ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512080028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ARCHIE BAILEY
IN ADDITION to the balanced-budget amendment, President Clinton is championing another issue as he prepares to run for re-election next year - children and tobacco. However, the plan President Clinton announced this summer - FDA regulation of tobacco products - won't help to curb tobacco consumption.
Tobacco is a legal product supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs. While the president's plan won't achieve its objectives, it certainly will harm our economy, eliminating thousands of jobs and increasing the federal budget deficit. The plan will also have a direct - and negative - impact on state and local governments.
Let's be honest: Giving the Food and Drug Administration jurisdiction to regulate tobacco, as the administration has proposed, inevitably will lead to a new era of Prohibition.
By law, the FDA is required to verify that the products it regulates are "safe and effective" for their intended use. Notwithstanding some creative statutory gymnastics, the FDA has not succeeded in writing this standard out of the laws that it proposes to apply to tobacco.
In a letter sent to an antitobacco group early last year, Commissioner David Kessler himself wrote that FDA jurisdiction over tobacco ultimately could mean the "removal from the market of tobacco products containing nicotine at levels which cause or satisfy addiction."
Accordingly, FDA jurisdiction over tobacco products would spell disaster for everyone who depends on tobacco products for some portion of their livelihood.
How many people are we talking about?
To begin with, nearly 700,000 people are directly employed either as producers and marketers of tobacco products, or as suppliers of goods and services to the tobacco industry in the United States. The ripple effect of throwing nearly 700,000 people out of work would affect more than an additional 1.5 million jobs, by some estimates.
In Virginia alone, more than 50,000 people owe their livelihood to the tobacco industry.
In all, some 2.2 million jobs and $66.7 billion in wages could be lost or adversely affected.
Significant tax revenue would disappear. Workers in the core tobacco industry pay approximately $10 billion every year in federal income taxes. The 1.5 million Americans whose jobs are created, in whole or in part, by tobacco-industry expenditures pay an additional $15.3 billion.
Last year, the federal government collected $5.6 billion in cigarette excise taxes. The states collected $6.7 billion in excise-tax revenue. Local cigarette taxes contributed another $184 million, and local and state sales taxes on cigarettes added yet another $2 billion to the pot.
This adds up to almost $40 billion of tax revenue that will disappear and will have to be replaced with other taxes if tobacco is banned.
Making tobacco contraband would also increase criminal activity. According to Canadian law-enforcement experts, criminal gangs from around the world were drawn into an enormously lucrative smuggling business by Canada's cigarette-tax increase, forcing the government to roll back the taxes.
The FDA bases its Draconian proposals to curb tobacco advertising on the assumption that tobacco advertising influences children to smoke. The problem is that the FDA has failed to back this assumption with any convincing analysis.
The FDA relies on evidence that minors who smoke tend to smoke the more heavily advertised cigarette brands. But this relationship proves not that advertising influences whether minors decide to smoke, but that it influences what brand individuals choose to smoke when they do smoke.
In fact, parental influence and peer pressure are the primary factors that determine whether minors smoke. Proof can be found in recent statistics indicating that smoking has declined dramatically among black teen-agers, despite a rise among white teens. All indications are that this decline occurred not because of differences in advertising, but because of differences in the peer pressure among black and white youth.
It doesn't take advertising restrictions to emphasize societal disapproval of smoking behavior. As any smoker will tell you, smoking is becoming less and less socially acceptable - even without the aid of the FDA. There simply is no reason to attack tobacco advertising, and the sporting and cultural events that are helped by tobacco company sponsorship, when such an attack will not yield any societal benefits.
If the president is concerned about underage consumption of tobacco, he should think about supporting measures - such as further federal support for the enforcement of state minimum-age laws - that will actually achieve his goals.
Archie Bailey is chairman of the Burley Committee of the Virginia Farm Bureau.
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