Fragment, complicate and delay the lawsuits, and the plaintiffs never get their day in court. The industry needs control, because the truth is out there everywhere, always threatening to derail its best-laid plans. It's a tough act to pull off, since once people stop thinking in the industry's terms, they're lost to the industry forever. But the industry got away with it for a long time. With predictability and respectability assured, truth loses its threatening aspect.
Control is reestablished.
Purloined documents, California bar smoking bans, whistleblowers, unruly activists, huge punitive damage awards, industry executives who take the Fifth, investigative journalists, imaginative novelists and scriptwriters, scientific researchers, enterprising plaintiffs' attorneys, angry jurors none of these are our enemies. No one planned Dr. Koop, Dr. Kessler, or Merrell Williams. And no one knows where we're going next. We're going in the right directions, even if we can't draw the map yet.