ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 29, 1996 TAG: 9604290097
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
TOBACCO politics makes strange bedfellows. In the massive farm bill passed recently, Congress scaled back virtually every subsidy for agricultural products - except tobacco.
Now, considering the lobbying clout of tobacco manufacturers and tobacco farmers, that's not especially surprising. What is surprising is that joining this alliance were ... anti-smoking crusaders.
As David Hosansky, agricultural reporter for Congressional Quarterly, recently wrote in The New Republic, anti-smoking activists are reluctant to oppose tobacco subsidies because these inflate tobacco prices and make cigarettes more expensive. Costlier cigarettes, in turn, help deter some Americans from taking up the habit, and may help convince more smokers to quit.
The strategy isn't entirely lacking in sense. This newspaper has long argued that Virginia lawmakers, as well as Congress, should raise the excise tax on cigarettes, in part to help pay for their huge health effects, but also to help dissuade more financially sensitive young people from starting to smoke. In Virginia especially, which has the nation's lowest state cigarette tax, a higher price would save lives.
Surely, though, the various means of raising prices aren't neutral. A tax increase is a far better way to raise cigarette costs than is continued government support of the industry. The latter may be a politically likelier prospect than the former. But something is out of whack in Washington when the anti-smoking crowd winks and nods, in conspiracy with the tobacco industry, for government to keep right on subsidizing a crop whose end product causes the death of more than 400,000 Americans every year while adding more than $50 billion annually to the cost of medical care.
As Rep. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., observed: ``We're telling everybody tobacco is dangerous and it will kill you, yet the government is subsidizing it. This defies any kind of rational behavior."
There is much about cigarettes that defies reason.
Theoretically, one could discern some kind of reason underlying all behavior - for example, the tobacco industry's generous political-campaign giving, which doubled from 1993 to 1995, despite the insistence of members of Congress that they and their votes aren't for sale.
One might even muster an explanation for why one in four American adults still smokes, and some 3,000 kids take up the habit every day, despite the well-known link to cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung disease and low birth weight in newborns.
Smoking, you could explain, is an addictive behavior that provides short-term gratification at long-term risk. Most adult smokers say they'd like to quit, but somehow find themselves unable to. According to this explanation, cigarettes are a drug pushed by those who make a profit from it.
Calculations of pleasure and profit offer, however, too narrow a definition of reason. They certainly don't offer justification. In the campaign against tobacco's terrible effects, reason remains the public health's best ally.
LENGTH: Medium: 57 linesby CNB