Ailing French Smoker Challenges Law, Culture

For 35 years, Richard Gourlain has puffed away on pungent, unfiltered Gauloises. Nothing has stopped him--not even three cancer operations to remove part of both lungs, his tongue, his lower jaw and all his teeth.

The 48-year-old former butcher and hearse driver now weighs slightly more than 100 pounds--60 pounds less than his normal weight--and needs to gulp his food, like yogurt or mashed potatoes, whole. “My only pleasures now are to eat a little and to light up a cigarette,” Gourlain explained over the telephone, struggling to form his words with what’s left of his mouth. “I daydream about eating a good steak, but I can’t.”

The longtime two-pack-a-day smoker, now down to between 10 and 20 brown tobacco Gauloises a day, has made legal history in France by suing the cigarettes’ maker, the former state-owned tobacco giant SEITA, and demanding more than half a million dollars in damages.

“I have lost everything with this disease: my job, my home, my friends,” said Gourlain, who lives in a Loire Valley village with his wife, Lucette, a former secretary, and their two sons. “I no longer have any relations with my wife. She stays with me because she is my wife, but it’s hard to live with a fellow like me.”

The reaction to Gourlain’s groundbreaking lawsuit says a lot about the complex relationship between the French and tobacco. The lawsuit, inspired by similar actions in the United States, is being handled by the attorney of the National Committee Against Smoking. But many French are vehemently opposed to it.

“People have been writing us anonymous letters saying we should assume our responsibilities, that we’re suing just to get money,” said Lucette Gourlain, 46, who says she still loves her husband.

A Touchy Subject

Some letters complain that Gourlain, who was fired from his job as a hearse driver when his smoking-related health problems kept him away from work for 10 months and then lost his house when his own hearse venture failed, is too much of a drain on France’s state-financed health system.

“No one forced me to smoke,” Gourlain readily admitted. “But they are selling death, and it is very profitable for the state.”

In France, smoking is one supremely touchy area where the law, though in some ways more advanced than that of many other countries, runs smack into widespread habits and a stubborn sense of individual rights, and where interests of the state and public health are not always identical.

After all, until SEITA was privatized in 1995, the government itself was France’s sole legal tobacco merchant. According to SEITA officials, 76% of the retail cost of a pack of cigarettes is tax, and cigarette sales fill tax coffers with the equivalent of more than $11 billion yearly.

In contrast to such enormous sums, says the National Committee Against Smoking, the amounts spent to educate people about tobacco’s dangers are pitiful: less than $400,000 a year, or about 1% of what the state of Arizona alone spends.

“This is David against Goliath,” said Philippe Harant of the Versailles-based committee.

About 60,000 people in France die each year of cancer and other smoking-related ailments.

Smoking by Minors

Unlike in the United States, there is no age limit in France to bar minors from buying tobacco. Gourlain, in fact, began smoking at 13.

Cigarette sales dropped by 9.5% in the first five years of the 1990s. But a new generation of consumers is on the way. Surveys show French boys and girls to be the heaviest smokers in the European Union. By age 18, 58% smoke.

A law passed six years ago made smoking illegal in cafes, public workplaces, restaurants, train stations and other closed places, except for designated areas. But from the platforms in the Paris subway to the canteen in Paris’ Palace of Justice, where judges and police officials meet for lunch and snacks, the French puff away regardless.

The designated area for nonsmokers in a restaurant may be a little corner by the restrooms, or there may be none at all.

Non-fumeurs worried about the risks of “passive smoking” are frequently dismissed as antisocial pests or fanatics. Last year, one 29-year-old Frenchman, who suffers from allergies, uses an inhaler and cannot stand to be around cigarette smoke, threatened to take legal action unless management stopped his 12 co-workers in an air freight company from smoking in the office they shared at Charles de Gaulle Airport north of Paris.

Cigarette Warnings

The 1991 law notwithstanding, the unhappy employee, Jean-Luc Michel, was fired for, in management’s words, having “systematically denigrated his co-workers” and “demonstrated a lack of respect for company hierarchy.” The National League for the Rights of Nonsmokers cites numerous similar cases. In November, French railways were slapped with a lawsuit for not doing more to stop passengers from smoking in a Lyon train station.

The first warnings on French cigarette packs--that “abuse” of the contents was “dangerous”--were mandated in 1976 under France’s first anti-tobacco law, which also banned advertising of the product. In 1991, the new law required cigarettes sold in France to carry the notice: “Seriously harms health.”

SEITA maintains that such warnings are sufficient for consumers to know the risks and that it has always obeyed the laws in force. But the cigarette maker evokes a more subtle cultural principle in disclaiming any liability for what happened to Gourlain.

“In the French tradition, people assume [legal] responsibility for what they do,” SEITA spokeswoman Aneta Lazerevic said.

Francis Caballero, the lawyer for the anti-smoking committee who is representing Gourlain and family members of another Gauloise smoker, Suzanne Berger, who died of lung cancer in October at 35, counters that both cancer victims were hooked on cigarettes long before the warnings went on the packs.

The plaintiffs’ lawsuits are based on a French law that holds a manufacturer responsible if his product is “inherently dangerous.” Vaguely worded warnings on the packets are not enough, Caballero contends.

“SEITA is responsible,” the lawyer said. “First, because it doesn’t inform consumers of the great risks they run in consuming its products.”

If he wins, Gourlain says, he wants to give damages awarded him to a Paris-area cancer institute where he was treated. “I’m not fighting for me. For me, it’s over,” he said.

Tobacco’s Toll

Her husband is so addicted to tobacco, Lucette Gourlain says, that after a 10 1/2-hour operation to remove one of his tumors, while still under anesthesia, he put his hand to his mouth, inhaled and mimed the action of smoking.

She wants an age limit imposed so that minors in France cannot buy tobacco and become hooked as adolescents, as her husband did.

Her life has been destroyed by cigarettes, she says. She held her gasping, emaciated father, another Gauloise smoker, in her arms as he died of lung cancer at age 56 in 1980. Her sons, 18 and 20, also smoke. The younger one has managed to quit, and his older brother is struggling with the help of nicotine patches. Lucette herself was an occasional smoker who has managed to break the habit.

“This is a legalized hard drug,” Lucette Gourlain said. “Children may look like babies, but already they have a cigarette between their lips.”