Callard Cynthia
Tob Control. 2016 Sep;25(5):492-7. doi: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2015-052618. Epub 2015 Nov 27.
The 'common knowledge' defence is a legal strategy which has been successfully used by defendant tobacco companies to avoid legal responsibility for the harms caused by smoking. Tobacco companies have hired professional historians to try to persuade courts about a longstanding high level of public awareness regarding the risks of tobacco use. To support this argument, they have used archival news clippings and media reports. Two historians were hired by tobacco companies to offer this defence during a recent class action trial in Canada, following which they were required to submit to the court the collection of media materials which had been gathered by history students to assist their testimony. Included in this collection were tobacco advertisements and other news items about tobacco products which the students had inadvertently also collected. Quantifying this collection reveals that even by the tobacco industry's own construct, the information environment surrounding Quebec smokers in the middle 20th century included more prosmoking messages than information about the risks of smoking.
“常识”抗辩是一种法律策略，被告烟草公司曾成功运用该策略来逃避吸烟造成危害的法律责任。烟草公司聘请了专业历史学家，试图让法庭相信公众长期以来对烟草使用风险有着高度认知。为支持这一论点，他们利用了存档的新闻剪报和媒体报道。在加拿大最近的一次集体诉讼审判中，两家烟草公司聘请了历史学家进行此抗辩，之后他们被要求向法庭提交历史系学生为协助他们作证而收集的媒体材料。这些材料中包括学生们无意中收集到的烟草广告及其他有关烟草产品的新闻。对这些材料进行量化分析后发现，即使按照烟草行业自己的说法，20世纪中叶围绕魁北克吸烟者的信息环境中，支持吸烟的信息也多于有关吸烟风险的信息。
