Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 19, 1993 TAG: 9301190076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JUSTIN CATANOSO LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE MAY BE BATTLE
THE FIGHT over cigarettes and taxes rages on, with a new president to be drawn into the fray.The rhetoric was as old as the 1964 Surgeon General's report on smoking. The annual death toll associated with smoking was repeated like a rallying cry. And the recommendations for change contained few new initiatives.
But the anti-smoking advocates who met this month to plan strategies for curbing tobacco use say they have new hope that Congress will be motivated to sharply in crease federal cigarette taxes as a way to raise revenue and keep kids from smoking.
The reason for this optimism: Bill Clinton.
"Bill Clinton is the first person to become president in the history of the United States who during the campaign acknowledged the death toll between tobacco and disease," said Matthew Myers, lawyer for the Washington-based Coalition on Smoking OR Health, an umbrella group for the American Heart, Lung and Cancer societies.
"He's the first person to become president to acknowledge his support of public policy action to protect children against tobacco."
The tobacco industry, however, has a warning for the incoming president.
"I think President-elect Clinton will read George Bush's lips," said Tom Lauria, spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, the industry's lobbying arm. "Bush went down in great measure because he raised cigarette taxes as part of the budget deal with Congress in 1991."
In that deal, federal taxes on a pack of cigarettes rose from 16 cents to 24 cents over two years. So-called "sin tax" increases were also applied to beer and liquor.
In a three-day conference this week called "Tobacco Use: An American Crisis," experts on public health, tobacco litigation, and marketing agreed that of the many recommendations proffered, a steep increase in the federal excise tax is "the most effective policy lever we have" to drive down the consumption of cigarettes.
Even though Congress has raised taxes on cigarettes only twice in the past 40 years by a few pennies each time, anti-smoking activists are calling for a federal tax increase of $2 a pack.
Thus the stage is set for another Capitol Hill brawl over the always-contentious issue of smoking and health, with legislators and Clinton being tugged and pulled by opposing forces who routinely accuse each other of lying, distortion and zealotry.
"We call on President Clinton to cut out the cancer of tobacco influence from the body politic," declared Dr. Michele Bloch, who heads the American Medical Women's Association.
"The `anti's' despise the industry," Lauria countered. "They don't understand the industry as a service provider in a global market that wants its product."
With per-capita cigarette consumption dropping gradually over the past 20 years, anti-smoking forces have succeeded in convincing millions that smoking can be a fatal habit.
But with the tobacco lobby contributing millions of dollars to both political parties and tens of thousands of dollars to key legislators, Congress has done little to regulate a product the U.S. Surgeon General says is responsible for 430,000 deaths annually, and some $52 billion a year in health-care costs and lost work time.
"Congress has always lagged way behind the American people on the tobacco issue because of the industry's influence," Myers said. "But Congress never ignores public opinion. It won't be easy, and it may not be immediate, but gradually the willingness of public officials to take on the tobacco industry is increasing."
Anti-smoking forces say legislators have little choice. Clinton has listed his top two domestic priorities as heath-care reform and reducing the deficit. The anti-smoking forces believe higher excise taxes on cigarettes play into both issues.
A $2-a-pack tax increase, they contend, will not only raise an estimated $35 billion a year in new revenue, but it would also save lives and lower health-care costs by discouraging people - particularly young people - from smoking.
"We have a public that is much more receptive to increased taxes on tobacco, and a government that is in desperate need of increased income," said Ken Warner, a public-health analyst at the University of Michigan, and an anti-smoking advocate.
According to a Harris poll conducted in December, 76 percent of American voters support higher taxes on cigarettes and liquor to help pay for health-care reform. Also, voters in Massachusetts and California recently passed steep state tax increases on cigarettes.
But the tobacco industry, which routinely raises cigarette prices several times a year to maintain profits, argues strenuously that because smokers tend to be low-income, working-class people, any tax increase punishes the very people Clinton has vowed to protect.
"In all American fairness," Lauria said, "the tax code was never meant to be used to punish behavior not approved of by certain groups. Those advocating higher taxes don't have to pay them. Smokers are not responsible for the deficit."
Lauria said the Tobacco Institute will try to rally trade unions and manufacturing employees to help lobby against any federal tax in crease on cigarettes.
Anti-smoking advocates say they find the industry's defense of blue-collar smokers outrageous. They argue that low-income smokers suffer a disproportionate share of the diseases caused by smoking, and that those smokers are least able to afford the health care needed.
Michael Erickson, who heads of the Office of Smoking and Health for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, said governments around the world are beginning to see that health-care costs associated with smoking are beginning to outweigh the economic benefit.
"The World Bank in 1992 decided to stop giving loans to any country in the world for the purpose of growing or manufacturing tobacco products," Erickson said. "That shows policy makers understand that while tobacco is a legal product, it has negative economic and health drain on the overall well-being of a country."
It's difficult to predict how a Clinton administration, weighing these competing arguments, will respond to a cigarette tax-increase proposal. Clinton, after all, accepted tobacco industry contributions during the campaign.
Also, he appointed Vernon Jordan, who serves on the board of RJR Nabisco, to head his transition team. And he nominated for U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor, a California lawyer who fought smoking restrictions in Los Angeles for Philip Morris.
"Elected officials, even presidents, are still comfortable dealing with the tobacco lobby," said Cliff Douglas, tobacco policy director with the Advocacy Institute in Washington. "Until the industry becomes delegitimized, it will be difficult to persuade Congress and the White House to implement significant tobacco control policies."