Clinton Hints at Giving FDA Tobacco-Regulation Power : Health: Remarks come after agency finds nicotine is addictive. AMA charges deception by one manufacturer.

In two potentially major blows to the tobacco industry, President Clinton signaled Thursday that he was inclined to grant the Food and Drug Administration broad new authority to regulate tobacco products, while the American Medical Assn. published several articles suggesting that the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. was aware that cigarette smoke contains cancer-causing substances and that nicotine is addictive.

The FDA, in documents delivered to the White House but not yet made public, has concluded for the first time that nicotine is an addictive drug and proposed some preliminary steps to limit the availability and promotion of tobacco products to minors.

Clinton, in brief remarks during a Rose Garden ceremony, said he shared FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler’s concern about the rise of smoking among teen-agers and believed that government had a role in trying to curb it.

“We ought to do more about that than is being done, and I’m willing to do that,” Clinton said, “but I want to see exactly what their recommendations are.”

Meanwhile, next week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. offers fresh evidence that B & W appeared to believe that secondhand smoke contains carcinogens and that lawyers discouraged in-house scientists from discussing potentially damaging laboratory research.

The 1,384 memos, reports and letters were analyzed by Stanton A. Glantz, a UC San Francisco bioengineer and staunch smoking foe, and his co-workers.

Glantz received the first papers last year from an anonymous source known only as “Mr. Butts,” possibly an allusion to the talking cigarette in the “Doonesbury” comic strip. The other sources were a scientist from B & W’s parent company, BAT Industries of the United Kingdom, and the House subcommittee on health and the environment, chaired by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), which conducted hearings last year, during which some of the documents became public.

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The documents published in JAMA “provide the most detailed and candid look to date into one tobacco company’s internal workings surrounding the smoking and health ‘controversy,’ ” the UC researchers wrote.

Speaking at a news conference in Chicago where the medical journal was released a week early, the AMA’s president, Dr. Lonnie R. Bristow, said the articles reveal “the predatory nature of the tobacco industry.”

Citing the “damning evidence against tobacco,” the AMA called for 14 measures to control tobacco use, including a ban on all cigarette advertising, stiff penalties for selling tobacco to minors, and FDA oversight of tobacco products as drugs.

The AMA publication “will greatly strengthen the FDA’s effort to regulate cigarettes,” predicted John Banzhaf, a George Washington University law professor and head of Action on Smoking and Health.

The FDA’s Kessler, in a statement issued Thursday, called smoking a “pediatric disease.” Every day, he noted, 3,000 children become regular smokers, and almost 1,000 of them eventually die from smoking-related illnesses.

Kessler, who has rejected an outright ban on cigarettes as politically untenable, is pressing for stronger measures to discourage young people from starting smoking.

Kessler is in essence asking Clinton for political permission to use his power as FDA commissioner to declare nicotine a drug and cigarettes a drug-delivery system, and to issue regulations regarding their sale and use. Congress and the tobacco industry could challenge the FDA’s jurisdiction over tobacco or try to overturn the regulations it issued.

Officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said that Kessler favored a ban on vending machine sales of cigarettes, restrictions on tobacco industry advertising aimed at young people and stiffer penalties for merchants selling cigarettes to youths.

Analysts said news that the FDA may regulate cigarette companies cast a pall over the market. Tobacco shares that fell on the news included Philip Morris, down 1 3/8 to 75 3/4, RJR Nabisco, off 1/2 to 27 1/2, Loews, off 1 3/8 to 123 and UST, off 1/2 to 29.

Although the tobacco industry is willing to accept some restrictions, it vehemently opposes labeling nicotine an addictive drug and granting the FDA new powers to regulate it.

“Philip Morris and tobacco industry critics agree on one thing, at least--kids should not smoke,” the tobacco giant said in a statement. But the company said that Kessler was asking Clinton for authority to do much more than restrict sales of cigarettes to minors.

“Commissioner Kessler apparently has a secret plan to impose more and more government regulation from Washington--regulations that go far beyond youth smoking and strike at the heart of the right of adults to make decisions for themselves,” the company said.

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Louisville-based B & W, the nation’s third-largest tobacco company, accused the AMA of presenting biased evidence, saying that publication of the “stolen documents is little more than a cherry-picking exercise designed to advance its stated mission to eliminate smoking.”

A spokesman for B & W, which in the past has denied it knew of such harmful effects, said, “We continue to believe that nicotine is not addictive because over 40 million Americans have quit smoking.”

Glantz replied, “People quit shooting heroin and no one says it’s not addictive.”

In a three-page chart, the UC San Francisco researchers juxtapose B & W’s private statements on the safety and addictiveness of tobacco with their public ones. In 1963, the researchers say, a B & W vice president and general counsel wrote privately, “We are . . . in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.”

That contrasts with congressional testimony given last year by B & W’s chairman and CEO, Thomas Sandefur, who said, “I do not believe that nicotine is addictive.”

The researchers also describe the legal “tactics” that they believe B & W has used to fend off tobacco liability suits. One crucial tactic, they argue, was to keep in-house scientists from explicitly acknowledging tobacco’s hazards.

In a confidential 1970 memo, a lawyer retained by B & W seemed to coach company scientists to avoid certain phrases. The memo cited as dangerous a scientist’s statement that a chicken-embryo test “might be showing genuine carcinogenic effects.”

As for the much-debated issue of secondhand, or side-stream, smoke, the UC researchers draw on a 1982 BAT meeting in Quebec City. “We should keep within BAT . . . thoughts on the biological activity of side-stream,” the researchers quote the minutes as saying. “Biologically active,” the researchers contend, is an industry euphemism for “carcinogenic.”

Anti-smoking forces applauded the AMA for throwing its weight behind the UC San Francisco papers. “It gives us new momentum,” said attorney Don Howarth of the Los Angeles firm Howarth & Smith, who is one of the plaintiff counsels in the class-action suit against tobacco companies now pending in New Orleans.

Smoking is the nation’s leading preventable cause of death, killing about 400,000 people annually, according to the federal government.

The issue poses delicate political problems for the President because the current Congress is deeply hostile to new regulations, and a crackdown on the powerful tobacco lobby would cost him support in tobacco-producing areas in Southern and border states.

Republicans in Congress quickly attacked Kessler’s attempt to expand his regulatory authority as an effort to usurp Congress’ lawmaking power and as a declaration of economic war on tobacco-producing states.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Thursday that the FDA had “lost its mind” and that Kessler had no business picking a fight over tobacco when the nation was losing its war on more dangerous substances such as cocaine and heroin.

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“Kessler and the FDA are out of control,” said Rep. Richard M. Burr, a freshman Republican from Winston-Salem, N.C., in the heart of tobacco country. He called on Clinton to “rein in Mr. Kessler or ask him to resign.”

Waxman, a longtime foe of the tobacco industry, said it was an “outrage” that Republicans in Congress were attacking Kessler and calling for his resignation when he was simply “trying to do something about the single most important cause of death and disease that is preventable in this country.”

Monmaney reported from Los Angeles and Broder from Washington. Times Chicago bureau researcher John Beckham also contributed to this story.