Napping on the Cigarette Issue

Florida officials are justifiably satisfied with the tobacco settlement they reached over the weekend. The agreement, under which cigarette companies will compensate the state $11.3 billion to settle a suit over smoking-related health care costs, follows the pattern of a settlement in Mississippi earlier this summer and could be replicated soon in Texas and possibly Minnesota, where trials in similar cases are pending. However, these agreements, while of major importance, will not substitute for the more comprehensive federal regulation of cigarettes that only Congress can put in place.

Lawsuits like that brought by Florida’s attorney general and similar ones in 39 other states pushed the industry, which had never paid a penny to tobacco claimants, to the bargaining table last spring. The resulting proposal for a $368.5-billion national settlement of all the state claims, while it has serious weaknesses, would supersede the state deals and produce major public health gains. Yet congressional inactivity undermines that likelihood. No legislation has yet been introduced to make the June accord national law.

At first glance, settlements by individual states appear to erode the chances for such national legislation. In addition to compensation for the costs of treating sick smokers, Florida was able to extract important concessions from the industry, including agreement to end all outdoor advertising, the release of 400 confidential documents and an admission by the head of Philip Morris that smoking might have caused as many as 100,000 deaths. The states next in line at the courthouse door will surely try to build on Florida’s gains, perhaps deflecting attention from the national agreement, possibly even derailing it. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

The Florida deal, significant though it is, is no substitute for strong federal control of nicotine, the addictive substance in cigarettes. Congress has the power to give that control to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ending the special treatment that exempted cigarettes from FDA authority and allowed Big Tobacco to prosper. And only when nicotine is controlled will smokers have an easier time quitting and young people be less likely to get hooked. In this direction lie the most meaningful public health gains for individual states.

The deal approved in June by the 40 attorneys general and the tobacco industry does not go nearly far enough toward such regulation. This failing and others have led to the perception that the national agreement is more favorable to the industry than to consumers. But nothing prevents Congress from acting, and each multibillion-dollar state settlement should embolden the lawmakers to do what’s right for the nation as a whole.