TOBACCO SETTLEMENT: A LOOTING SPREE

Missouri is one of 46 states that reached an agreement with the tobacco industry last month, subject to court approval. The deal is part of a national settlement offered by four tobacco companies that would pay those states about $206 billion. (Four other states have already reached their own settlements.) Pursuant to that agreement, Missouri stands to receive $6.7 billion over 25 years beginning in 2000.

Now come St. Louis city and county, Kansas City and Jackson County and 53 Missouri hospitals seeking to intervene in the lawsuit in order to collect as much as $1 billion of the $6.7 billion award to the state. Attorney General Jay Nixon is objecting strenuously to this proposed intervention by additional parties. Nixon says the intervention could endanger the proposed settlement. This past week, St. Louis Circuit Judge Jimmie Edwards said he would resolve the dispute between the attorney general's office and Missouri's two largest cities before ruling on the agreement.

Late last week, two St. Louis women filed a class-action lawsuit seeking still another piece of the state's award. And why should this be all? Why won't there be more to come? We're limited, after all, only by the ingenuity of the plaintiffs' lawyers, smelling the fattest-ever, easiest-ever payday. There is, it seems clear, more than enough ham on this bone to draw the vultures from distant parts.

The contract Nixon negotiated with trial lawyers to represent the state in this litigation calls for payment of hourly fees at the rate of $250 an hour through the end of this year. After Jan. 1, it calls for contingent fees that will mean millions more dollars lining the pockets of these few attorneys. All this for a few months' work in litigation that is largely a cut-and-paste job from that already completed by other lawyers in other states. The dirty little truth is that even other plaintiffs' attorneys around the state regard this as an incredible ripoff. There was never much doubt that the litigation would be kept going long enough to complete this scam. It is this contract to hire outside counsel that is the target of a lawsuit filed by state Sen. Peter Kinder, R-Cape Girardeau, seeking to set it aside.

There are yet more aspects of this that bear continuing scrutiny by state lawmakers. Many news reports have seemed to indicate that this money is the governor's and the Legislature's to spend as they see fit. But why shouldn't it be counted as part of total state revenue, such that it will trigger a tax refund under Missouri's Hancock Amendment? Sadly, it may take another lawsuit to vindicate the taxpayers' interests.

There is still another bizarre aspect to all this. The tobacco industry will spend the next quarter-century paying this money out. And exactly where will this money come from? From the proceeds of the sale of tobacco products, extracted from smokers. Doesn't this make the state a virtual partner of the evil tobacco companies, with a joint interest in their continuing vitality, in order to allow their continuing ability to pay such vast sums?

There are more smelly aspects to all this tobacco litigation than in a barrel of skunks. Here, sadly, is the unpleasant truth: An astonishingly greedy few members of the plaintiffs' bar -- itself a minority of the population of all lawyers -- is seeking their own enrichment beyond anything heretofore seen in all the annals of American jurisprudence. Even more sadly, their number includes one who until this summer was a respected member of the Missouri Supreme Court. Our greatest contempt should be reserved for these plaintiffs' attorneys, along with our pledge of continuing resistance to their brazen looting spree.