Asbestos Plant
Wireback, Justin Catanoso and Tuft
ASBESTOS PLANT Lorilland's smoking gun Asbestos in a cigarette filter? It's sounds as ludicrous as a dioxin sandwich, but between 1952 and 1956, R Lorillard Company actually produced some 12...
...But Kent was a hot seller, so 18 months passed and 4 billion more Kents were produced before the company finally removed the asbestos...
...She never smoked, but she died of mesothelioma in 1989 never knowing the filter contained asbestos...
...Only one Micronite filter case against Lorillard has come to court thus far...
...Lorillard still maintains that its Micronite filter is not responsible for causing mesothelioma in anyone...
...The Greensboro News & Record reported in November that at least three former Lorillard employees have died of mesothelioma since 1989...
...But the two other diseased Lorillard workers knew and both won confidential out-of-court settlements prior to their deaths...
...Justin Catanoso and Taft Wireback January/February 1993/The Washington Monthly 17...
...Lorillard, however, never bothered to tell anyone the truth about the Micronite filters, even though it knew that asbestos exposure was linked to various lung diseases...
...Jurors in his case, however, found that Ierardi didn't prove conclusively that he smoked Kents then...
...People who smoke and are also exposed to asbestos compound their risk of developing mesothelioma many times over...
...It's sounds as ludicrous as a dioxin sandwich, but between 1952 and 1956, R Lorillard Company actually produced some 12 billion Kent cigarettes with asbestos in the filters...
...Lorillard, based in Greensboro, North Carolina, has never lost a lawsuit to a smoker who's alleged that his or her smoking led to tobacco-related lung cancer...
...The nation's fourth largest tobacco company was so proud of its "Micronite" filter that it took out full page ads in the Journal of the American Medical Association to tout the filter's ability to remove tars and nicotine...
...Lorillard refused to comment about the settlements...
...It's now known that even one exposure to asbestos increases a person's chance of developing mesothelioma, a rare and deadly cancer of the lung and abdomen caused almost exclusively by asbestos...
...Despite the sensational claims of its advertising, Lorillard's Micronite filter only made the problem worse: Tiny, shard-like asbestos fibers broke loose from the filter and were sucked into Kent smokers' lungs carrying particles of tars and nicotine...
...The company made the workers' lawyers promise not to discuss the settlements either...
...Electron microscope tests ordered by Lorillard in 1954 confirmed that Kent smokers were being exposed to asbestos...
...But the Micronite filter changes the game: Future lawsuits will be about asbestos, not tobacco...
...The filter seemed like a great idea at the time...
...Thus the jury ducked the scientific issues involved and acquitted Lorillard as well as Hollingsworth & Vose, the Massachusetts company that manufactured the Micronite filter...
...Stella Manzo used to attach the filter to Kents in Lorillard's old Jersey City plant...
...Over the past 10 years, thousands of plaintiffs with work-related asbestos exposure cases have rung up a string of court victories and put the asbestos industry out of business...
...Seven similar cases await trial, some more solid than others...
...Peter Ierardi, a 58-year-old Philadelphia stockbroker has only one explanation for the mesothelioma that will soon kill him: the Kents he smoked in the early fifties...
...The asbestos used by Lorillard could be spun into extremely fine fibers, so fine that they trapped hazardous smoke particles smaller than a micron...
...About the only thing all three had in common was their work with the Micronite filter...
...In the fifties, as the medical community reported more and more about the hazards of smoking, tobacco companies rushed to put filters on cigarettes to show that they were doing something about the problem...
Vol. 25 • January 1993 • No. 1
