This covers almost half a century of history of the regulatory and legal struggle over tobacco

The whistleblowers, judicial rulings, revelations and other turning points which helped trigger the Department of Justice's criminal probe into Big Tobacco

This timeline chronicles how state Attorneys General - and in particular, the two hometown lawyers from Pascagoula, Miss. - brought the once invincible tobacco industry to the negotiating table in 1997. The critical new strategy they employed: filing state Medicaid lawsuits for billions of dollars in damages against the tobacco industry.