A pinch of sanity

Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune: Anti-tobacco zealots tore their hair out over the decision by the Florida Supreme Court to throw out $145 billion in punitive damages against the U.S. tobacco industry awarded by a lower-court jury to hundreds of thousands of unnamed class-action complainants.
Yet, in all good sense, what else could the court do? The damage amount was preposterous, quite beyond the ability of companies to pay and quite beyond any reasonable link between guilt and punishment.
These modern-day lawsuits against tobacco companies all depend entirely on a common denominator: the claim that injured parties had no way of knowing the dangers of smoking because companies had hoodwinked them for decades, often generations. This is a phony claim.
Most people are better off not smoking, but they are free to do so. The potential harm from their decisions should be theirs to bear, not to shift in any way to others through court action.