I just read this article, How to Silence a Racket: The Justice Department’s tobacco lawsuit threatens freedom of speech , in Reason about how the recent DC circuit court’s decision against the government in its racketeering case against the tobacco companies was also about freedom of speech.

As you can imagine the decision was big news here in Winston-Salem, home of Reynolds America the purveyor of such brands as Winston, Salem, Kool and Camel cigarettes.  Still, I never saw anything that looked beyond the decision’s immediate impact on the tobacco companies.

The author, Jacob Sullum, explains it best here:

The "racketeering acts" listed
by the Justice Department consist largely of advertisements, press
releases, and televised statements, which it considers instances
of mail or wire fraud. The fraudulent aspect of this speech is often
obscure. One "racketeering act," for instance, involved placing a
magazine ad that "depicted
Joe Camel wearing sunglasses, a tee shirt, and blue jeans, with a pack
of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve and a lit cigarette hanging from
his mouth, and casually
leaning against a convertible automobile."

Even the messages closer to the heart of the Justice Department’s
case are not clear-cut examples of fraud. When the cigarette
manufacturers criticized early
studies linking smoking to lung cancer, for example, were they
deliberately misleading the public, or were they doing what any company
does when its product is
impugned—i.e., pointing out weaknesses in the evidence against it?

The question is of more than historical interest. Given the logic of
the Justice Department’s case, oil companies that question global
warming projections,
automakers that defend the safety of their SUVs, fast food chains that
say they’re not responsible for increases in obesity, pharmaceutical
companies that criticize
research indicating possible side effects from their drugs, and any
other business that stands up for itself in the face of attack could be
the target of a future RICO
lawsuit.