
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 8, 1995                   TAG: 9508080045
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

AMA DECLARES WAR

After all but avoiding the battle for years, the American Medical Association is taking the lead in pushing for federal regulation of tobacco as an addictive drug. The rhetoric has risen - its president compares the industry to ``the Medellin drug cartel.''

Meanwhile, President Clinton, suggesting he will push to regulate smoking among young people, said Monday that the government's approach should be ``tough and mandatory.''

Although the president did not specifically call for regulations, an administration official said Clinton planned to take a series of steps - some regulatory - aimed at preventing smoking by teen-agers and children.

He will announce the specifics as early as Wednesday in a speech in Charlotte, N.C., the heart of tobacco country.

The AMA finally declared all-out war on tobacco when it published once-secret documents indicating industry schemes to hide tobacco's dangers. The new president of the doctors' organization, Dr. Lonnie Bristow, fairly bristles at the industry effort.

``It was the most despicable action by an industry I had ever heard, something you would expect from the Medellin drug cartel,'' he said.

Such vehemence is rare for the nation's largest doctors' group, whose California branch still is accused of thwarting anti-smoking efforts.

Bristow urged Clinton to allow the FDA to crack down on teen-age tobacco use, and the AMA recently put the force of its 296,000 members behind intensive lobbying of Congress.

``There's been an institutional shift in how they deal with this,'' said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. ``While they have a terrible historical record ... they're becoming a 500-pound gorilla.''

The AMA accepted millions of dollars from tobacco makers in the 1960s to study smoking's health risks, a move the industry used for years to assert that the question of whether tobacco causes cancer was unresolved.

In the past year, the AMA came under fire for supporting legal changes to exempt tobacco from lawsuits - a position it recanted in June - and for giving higher campaign contributions to lawmakers who oppose tobacco control than to anti-smoking members of Congress.

by CNB