Asbestos lawyers are pitting plaintiffs who aren’t sick against companies that never made the stuff -and extracting billions for themselves.

The prospect of winning massive, multimillion dollar verdicts has turned the original mass tort–asbestos litigation–into the ultimate mass farce.

There are now about 49,000 asbestos plaintiffs awaiting trial in Lexington, Fayette, Port Gibson, Pascagoula, and other propitious plaintiffs’ venues in Mississippi, and at least 200,000 more cases nationwide–mainly concentrated in other favorable plaintiffs’ locales sprinkled across such states as Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, New York, and California.

The nation’s dockets are now so jammed with asbestos suits being brought on behalf of minimally injured people that lawyers who represent the truly ill are teaming up with asbestos defendants to demand reform.