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BOSTON -- Cigarette manufacturers vowed yesterday to continue their legal attack on a state law that requires them to disclose the special ingredients in their products.
They also said they would focus on a new argument -- that the state law would likely destroy the industry's "valuable ingredient trade secrets."
"The companies intend to pursue that avenue vigorously," tobacco attorney Henry Dinger said in a statement.
The companies reacted after losing an appeal in federal court in Boston. The companies, in that appeal, had argued that a federal law on cigarette "advertising and promotion" overruled the state law.
Under the state law, the manufacturers must reveal their ingredients. The state health department will review them, pick out the harmful ones, and then publicize them.
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the state's scheme simply didn't fall in the realm of advertising and promotion.
"Although Congress sought through (the federal laws) to achieve several goals on the subject of tobacco product use and health, preventing states from obtaining information regarding product additives and disclosing such information was not one of them," the court said.
"Congress is free, of course, to enact legislation to bar the operation of laws such as the Disclosure Act. We are satisfied, however, that it has not done so yet," the court said.
While saying they had a new argument to pursue, the tobacco companies also didn't rule out a further appeal of the 1st Circuit ruling.
Cigarette makers Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., Lorillard Tobacco Co., Philip Morris Inc. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., as well as the makers of smokeless tobacco products, had sought to block the state's first-in-the-nation law.
The law passed last year requires tobacco companies to disclose the additives and the nicotine levels in cigarettes, snuff and chewing tobacco.
"True to form, Big Tobacco will try to use miles of legal red tape in an effort to strangle this historic consumer protection initiative," said Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. "My office will gladly defend this law every step of the way."
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