Kids Targeted in GOP Tobacco Bill

House Republicans unveiled a skeleton tobacco plan Thursday that would punish kids for smoking but omit many of the hallmarks of other proposals that the tobacco industry had found onerous, including price increases, tougher government regulation and more severe financial penalties.

The measure, which was released in outline form with details to follow next month, centers on an anti-smoking advertising campaign. However, the campaign’s size has not been determined, and Republicans said they do not know how it would be funded.

GOP lawmakers also would require states to enact laws making teen smoking a crime punishable by the loss of a driver’s license, notification of parents and mandatory community service.

The bill was unveiled just a week after Senate Republicans killed a massive anti-smoking measure that would have attacked the problem of underage smoking by raising the price of cigarettes by $1.10 a pack over five years and strictly regulating the tobacco industry.

Public health experts, Clinton administration officials, Democratic lawmakers and some anti-smoking Republicans derided the proposal as thin gruel that would not quell teen smoking.

Indeed, the GOP’s slimmed-down bill appeared to do so little to regulate the tobacco industry that it left its authors vulnerable to the criticism that they are in the pocket of the industry--the very accusation that they hoped the bill would forestall.

Republican lawmakers, who billed their effort as “common-sense legislation that helps teens,” seemed not to share the alarm of many Americans about the rising number of teens who are smoking.

“Teenagers are going to smoke. It’s one of those rites of passage,” said Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Republican Conference and a heavy smoker himself.

Far more worrisome than tobacco, many Republicans said, is the rise in teenagers’ use of marijuana. Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), who chaired the GOP’s tobacco task force, said that tobacco use and marijuana use are “twin problems,” with marijuana “significantly more dangerous.”

Although marijuana use has risen more sharply than cigarette use during the last six years among middle school and high school students, tobacco use remains at least 50% more prevalent in every age group, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study of teen use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco.

Pryce said she hopes public health groups will embrace the GOP plan, but that seems unlikely. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, a Republican, said the GOP proposal appears to “fall woefully short of anything that might be construed as a meaningful first step.”

White House officials said they could not take the GOP bill seriously since it failed to meet any of President Clinton’s five principles for tobacco legislation that he would sign into law.

Those include a price increase of at least $1.10 a pack, full regulatory authority over tobacco by the Food and Drug Administration and requirements that the cigarette manufacturers change their advertising and marketing practices.

“It’s hard to take seriously,” said Bruce Reed, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council. “It won’t do a thing to reduce teen smoking. It lets the tobacco industry completely off the hook. I think House Republicans will be ridiculed for doing so little.”

From the White House standpoint, among the most objectionable features of the GOP outline is enhanced responsibility for the Federal Trade Commission, rather than the FDA, to monitor tobacco advertising aimed at children.

The FTC, which has authority over tobacco advertising, historically has found it difficult to prosecute cases against the industry. That is in part because it must find ad campaigns “false and misleading,” a difficult test to meet, before it can prosecute.

The administration has asserted and is defending in court the proposition that the FDA already has authority to regulate nicotine as a drug and cigarettes as drug delivery devices.

The tobacco industry had no comment on the Republican proposal.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.