Court sees smoker's death-bed video

A death-bed video of a woman will be played in a landmark case in the High Court at Auckland today as executors of her estate sue the tobacco company they hold responsible for causing her lung cancer.

Janice Yvonne Pou started smoking three cigarettes a day aged 17, but within a year her addiction had taken hold and she was smoking up to 30.

Advertising convinced her it was sophisticated, glamorous and sexy, she later said.

Mrs Pou died, aged 52, of lung cancer in September 2002, before her case against British American Tobacco (NZ) and WD and HO Wills, the first to be heard in New Zealand, was finished.

In the High Court at Auckland yesterday, her children, Brandon and Kasey Pou, continued their mother's legal battle, as executors of her estate, claiming $310,966 in damages under the Deaths by Accident Compensation Act 1952.

Today Justice Graham Lang will see Mrs Pou's video evidence, finished from her hospital bed where she was suffering throat and neck pain, fully aware she had only a few weeks to live.

Her last major role in life, she will say, was to bring this proceeding against the tobacco companies. She finished with a plea that young people who hear of her plight will be dissuaded from smoking.

In opening submissions yesterday, the Pous' lawyer, David Collins, QC, said their case was that in 1967, the tobacco company had a duty to fully warn Mrs Pou of the possible addiction to, and health dangers associated with, smoking.

The first health warnings on cigarette packets did not appear in New Zealand until 1974, seven years after Mrs Pou began smoking.

Mrs Pou will say she was "shy and introverted" as a teenager.

"She took aboard the message that if she lit a cigarette she would join the beautiful people, that she too would look cool, grown-up and classy. That was the reason she started smoking cigarettes," Mr Collins said.

"Ambassadors" such as runner Peter Snell and All Black Don Clarke who endorsed cigarettes impressed her. Their endorsements meant cigarettes could not possibly be harmful.

She craved cigarettes from the moment she woke up and within about three months of starting smoking she would smoke a cigarette in bed at night before going to sleep. So severe was her addiction that she continued smoking when she had cancer.

Throughout the video there were breaks for her to have a cigarette.

Mr Collins said Mrs Pou believed tobacco companies' denials that cigarettes were harmful. When the warnings did appear on packets it said, "Government warning".

"The tobacco companies were still selling cigarettes. I trusted them, they wouldn't sell anything lethal," Mrs Pou would say.

Mr Collins said any warnings she had seen were counter-balanced by reassuring comments from New Zealand's tobacco industry.