A Zogby International poll taken in August found two-thirds of Americans (65 percent) opposed to giving the Food and Drug Administratioin authority to regulate tobacco products, with almost half (47 percent) “strongly opposed.”
“These poll results show Americans want the FDA to concentrate not on tobacco, but rather on policing our food supply and our medicines,” pollster John Zogby said.
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FDA chairman Andrew von Eschenbach doesn’t want the added responsibility, either. He’s got a lot of stuff already on his plate, including making sure FDA-approved medicines don’t kill patients and keeping e-coli and other fatal bugs out of our nation’s food supply.
So does Congress listen to the public, or even heed the head of the agency that will have to do all the heavy lifting if this latest regulatory scheme is imposed on an already tightly regulated industry?
Of course not. The Senate version introduced by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., is under consideration in the Senate Committee on Health, Education and Labor.
For the record, I’m not a smoker and would never encourage anybody to start smoking because it’s clearly hazardous to one’s health. We’ve known this since 1964, when the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health issued a report based on over 7,000 scientific studies and articles that linked tobacco use with cancer, emphysema and other diseases.
We have laws requiring explicit labels on all tobacco products warning of the health dangers of lighting up. Many jurisdictions like D.C. have passed ordinances banning smoking in privately owned restaurants and bars. Unless you’ve been living in Tora Bora for the past 43 years, you’ve heard about the risks hundreds of times.
Really, people who still choose to smoke at this point can’t say they weren’t warned.
Tobacco remains legal, however, in large part because government officials have become addicted to the taxes generated by the $80 billion industry. For example, Congress planned to add a dollar to the current 61-cent federal tax on a pack of cigarettes to finance SCHIP expansion. Pundits soon figured out that between 2 and 20 million more people in the U.S. would have to be lured to start smoking in order to hit the estimated revenue projections.
How are people enticed to start smoking? By clever, expensive advertising campaigns, which mostly benefit Madison Avenue advert firms and the mass media. Like the Mafia, politicos gladly settle for their cut of the action, which big tobacco companies like Phillip Morris simply write off as the cost of doing business.
Speaking of PM, the Richmond-based tobacco giant is actively supporting the FDA bill even though all the other tobacco companies are working hard to defeat it, Ronald Milstein, senior vice president and general counsel of Lorillard Tobacco Co. of Greensboro, NC told us.
This makes no sense, unless you’ve read Examiner columnist Tim Carney’s book “The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money”- in which he explains how big companies often use government regulators to squeeze smaller competitors out of business. Putting the FDA in charge of regulating tobacco “wouldallow Phillip Morris to improve its first place position and crowd out smaller competitors,” Milstein acknowledged.
To summarize: Congress is working on legislation that a large majority of Americans do not want, legislation that will give extra regulatory powers to FDA, which it does not want. It would ultimately benefit the largest tobacco company in the U.S., which would then use the extra profits from its enhanced market share to buy advertising to entice millions more people to start smoking so they, in turn, can pay higher taxes to fund a health insurance program.
This is about as clear as a smoke-filled room.
