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This article focuses on the airing of the program "Smoke Screen," on television advertising of cigarette industry by ABC. Within weeks of the broadcast on February 28,1994, Congressional hearings were under way to explore the program's central charge: that tobacco companies deliberately fine-tune nicotine levels to keep millions of Americans addicted to cigarettes. In addition, the media disparaging of "Smoke Screen" was done without the benefit of tens of thousands of pages of internal Philip Morris documents turned over to ABC during the lawsuit and returned after the settlement, when all case records were sealed and a gag order imposed. INSET: Comments, by D.Z..

The article focuses on one of the most famous liability suit in the U.S. history, "Castano v. American Tobacco." The case, when it goes before a jury, will be the first national class action for product liability ever to do so, one that could represent 90 million current and former smokers, who could win damages of $40 billion or more. To pull it off, more than sixty of the most prominent personal injury law firms in the country have banded together to attack the tobacco industry in one mega-suit. Dianne Castano immediately stole the spotlight in a year that seems to be building toward an all-out assault against cigarette makers. The story of Castano is also the story of the 800 other suits defeated by the corporate world's most ferocious litigator, an opponent that never settles and spends whatever it takes to exhaust the usually small plaintiffs' firms.