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Research Project.” Inside, the decor includes several antique tin cigarette advertisements (“Chesterfield—They Satisfy!”) and a stuffed Joe Camel atop a bookcase stuffed with binders labeled “Philip Morris,” “Brown & Williamson,” and “R. J. Reynolds,” along with bound back issues of the Tobacco Industry Litigation Reporter. Daynard has been called the “intellectual godfather of tobacco litigation,” and that’s by his detractors. He was one of the original lawyers behind the lawsuits against the tobacco industry for fraudulent practices in the 1990s. That campaign succeeded in 1998 with a $250 billion settlement by the tobacco companies, who admitted they’d lied about the addictiveness of their products, followed five years later by a global tobacco treaty to limit cigarette sales overseas.

In the summer of 2005, however, he was pursuing a new quarry—soda. “The number of analogies [is] very surprising,” says Daynard, now director of something called the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI). “You are dealing with an addictive product sold to kids, where, if not the addiction, at least the taste is acquired at a young age. You are dealing with a product that, at least when initially produced, was not understood to be deleterious, yet as the evidence kept coming in, companies kept marketing it and stonewalling.”

The idea of suing the soda companies over the issue of childhood obesity had been percolating since a conference organized by PHAI in 2003. As long as the anti-obesity advocates were forced to go after soda one school or one state at a time, they reasoned, Coke and Pepsi could stone-wall indefinitely. If they were going to succeed, they’d have to speak the language companies understood—hitting their bottom lines with legal damages, or besmirching their brands so badly they’d be forced to settle.

Shortly after the confab, one of the lawyers, John Banzhaf, threatened to sue the Seattle School Board if it renewed its contract with Coke, but eventually backed down. It was one thing to brand multinational corporations as greedy, but it was simply too risky to go after a school that was already hurting for cash. It took another two years for lawyers to get up the courage to go after those they argued were really calling the shots: the companies themselves. “I look at Coke and Pepsi as the Colombian cartel, the bottlers are the middlemen, the school is the one who is actually selling the drugs,” reasons Stephen Gardner, litigation director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which joined with PHAI in seeking a lawsuit. “The best way to stop it is to go after the cartel, the ones who are actually selling the product.” (The imagery is ironic given Coke’s origins as a cocaine-laced nerve tonic, to say nothing of its later problems in Colombia.) As the lawyers prepared a class-action lawsuit in the fall of 2005, they modeled their strategy after the tobacco case, arguing that the companies knew the damage their products could do, yet pushed them anyway. The situation was made even worse by the presence of caffeine in the drink, which rankled the lawyers as much as it did Harvey Washington Wiley a century earlier. According to one study at Johns Hopkins University, consumers couldn’t tell the difference in taste between caffeinated and noncaffeinated sodas, contradicting soft drink makers’ claims that the substance was added for taste, and implying that it was there to addict consumers. “You are talking about selling an addictive substance to kids—an addictive substance that is bad for them,” says Daynard.

No matter how they spun it, however, soda wasn’t cigarettes, and caffeine and sugar weren’t nicotine and cocaine. In painting them that way, they risked a backlash of their own, similar to a case a few years earlier when Banzhaf had sued McDonald’s on behalf of a man who accused the company of making him fat. Coca-Cola’s surrogates sought to paint this lawsuit in the same light. “There are trial lawyers who see dollar signs where the rest of us see dinner,” said the Center for Consumer Freedom’s Mindus. “It