Saturday, June 27, 1998

Misguided try to control teen buying habits

While President Clinton may be frustrated at failing to pass a tobacco bill, his latest response to the tobacco industry is baffling.

He has directed the Department of Health and Human Services, as part of its National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, to determine annually the most popular brands of cigarettes among kids 12 through 17.

The government, if it really needed to know, could get this information right now, cheaper, faster and in more detail, by buying it from a reputable market research outfit.

The president's rationale for the survey is, "Parents, quite simply, have a right to know." Parents, despite what the president and their teen-age offspring think, are not that thick. They can find out, quite simply, by looking in the kid's purse or breast pocket.

Cigarettes are still a legal product, even though it's illegal for kids to smoke them, and including teen smoking in a survey about drug abuse would seem to trivialize the problem of illegal narcotics.

Also unclear is what the government will do with the information once it has it. Clinton says darkly, "Once this information becomes public, companies will then no longer be able to evade accountability, and neither will Congress. From now on the new data will help to hold tobacco companies accountable for targeting children."

The president justified this survey, as he now seems to justify all his policy initiatives, as being for the sake of the children and soared into rhetorical excess when he denounced those who voted against the tobacco bill as "anti-family."

This survey, in itself, will do nothing to curb teen smoking; it is pure public relations designed to keep the tobacco bill alive as a political issue. The Department of Health and Human Services has more productive ways of spending its time.