What once was seen as a “magic mineral” has turned into a magic carpet ride for profiteering plaintiffs’ attorneys. That’s the gist of a report released this week by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy, which takes the class-action plaintiffs’ bar to task for ginning up thousands of false claims of asbestosis while procuring too little assistance for the smaller number of real victims who suffer serious asbestos-related diseases.

Since the blizzard of asbestos lawsuits began in 1973, at least 80 companies have been forced into bankruptcy, while businesses and insurers have paid more than $70 billion in asbestos claims. But only $30 billion of that actually got to plaintiffs because their attorneys pocketed $19 billion and other court costs consumed $21 billion.

The new report, part of a series collectively titled “Trial Lawyers, Inc.,” describes how some attorneys have set up a sophisticated business model to pursue what the report calls “abusive litigation.”

That business model, according to the report, “uses sophisticated marketing to attract thousands of claimants, … and packages claims together to overwhelm defendants and courts.

Ultimately, the attorneys bully besieged defendants into settlements that enrich” the lawyers, “while leaving genuinely injured claimants high and dry.” In sum, the report says, “much of modern asbestos litigation has involved the filing of lawsuits by individuals who aren’t sick against companies that never made the product alleged to have caused their sickness.”

A little background is in order. Asbestos has been used in a large variety of ways since the ancient Greeks called it a “miracle” because of its strength and fire-retardant properties.

But in the 20th Century, research proved that asbestos inhalation could cause mesothelioma, a deadly lung cancer, and another potentially serious disease (a non-malignant one) called asbestosis.

Worse, some companies that manufactured asbestos products tried for years to cover up evidence of the health dangers. Lawsuits were inevitable, and several thousand mesothelioma victims per year obviously merit some remuneration.

But things got out of hand when class-action plaintiffs attorneys began advertising for “victims” with any tenuous connection to asbestos exposure, then set up moveable vans for mass X-ray screenings for non-malignant asbestosis, with the X-rays to be read by the thousands by doctors paid by the lawyers.

When U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack in Texas discovered that many thousands of similar claims for another lung disease, silicosis, featured claims from plaintiffs who already had sued for relief for the entirely different disease of asbestosis, she unearthed massive fraud in the litigation of both diseases.

“The films were misinterpreted nearly universally,” said Dr. David Weill, a specialist in pulmonary medicine who twice has testified to Senate committees about the abusive screening system.

The American Bar Association has supported federal legislation since 2003 to establish specific medical criteria for “asbestos-related disease claims,” and has urged states to set “standards for the operation of screening vans or other forms of mass screening for asbestos-related conditions. These standards should be enforced, as appropriate, by federal, state and territorial governmental agencies,” along with bar associations and medical societies.

Federal courts already are supposed to be governed by the “Daubert test” established in a 1993 Supreme Court case that sets strict standards for the admissibility in court of medical or scientific evidence.

Notwithstanding the Daubert test, close approximations of which are supposed to apply in many state courts as well, some of the most abusive litigation practices continued for years in state courts until Judge Jacks’ discoveries rocked the legal world.

“If judges strictly exercised their gatekeeping roles, and followed ABA standards, many of these fraudulent practices could have been prevented,” said Victor Schwartz, general counsel for the American Tort Reform Association and the author of a principal amicus brief in the 1993 Daubert case.

But the new Manhattan report makes clear that the class-action plaintiffs bar is constantly seeking new ways to game the legal system for profit. The most effective way to fight such abuses, according to the report, is for state legislatures to adopt four key reforms.

“Prosecutions are needed as well to punish and deter wrongful conduct,” writes Center for Legal Policy Director James Copland, whose report clearly is intended to keep the pressure on.

Quin Hillyer is associate editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.