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In the basement of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Guildford, Surrey, is a treasure trove of documents on the internal workings of a tobacco company. Forty thousand files contain eight million pages of memos, research and reports from the previously secret records of British American Tobacco, producer of Lucky Strike, Kent, Dunhill and Pall Mall. … In the UK, however, they sit mostly unread, apart from visits by a few dedicated anti-tobacco researchers and journalists. … The judgment in the case of McTear v Imperial Tobacco was delivered at the Court of Session in Edinburgh on 31 May, World No Tobacco Day. But the irony appeared to have been lost on Lord Nimmo Smith in his 350,000-word judgment. It could not have been more damaging to the anti-smoking case if it had been written by Imperial's own public relations team. Alfred McTear, who smoked 60 a day, died of lung cancer in 1993 at the age of 48. Just before his death he had launched a case against Imperial Tobacco.…After 15 months of deliberation, Lord Nimmo Smith issued his ruling. He said the case failed on every count, and he stunned health experts by saying he could not find it proved that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer. … Across the Atlantic, critics were less reticent. Richard Daynard, lawyer, professor and tobacco litigation expert from Northeastern University law school in Boston, was scathing. It was, he said, "an extraordinarily ignorant opinion". "The UK suffers from a conservative, narrow-minded judiciary who don't know or don't want to know the relevant medical and social facts," he said. The idea that if witnesses were not paid, their testimony was somehow suspect left him bemused. "The fact that selfless people were prepared to give evidence for free is evidence of bias?" he asked.
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