Moore’s Law

“Seven years ago, Mike Moore stepped from the 2 a.m. darkness into the light of a small home off Lakeland Drive in Jackson, Miss., to find his nephew close to death. The 250-pound 30-year-old was slumped on the living room couch, his face pale, breath shallow, and chest wet with vomit. It was his fiancée who’d called Moore, waking him in a panic. Now they were both screaming in the man’s ears, dousing him with ice cubes and water, and pinching him as his respiratory system began to collapse … Moore’s nephew had been wearing a fentanyl patch on his arm and sucking on another. ‘An ordinary horse would have been dead,’ Moore recalls in his Mississippi drawl.” Sadly, Mike Moore’s story makes for a common lede in today’s news. But Moore is no ordinary leading man. He’s the lawyer who went after big tobacco and negotiated “the largest corporate legal settlement in U.S. history: a 50-state, $246 billion agreement that funds smoking cessation and prevention programs to this day.” And now, as Bloomberg reports, The Lawyer Who Beat Big Tobacco is Taking on the Opioid Industry.