Congress finds the willpower to regulate cigarettes
Monday, April 14, 2008 7:15 AM PDT
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E-mail this articleSeven years after a presidential commission unanimously recommended that tobacco be regulated as an addictive drug, Congress is moving legislation that would give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration new authority to regulate tobacco products. The House Energy and Commerce Committee last week approved a bill allowing the federal agency to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes. A Senate panel already has cleared similar legislation. We're encouraged that nicotine may finally be brought under government regulation.
For decades the FDA resisted calls to regulate nicotine or tobacco. The agency insisted that it had no regulation authority so long as tobacco manufacturers avoided making claims that their products were providing health benefits. The agency reversed itself in 1996, classifying tobacco products as "drugs" and "devices" subject to federal regulation. But four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court said that the agency had it right the first time. The court ruled that Congress would have to grant the regulatory authority.
There have been repeated attempts in Congress to grant the authority in the years since that 2000 ruling. None went far. But the political equation changed when Democrats won control of Congress in 2006. And, too, Republican opposition has softened with new evidence that the tobacco industry may have manipulated nicotine content.
Indeed, the regulatory bills approved by Senate and House committees this year were introduced not long after the release of a 2007 Harvard School of Public Health study revealed that the industry may not be living up to its 1998 agreement with the states to help reduce smoking among young people. The study's principle finding was that nicotine levels in cigarettes had steadily increased between 1997 and 2005. Harvard researchers found that increases in smoke nicotine yield per cigarette averaged 1.6 percent each year. That's a total increase of 11 percent over the seven-year period.
Legislation moving in the House and Senate would give the FDA the power to force reductions of nicotine levels in cigarettes. It also would allow the agency to require more informative health warnings on tobacco products. This proposed authority is only sensible. Nicotine is a highly addictive drug. Tobacco-related illnesses claim more than 400,000 lives and cost the nation around $94 billion in health-care bills every year, according to the American Cancer Society. Smoking is the number cause of preventable deaths nationally. As such, its drug, nicotine, ought to be tightly regulated.
Will this even work. wrote on Apr 14, 2008 10:05 AM:
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