Tobacco Laws: Don't weaken FDA's rules
By WILLIAM D. NOVELLI
For Scripps Howard News Service
Last week, executives at the Liggett Group, maker of Chesterfield and other cigarettes, publicly admitted smoking is addictive and that their products cause cancer.
While that tells the public nothing it didn't already know, it carries a significance beyond the long-awaited confession that cigarette makers have been feeding the public a steady diet of distortion.
After years of closing ranks and lying about the dangers of smoking, the tobacco industry no longer presents a unified front. Liggett has knocked a hole in the industry's defenses that can't be mended with the old, thin argument that research fails to prove their products are harmful.
The facts about tobacco have been known for decades to scientists, to public policy makers, to the public and, perhaps more than anyone else, to the tobacco companies.
Here they are again: Smoking-related illnesses kill more than 400,000 Americans each year. Smoking overwhelmingly begins in childhood - of all current smokers, 89 percent picked up the habit at or before age 18. Today, the average smoker lights up for the first time at age 13.
That the tobacco companies market their lethal products to kids has long been suspected and evidence to support it has been mounting. Now, the director of the Liggett Group, Bennett LeBow, confirms it.
"Liggett acknowledges the tobacco industry markets to 'youth,' which means those under 18 years of age, and not just those 18-24 years of age," LeBow said as part of his company's court settlement.
Yet Congress has allowed tobacco companies to go largely unregulated for decades; with little to stop them, they have been allowed to prey upon impressionable children easily swayed into making destructive choices.
Even now, it is unclear whether Congress will let stand the proposed FDA rule labeling nicotine as a drug and restricting the marketing of tobacco products to children. With the issue of the FDA's jurisdiction over tobacco products pending before a federal judge in Greensboro, N.C., there is talk of bills that could severely weaken these much-needed restrictions.
How have the tobacco companies continued to wield so much influence in the face of such compelling evidence? They have a weapon in their arsenal even more addictive than nicotine: money.
Consider:
-- Tobacco companies contributed more than $10 million to congressional campaigns over the last five election cycles. They gave another $11 million in controversial "soft money" to both political parties.
-- Philip Morris alone spent more than $11 million lobbying the federal government in just the first half of 1996.
-- Cigarette companies spend almost $5 billion annually on advertising and marketing.
With billions of dollars at stake, is it any wonder a recent survey of members of Congress found nearly one in four senators and one in five representatives still swallowing the tobacco industry line that it doesn't market its products to children?
Now that Big Tobacco has finally admitted its Big Lie, the question remains: What will Congress, the advertising industry and the public do about it?
The FDA rule should stand. One tobacco company has stopped lying to the public. Don't let the rest of them continue to buy our silence.
William D. Novelli is president of the National Center for Tobacco-Free
Kids in Washington, D.C.