung out at the smoking area at school, never tried to bum menthols.

Filter-Less work rather well for that as well.

Dirckman wrote:

The only time I would smoke menthol was after I had been smoking pot...  It really added to the affect.

I used to do the same thing in the latter years of my pot-smoking period.  I found that a few hits of nicotine gave me almost that same wonderful rush sensation I used to get when I first started smoking weed.  During that time, I always preferred menthol because it somewhat masked the taste of the tobacco which I wasn't really all that fond of.

But really -- a settlement of 153 million?!  For a brief moment, that inspired within me thoughts of tort reform.  But a second later I came back to the depressing reality that it's lawyers who make our laws.

Then again, there's always the real possibility that the company have been hit much harder if instead it had been a discrimination case against them -- for not giving out promo samples in predominantly black neighborhoods.  I guess we should just wait for the impending new prohibition against alcohol, which to me, doesn't seem at all unlikely to come about eventually.  If/when it happens, look forward to reading about lots of similar cases brought against brewing companies for targeting blacks with their malt liquor ad campaigns.