THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 4, 1996 TAG: 9609020216
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Glenn Allen Scott
LENGTH: 92 lines
To hear the shills for Big Tobacco tell it, President William Jefferson Clinton has gone too far - TOO far - by giving the Food and Drug Administration the nod to regulate tobacco. Clinton has directed the FDA to regulate cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products as delivery systems for the drug nicotine. Among other things, the FDA intends to prohibit tobacco companies from pitching cigarettes and smokeless tobacco to the young.
What the shills for Big Tobacco are saying is garbage. Government should have been regulating tobacco all along.
That tobacco is unregulated is easily explained. The clout of the megabillion-dollar tobacco industry has assured the protection of tobacco by presidents, governors, Congress and state legislatures. Not until now has anyone in Washington authorized the FDA to lay a hand on tobacco, although the FDA's assignment is to regulate commercial products that enter the human body - in the case of tobacco, in the form of smoke, a chaw or a dip.
The FDA is a child of the 1906 Federal Food and Drug Act. The agency oversees the licensing, manufacturing, labeling, advertising and selling of food, drug, cosmetic and other products. Tobacco's immunity from FDA oversight since the agency's inception is an anomaly.
A shameful anomaly, especially since 1964, when U.S. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry endorsed medical studies' findings that smoking causes cancer.
Tobacco sickens and kills because the nicotine it contains is highly addictive, with the result that smokers, chewers and dippers smoke, chew and dip excessively. The overwhelming majority of adult nicotine addicts were hooked when children; at least 90 percent of cigarette smokers try repeatedly to quit. Millions never succeed.
Three thousand American children start smoking each day, and 1,000 will shorten their lives considerably by taking up smoking. They will be sick more often than nonsmokers and die of lung cancer (or other cancers), or heart and circulatory diseases, or emphysema. . . .
Promoting the health of the populace through education and appropriate legislation, regulation, procedures and infrastructure that prevent illness and accidents is a governmental mission of the highest importance.
The swiftest gains in health and longevity flow from unglamourous, undramatic federal, state and local programs from which we constantly benefit but largely take for granted.
Such measures constitute the most-cost-effective means of checking diseases and enhancing safety at home, at work and while traveling.
The lives improved and extended by public-health-and-safety-related decrees, projects, programs, practices and products are beyond calculating. Incalculable also are the payoffs in happiness, productivity, prosperity and, indeed, quality of life generally.
Consider what life would be like without well-ordered water and sewer systems and trash-and-garbage services; pollution controls; immunizations and disinfections; screens in windows and mosquito-control activities; quarantining and isolating patients with certain communicable diseases; lung x-rays and scratch testing for tuberculosis; meat and restaurant inspections; nutritional school meals; pasteurized milk and other foods; regulation of food processing and food-handling, prescription and non-prescription drugs and alcoholic beverages; pest control; lessons in personal hygiene. . . .
Public safety is enhanced by building, fire and sanitation codes; traffic laws and signals; improved highway design and road construction; safety glass, seat belts and air bags in motor vehicles, workplace-safety rules; advances in fire prevention and fire fighting. . . .
Clinton's ordering the Food and Drug Administration to prohibit tobacco companies from pushing cigarettes at children aims to reduce the more-than-400,000-a-year premature deaths exacted by nicotine addiction. Big Tobacco says what the FDA will try to do - over the industry's spirited resistance - won't work.
But we shall see, provided Big Tobacco's litigation and lobbying to block FDA action fail. Fewer and fewer American grownups smoke because so many understand smoking's hazards and want no part of the weed. More than 42 percent of U.S. adults smoked in 1965; less than 25 percent smoke today.
Despite its vehement denials, Big Tobacco targets children with advertising and giveaways and promotional events that make smoking seem as cool as R.J. Reynolds' Joe Camel. The FDA's task will be to persuade some children never to light up. Mission impossible? Clearly not.
The FDA proposes to ban cigarette and smokeless-tobacco sales to anyone below age 18 and single-cigarette and ``kiddie pack'' sales to anyone; prohibit vending-machine, mail-order and self-service sales of tobacco; bar distribution of free samples of tobacco products and brand-name advertising at sporting events on products not related to tobacco use (such as T-shirts and hats); forbid outdoor advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds; restrict ads in publications that reach significant numbers of teens and preteens to black-and-white text only; hold manufacturers, distributors and retailers responsible for sales to minors; require tobacco companies to underwrite a $150 million anti-smoking ad campaign.
The nicotine pushers are going all out to keep the FDA from acting. The battle in the courts as well as on Capitol Hill could drag on for decades.
But Big Tobacco is on the losing end of this one: The truth about tobacco is ugly, and that truth continues to free millions from nicotine addiction. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB