Ontario Sues Tobacco Companies For Billions

Wow! The province of Ontario, Canada filed a $50 billion dollar lawsuit yesterday (September 29) towards several tobacco companies to try and recover smoke-related health costs that have occured since 1955.

New York Times reports, Ontario is now the third province to join British Columbia and New Brunswick in their attempts to try and recover health care costs from the tobacco companies. All three provinces passed legislation enabling their legal actions, an approach that was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2005.

“We believe that taxpayers should be compensated for the costs that they have paid,” Chris Bentley, the province’s attorney general, told reporters in Toronto.

Eric Gagnon, a spokesman for Imperial Tobacco, called the government “hypocritical” for filing a lawsuit.

“What’s happening is double dipping,” Mr. Gagnon said from the company’s headquarters in Montreal. “You’re taking a billion dollars of taxation out of the industry every year, then you turn around and sue the industry.”

"Like plaintiffs in some lawsuits against tobacco companies in the United States and elsewhere, Ontario is arguing that the tobacco makers have known for decades that their products are addictive and dangerous to health but have done little or nothing to mitigate their effects and have been late to warn consumers.

The defendants in the case include the Altria Group of Richmond, Va., and some of its Philip Morris subsidiaries, British American Tobacco of London and its Canadian unit Imperial Tobacco as well as R. J. Reynolds and JTI-Macdonald, a Japan Tobacco unit that is in bankruptcy proceedings."

Too much salt at Dennys causes lawsuit

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A class action lawsuit against Denny's Restaurants is being filed by a New Jersey man with the support of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

The lawsuit is asking for the restaurant chain to disclose the amount of sodium in each of its meals on their menus. They are also requesting the restaurant to place a notice on its menus warning about high sodium levels.

Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that most people consume no more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day. But at Denny's, the great majority of its meals contain more, and in some cases, several times more.

Some meals at Denny's provide more than 4,000 or 5,000 mg of sodium -- more than most adults should consume in three days. Diets high in sodium are a major cause of high blood pressure, which in turn is a major cause of heart disease and stroke, the first- and third-leading causes of death in the United States.

"Denny's is slowly sickening its customers," said CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson. "For those Americans who should be most careful about limiting their sodium, such as people middle-aged and older, African-Americans, or people with existing high blood pressure, it's dangerous to eat at Denny's. Denny's customers deserve to be warned about the considerable health risk posed by many of these meals.

Denny's describes itself as the largest full-service family restaurant in the United States, with more than 1,500 restaurants and annual sales of $2.4 billion.

"By concealing an important material fact about its products -- namely, that that these foods have disease-promoting levels of sodium -- Denny's is failing its responsibility to its customers and is in violation of the laws of New Jersey and several other states," said CSPI litigation director Steve Gardner.
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Read more: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/07/cspi_dennys_sodium.html#ixzz0Mt6RkvS2