But what mattered was not how much Rose Cipollone knew about tobacco risks; what mattered was what cigarette makers knew, and how much of the cancer risk they had revealed to consumers such as Rose. The argument took the tobacco companies by surprise. Edell’s insistence that he needed to know what cigarette makers knew about smoking risks allowed him to ask the courts for unprecedented access to the internal files of Philip Morris, Liggett, and Lorillard. Armed with powerful legal injunctions to investigate these private files, Edell unearthed a saga of epic perversity. Many of the cigarette
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