Every six weeks or so, the guy from Philip Morris, as his customers still think of him, swings by for a chat. But this summer, salespeople like Winfred Hayes are changing hats. He now works for Philip Morris USA’s parent, Altria Group.

A California jury decided yesterday that cigarette maker Philip Morris USA should pay $13.8 million in punitive damages to the daughter of a longtime smoker who died of lung cancer. The Los Angeles County Superior Court jury voted 9-3 in favor of Jodie Bullock, who is now the plaintiff in the case filed by her mother eight years ago. Betty Bullock of Newport Beach, who smoked Philip Morris-made Marlboro and Benson & Hedges cigarettes for 45 years, died of lung cancer in February 2003.

As chief public-health officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Lawrence Deyton is credited with improving the agency’s tobacco-cessation programs for veterans. Now, Deyton will lead the Food and Drug Administration’s newly created Center for Tobacco Products, which is tasked with regulating the $80 billion U.S. tobacco industry.

Philip Morris USA has started test-marketing roll-your-own cigarette tobacco, its first venture into that market. This summer, the nation’s No. 1 cigarette-maker started selling pouches and canisters of L&M brand tobacco in Maine and Michigan, spokesman Bill Phelps said. “It’s a very small market, but it’s growing fast,“ he said.

As of this morning, Philip Morris USA’s Richmond manufacturing plant is the only site where the company makes cigarettes.

Big changes are coming to the tobacco industry, and we’ve ramped up our coverage in the Richmond Times-Dispatch to keep you informed. Tobacco has long been a focus of our coverage—the business has been a key component of Virginia’s economy since soon after its founding at Jamestown. Now more than ever, Richmond is at the heart of the industry.

California: The Bullock case. A Los Angeles court is rehearing a claim for punitive damages in light of a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in an Oregon case against Philip Morris (the Williams case) that held punitive damages can’t be calculated based on harm to people who aren’t parties to a lawsuit.
The Whiteley case. Philip Morris is appealing a 2007 verdict that a smoker’s illnesses the company caused resulted in $2.5 million of financial loss to the smoker. In 2007, a jury ruled the smoker was not entitled to punitive damages.

She started smoking Marlboro cigarettes in 1955, the year Philip Morris relaunched the brand. Forty-five years later, Betty Bullock had a two-pack-a-day habit and a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. Bullock was among the roughly four in 10 smokers who succeeded in getting a case against Henrico County-based Philip Morris USA into court and winning. Most lose on appeal, but Bullock’s case still has legs, though not as the $28 billion case it once was.

Altria Group Inc., the largest U.S. tobacco company, said second-quarter profit rose 8.6 percent after price increases. The Henrico County-based maker of Marlboro cigarettes also raised its full-year forecast. Net income increased to $1.01 billion, or 49 cents a share, from $930 million, or 45 cents, a year earlier. Excluding items, adjusted earnings were 50 cents a share, beating the analysts’ estimates of 47 cents.

Even though Americans bought fewer cigarettes in the second quarter, profit rose 9 percent at Altria Group Inc., owner of the nation’s biggest cigarette maker, Philip Morris USA.

With Brittany Ashe and Merci Best wearing their best studiously intent stares, Drew Simmelink was divesting fruit flies of their heads. Simmelink, a rising junior at the University of Richmond, was offering the students an up-close look at a research project as his lab partner, Hersh Gupta, was explaining the program to a group of executives from Altria.

It took more than a decade for Congress to grant the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco products. Now that the FDA has been given that job, the agency must set up a new regulatory office.

Some of the newer smokeless products that tobacco companies are betting on may not be as good at helping smokers quit as the industry hopes, a new federally funded study by Virginia Commonwealth University shows. And that means they may not be the kind of reduced-harm product that is the industry’s latest hope, now that tobacco is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Winning FDA designation as a “potential reduced-exposure product” could be worth billions of dollars, and a key element of that could be whether an item keeps smokers from lighting up.

Philip Morris USA has put some of its South Richmond and Chesterfield County properties up for sale as the tobacco company cuts costs and consolidates its operations in a smaller U.S. cigarette market. The Henrico County-based company is seeking to sell more than 570,000 square feet of office, laboratory, warehouse and manufacturing space just off Bells Road, on property adjacent to its cigarette plant off Interstate 95.

Altria Group Inc. said on Friday that Murray S. Kessler, chief executive of the smokeless tobacco company UST Inc., will leave the company at the end of June after overseeing key elements of UST’s integration into Altria.