May 26, 2016 2 min read

Tony Gwynn was one of the great baseball players of his or any era. The eight-time batting champion amassed 3,141 hits in his 20-year career, with a .338 lifetime batting average, and he was a first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee in 2007.

Unlike many of his era, there was a never a suggestion that Gwynn’s achievements were the result of his taking steroids or human growth hormone. Gwynn’s body more resembled the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man than Captain America.

But Gwynn had an addiction. It was to smokeless tobacco. And it killed him.

Gwynn developed salivary gland cancer and died of its effects in 2014.

Now, his family is suing the tobacco industry for wrongful death.

From the Associated Press:

“Attorneys representing the family cite the tobacco industry’s significant marketing campaign in the late 1970s that targeted young people, African Americans and athletes, despite knowing its products contained carcinogens. Gwynn, they say, received free samples of smokeless tobacco as a student, baseball and basketball player at San Diego State University.”

Said Tony Gwynn Jr., “Our dad was an elite athlete who didn’t drink or smoke because he cared about his health and performance. If he had known how addictive and harmful to his health dip was, he would not have started using it in college, become addicted and died so young.”

While it’s sad Gwynn suffered from cancer and died at a relatively young age, it’s difficult for us to get behind this lawsuit.

For one thing, smokeless tobacco was and remains a legal product, and the tobacco industry’s advertising of its products was well within the laws at that time.

Then there’s the matter of personal responsibility. Any reasonably intelligent person, even in the relatively unenlightened days of the 1970s, had to realize that placing a wad of smokeless tobacco between his cheek and gum, over and over and over again, was probably not healthy and might have serious consequences. And Gwynn, by his family’s admission, was a heavy user of snuff.

Humans make risk assessments regarding their behavior on a daily basis. Sometimes those choices backfire. Sometimes people pay for their mistakes with their lives. But the Gwynn family’s lawsuit is like someone seeking recompense from General Motors because a loved one drove 90 mph in a Camaro and plunged over a cliff. It’s called user error.