The Tobacco Wars: Strategist of Smoking Assault Calls Shots from Maine Farm
/“Control Central for the 35 attorneys general and 200 private lawyers pressing the vast legal assault on Big Tobacco is, incredibly, the perfect rural stillness of a weathered old farmhouse near tiny Lisbon Falls, Maine.
Up the stairs, in a small bedroom that affords a view of his neighbor’s pasture and occasionally yields up the wafting fragrance of his own ancient apple trees, James E. Tierney is a one-man information clearinghouse in the wave of lawsuits that is expected to redefine the role of cigarettes in U.S. commerce and society.
This rangy, 50-year-old man wearing blue jeans, a green plaid shirt and dusty old hiking shoes - a regular Mainer, you might say - is the spin doctor, coordinator and a key strategist for the attorneys general who are suing to make tobacco companies repay Medicaid money spent to treat smoking-related diseases.”
See: Hunt Helm, The Courier-Journal, June 11, 1997 (PDF).
