In this incredible story that reads like a legal thriller, Michael Orey recounts the unprecedented defeat of big tobacco. In 1985, Nathan Horton, a building contractor in rural Mississippi, developed a chronic ache in his left shoulder. A year and a half later, he was dead from lung cancer. In his final, painful months, Horton had filed suit against the manufacturer of the cigarettes he had smoked for more than thirty years. Horton, who was black, found a most unlikely lawyer to pursue his cause with near-religious zeal: Don Barrett, an arch-segregationist in his youth and an unapologetic defender of the Old South. When he took up his dying neighbor's case, Barrett knew full well that no tobacco company had ever paid a cent to anyone who claimed that smoking had harmed their health. Smokers, the cigarette makers said, assumed the risk of their habit. Now Barrett was also assuming an enormous risk, taking on the all-powerful tobacco industry.
In the end, the chain of events unleashed by Nathan Horton's suit culminated in the largest legal settlement in American history. The individuals joining forces in Mississippi included a washed-up actor-turned-paralegal who copied thousands of pages of internal company documents; a Gulf Coast lawyer whose almost accidental foray into asbestos litigation had made him a multimillionaire; and the state's maverick attorney general, who authorized a pioneering suit against the tobacco industry to make it pay for the health care costs of smoking.
In riveting detail, journalist Michael Orey tells how these people came together and did what no one else before them had: defeat the tobacco industry. Orey weaves up-close, personal accounts of their lives with a dramatic recounting of their battle against the cigarette makers, one that ended in nationwide settlements totaling more than $200 billion. Assuming the Risk is an engrossing, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the highest-stakes legal battles ever fought.
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