Tobacco should be regulated like the drug it is
Indian children where skull masks at an anti-tobacco rally in Calcutta.
Cigarettes are a potent delivery device for the drug nicotine. But unlike most other drugs in widespread use, nicotine isn’t regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
This week, the Senate began debating a bill that would change that. It would give the FDA authority over the production, packaging and marketing of cigarettes.
Similar legislation already has been approved by the House. Senators should quickly follow suit.
A decade ago, then-FDA Commissioner David Kessler tried to assert regulatory control over tobacco companies. But the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his bid, ruling that congressional authority was required.
More than 4.4 million Americans have died from tobacco-related causes since then, an average of 443,000 a year.
For each one of them, 20 suffer at least one serious tobacco-related illness. The direct medical cost of treating those illnesses is estimated at $96 billion a year.
Regulating Big Tobacco would help by curbing the industry’s heavy marketing, much of it aimed at teenagers and kids. It would prevent the purposeful manipulation of nicotine levels in cigarettes. And most important, it would prevent Big Tobacco’s fraudulent — and fraudulent is precisely the right word — marketing techniques.
On May 22, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia upheld a ruling that cigarette makers had lied for decades about the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke; that they conspired to mislead the public and that they marketed their products to people under 21.
The three-judge panel ruled that tobacco companies knew “that cigarette smoking causes disease, that nicotine is addictive, that light cigarettes do not present lower health risks than regular cigarettes … and that secondhand smoke is hazardous to health.” Yet they continued publicly to insist otherwise.
Tobacco companies say they’ve turned over a new leaf since the bad old days when they used to insist the science on smoking’s health effects was “unsettled.”
The truth is that tobacco companies have turned over enough new leaves to make a million cigarettes, yet they keep getting caught at their old tricks.
Industry documents show that cigarette companies paid to establish and sustain so-called “smokers’ rights” groups in the 1990s when the first indoor smoking bans were proposed. The industry coordinated “grass roots” opposition to those bans.
Arguments first orchestrated by industry groups more than a decade ago — years after they first became aware of the health effects of secondhand smoke — still are being aired by smokers rights groups in Clayton, where the Board of Aldermen is considering a clean indoor air bill, and on the commentary page of this newspaper.
Regulation would add to the workload at the FDA, which is underfunded, understaffed and overstretched. Lawmakers want to pay for a new tobacco division at the FDA by imposing a fee on tobacco companies.
Similar funding arrangements with drug companies are used to pay for FDA safety reviews of new drugs, an arrangement critics say makes the agency overly reliant on an industry it regulates. The fact that Philip Morris, the nation’s largest cigarette maker, supports FDA regulation worries many long-time public health advocates.
They’re right to be suspicious. To paraphrase former President Ronald Reagan, lawmakers
Wheres the rest of the article?
The war of drugs has worked so well. I’m sure regulation and making tobacco illegal will work just as well
Surgeon General Carmona admitted in his 2006 report that the air filtration machines installed by five Clayton restaurants that allow smoking might adequately address any possible risks of secondhand smoke exposure:
“The concept is straightforward: process a portion of the air locally and remove secondhand smoke constituents with commonly used devices mounted on ceilings. The devices use the principle of electrostatic precipitation to remove particles or a series of filters to remove particles and odors. New devices have become available recently and include ultraviolet-activated photo catalytic systems that oxidize vapor phase organic compounds. With the addition of filters to this configuration, these devices could also remove particles. However, widespread application of these systems to effectively control secondhand smoke exposure in buildings has not yet been demonstrated.”
Experience in St. Louis venues with such air filtration since 2006 clearly shows that air filtration works.
If the Editorial Board knows of a smokers rights group fighting the Clayton smoking ban, please put me in touch with them. All the opposition to the Clayton ban that I have seen has come from the 26 restaurants of the Clayton Restaurateurs Alliance and the Missouri Restaurant Association.
Caffeine anyone?
Control, control, control…next.
Surprise, surprise. Lawmakers cry and bemoan the dangers of smoking, but don’t ban the accursed product. Instead, they add a new layer of government funded by a new tax.
And if public safety officials are so concerned about the deadly effects of addictive substances, where is the outcry against alcohol? It has got to be one of the leading preventable causes of death, violence, sexual assault, and disability in the US.
To paraphrase an earlier pearl, “Follow the campaign contributions.
Using children to promote your cause, how cool and cowardly.
If you don’t like it, ban it and shut down the industry. You are so hypocritical when you whine about it then tax people up the arse to get your money.
Do you know who these taxes hurt most? Poor people and the working class. Since it is a drug, they won’t quit smoking to save the money, they will cut out other things like food for their family.
Don’t be cowards, either ban or lift your taxes.
To Think!,
My what an ironic name you’ve chosen to post under. You say-”Do you know who these taxes hurt most? Poor people and the working class.”
Yeah as opposed to incentivizing quitting. Let’s lower tobacco taxes so they can buy more cigarettes. They’ll love you for it, at least the tobacco industry will and so will the industry that supplies those Oxygen bottles and carts, so will their families. If Dad or Mom kicks off sooner we’ll get our inheritance sooner, and they won’t be around stinking up the house with their smoke and passing on their love and wisdom. Boy we can do without that.
Every time we raise the cigarette taxes a certain percentage of smokers quits, depending on the size of the increase. Fewer teenagers begin smoking, because they don’t have the money to spare. The population becomes healthier. I agree Think!, these results hurt the poor and working class….NOT.
it took some finding, because Bill Hannegan failed to provide a link this time, contrary to his usual good practice, but I managed to find his quote in question in U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona’s 2006 report “The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke.” It can be found on-line at http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/secondhandsmoke/report/chapter10.pdf (page 639).
Bill’s quote is textually correct but like all quotes it’s essential to know the context, and the immediately preceding paragraph, which Bill unfortunately omitted, provides it:
“With efficient heat recovery devices for the exhaust air, it is becoming less costly to increase outdoor air supply rates. Because most office buildings have conventional HVAC systems that force conditioned supply air to mix with room air to achieve comfort conditions, the strategy to accommodate nonsmoking employees or visitors would simply be based on dilution. However, if complemented with improved filtration of the return air, it is possible to achieve greater reductions of some secondhand smoke constituents beyond what dilution alone can accomplish (ASHRAE 1999).”
Note that it doesn’t talk about “removal” of secondhand smoke with the aid of the devices being promoted by Bill Hannegan, only of “greater REDUCTIONS of SOME secondhand smoke constituents” [my emphasis]. That is very different from the complete removal of an air contaminant already identified as toxic and tumorigenic 20 years or more ago [e.g. the U.S. Surgeon General's 1989 report: Table 8, p. 89, of "Reducing the Health Consequences of Smoking."].
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, Inc. [ASHRAE], which represents the HVAC industry, even released a standard in 2005 for Indoor Air Quality stating that secondhand smoke is not compatible with safe indoor air and that ventilation is not a solution. You can find the following on-line at http://www.ashrae.org/publications/page/621 , excerpted from a longer document:
“ASHRAE’s position is that the only way to effectively eliminate health risk associated with indoor exposure is to ban smoking activity,” Terry Townsend, P.E., ASHRAE president, said.”
For years, ASHRAE was cowed by threats of litigation from Big Tobacco if it suggested such heresy, and even had a tobacco industry rep. sitting on its Advisory Board. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. Science finally triumphed with ASHRAE, but unfortunately Bill Hannegan and his cohorts are doing their level best to dispute it.
The addictive power of nicotine to befuddle the brain is great indeed!
Hannegan acts like the Surgeon General has checked out the Clayton Restaurants - which is of course wrong. Also wrong is that the filtration is working - the restaurants smell bad, and that is they are crying “there is not enough business now” because we non smokers do not eat or drink there.
FDA was not allowed to regulate the tobacco COMPANIES because tobacco is only part of their business. FDA should regulate the drug nicotine and the other toxic ingredients of a cigarette or cigar, although this has nothing to do with a discussion of an indoor or public smoking ban ( regulation would apply to amounts rather than where ).
The tax argument is silly - if you want lower taxes ban all types of smoking products altogether anywhere and everywhere (which do Not advocate) and cut the military spending in half (the total annual military $ make these “bailouts” look like a drop in the bucket) and we would all pay so little in taxes every citizen would be overjoyed.
Mr. Pion, I didn’t supply a link because I received that section of the report by fax and had to retype it myself.
The head of the ASHRAE committee that drafted ASHRAE’s position on air filtration and secondhand smoke, Dr. Jonathan Samet, was also the senior scientific editor of Surgeon General Carmona’s report. I consider that a conflict of interest. Dr. Samet has the reputation of a partisan when it comes to the smoking ban issue. I am told at least some of the engineers at ASHRAE fought against such a statement but Dr. Samet’s faction prevailed. Really, how can air filtation and ventilation work for enclosed parking garages and welding shops but not bars? That makes no sense.