A money trail for the food scare folks.
"Fatty foods cause heart disease yet the human body craves fat. Even if a court decides that fast-food customers are to blame for their own rotundity, Medicaid and Medicare are 'victims' and may collect [from restaurants] under the new doctrine."
An editorial from an anti-choice food police newsletter? No. The Wall Street Journal.
But far from encouraging litigation, the Journal vividly points out how massive class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies, and the huge settlements that followed, have paved the way for similar litigation against other legal products, including meat, fried food, alcohol, and even milk.
Case in point: These recent lawsuits and legal threats would have been unthinkable only a few years ago: Norman Mayo sued the dairy industry after he suffered a stroke which he blamed on a lifetime of drinking milk
The wacko Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has called upon the U.S. Justice Department to file a class-action suit against the meat industry, claiming "meat consumption is just as dangerous to public health as tobacco use."
After losing $3 million over a lifetime of gambling, Joe McNeely filed lawsuits against five gambling casinos claiming they "knowingly exploited" his gambling addiction.
The over-the-edge anti-tobacco group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) is actively promoting a "lawsuit kit" to enable those in condos or apartments to sue their neighbors for exposure to secondhand smoke. "Even if you can't smell it, it may still be killing you," claims ASH.
According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI): "It's high time the [restaurant] industry begins to bear some responsibility for its contribution to obesity, heart disease and cancer." No stranger to lawsuits, CSPI's veiled threat could prove ominous to fast-food restaurants in today's legal climate.