Fags Forever

Last week’s House passage of a bill to place tobacco products under the regulatory authority of the Food and Drug Administration looks at first glance like a no-brainer, especially given its hefty list of backers, which includes everyone from the American Cancer/Heart/Lung etc. societies to the anti-smoking group Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Society of Chest Surgeons and the ‘Justice and Witness Ministry’ of the United Church of Christ. All the iconic liberals are on board, too, from Ted Kennedy to Henry Waxman, along with some retired cabinet secretaries, a former CDC director, a surgeon-general, three French hens and a partridge in a pear tree. And the tobacco-state pols are predictably hostile to it.

So why are so many people in the tobacco-control community deeply worried? The lusciously titled ‘Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act’ would empower the agency to regulate the contents of tobacco products, publicize their ingredients at long last, prohibit flavored cigarettes, require much larger warning labels and restrict marketing campaigns, especially those geared toward children. Isn’t this good?

For a hint about why it might not be, consider why the Philip Morris parent company, Altria, is a firm backer of the bill. A top Philip Morris priority, according to an internal document, is to ‘stop the decline in, and start re-building, the social acceptability of smokers and smoking in society’. The bill is a step in that direction.

The worldwide tobacco industry has invested considerable energy and funds in something called ‘corporate social responsibility’ to try to show themselves in some kind of positive light while steadily donating millions to charity and the arts. The idea is to admit that while a given company may market a controversial ‘product’, it itself somehow is not.

Tobacco Free Kids has been a big proponent of the bill from its inception, and although the tobacco-control community is careful to keep its internal disagreements as quiet as possible, it’s not hard to find some rather pointed comments about the origins of this bill to put tobacco under the FDA in TFK’s secret negotiations with PM dating back to 2001.

The arguments against the bill are several: Jeffrey Wigand, the real-life figure played by Russell Crowe in The Insider, says the FDA is totally inadquate to regulate what is on its plate now, much less add tobacco products. ‘One only needs to read the recent history of their regulatory competency’, he wrote acidly.

Another fear is that FDA oversight of tobacco will translate in the popular mind—no doubt subtly helped along by the tobacco companies—into FDA approval of same. After all, that’s what the FDA does: it reviews substances used for human consumption and either approves or prohibits them. Other commentators say that at the very least the measure ‘perverts the mission’ of the FDA by giving it supervisory responsibilities without—for the first time ever—empowering it to ban the poisonous substance involved: nicotine.

Given the industry’s expensive and ongoing legal problems, critics also warn that FDA supervision/regulation of tobacco products may be used in court by the companies as a shield against lawsuits. We are just doing what the government says we can do, might go the argument, certainly a plausible, if devious, one.

Given all the distractions we’re facing these days, it’s no wonder this dubious and strangely uncontroversial measure is flying toward passage. It would be a shame to find that the tobacco industry plying its deadly trade with greater impunity as a result of a laxly-designed ‘anti-tobacco’ measure.

[Curious parties can read more at Anne Landman’s hair-raising account, ‘The Untold Story of How & Why Philip Morris is Pushing for FDA Regulation’ at the Center for Media and Democracy website www.prwatch.org]