Smiles in a Smoky Room

The cigarette industry spent a cool $40 million in the past three months to defeat the modest tobacco bill that once was. By Wednesday, when the bill was declared dead, suffocated with unrelated tax cuts and anti-crime measures, the captains of the industry must surely have been pleased with their investment. Indeed, this Congress is the very best that tobacco money can buy.

The core value of the original bill drafted by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain was lost long before Wednesday. As first introduced last November, the bipartisan bill largely was modeled on a settlement reached last June between cigarette makers and the attorneys general of 40 states. Congressional approval was required for key parts of that $368.5-billion package, which would have resolved smoking-related lawsuits and funded an array of anti-smoking measures in return for relief from attacks in court.

McCain’s bill could have been considered radical only when compared with the kid-gloves treatment that cigarette companies have gotten from Congress for so long, an expression of members’ gratitude for the industry’s continuing campaign largess at election time. Still, the bill would have done some real good. For one thing, granting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a measure of the regulatory authority over nicotine that it already has over any other drug could have forced the industry to produce less addictive cigarettes--and thereby cause fewer smoking-related illnesses and deaths.

But even McCain’s bill was too much for many pliable members of Congress who, with their Big Tobacco benefactors whispering in their ears, shamefully recast a sensible public health measure into some sort of threat to American industry. Cigarette tax hikes designed to discourage teenagers from smoking were portrayed as a “big government” attack on low-income families who could no longer afford their smokes. And this while somber members of Congress fairly crowded each other off the podium pledging to cut teenage smoking.

At the same time, Democrats pushed for a higher per-pack tax increase, and anti-smoking activists sought broader marketing limits.

Republican leaders insisted that the bill would pass only if cigarette tax hikes were offset with a cut in the marriage tax penalty, a bizarre bit of horse trading. Funds to enforce laws against teen smoking had to be matched with more money to fight illegal drugs, the GOP majority insisted.

Yet when all that and more was added, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) engineered the bill’s demise by arguing, with a straight face, that “we’ve lost sight of the original noble cause of just dealing with teenage smoking and drug abuse.” The honorable senators lost sight of something, all right.

On Thursday, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, anxious to deflect criticism that the Republicans are beholden to Big Tobacco, announced that the House next month will take up a new version of the bill, possibly without any cigarette tax hike and little new government spending. We’ll see.

The industry may one day rue its victory. After agreeing to pay $36 billion in recent settlements with four states, the companies still face suits filed by 36 others, including California, plus 15 class action suits on behalf of allegedly addicted smokers and a flood of new claims filed in the last year. But for now the American people are the big losers. This month 90,000 more teenagers will try smoking, and this year 418,000 more Americans will die early--and needlessly--from their habit.