Blowing smoke - unwarranted attacks on the tobacco industry by Food and Drug Administration chief David Kessler - Editorial

ONE OF the more absurd shows staged in Washington recently was an inquisition of chief executives of the cigarette companies. representatives Henry Waxman, Mike Synar, and Ron Wyden, who called the hearings, were not really interested in what their witnesses had to say. The CEOs were there simply as props in a cheap political theater--dummies to be berated and belittled. When they tried to answer questions they were cut off. The questions themselves were frequently just abusive statements.

Interestingly, the hearings were orchestrated by a supposed civil servant, Food & Drug Administration chief David Kessler. The first thing to note is that tobacco is none of Dr. Kessler's business. It isn't food, obviously. The "drug" in Food & Drug Administration refers to pharmaceutical drugs for which a therapeutic medical claim is made. Tobacco has always been, and formally still is, the regulatory province of the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF). That agency, however, disgraced itself last year with its farcical, and tragic, attempt to become a commando-style slayer of religious cultists. In the ashes of Waco, David Kessler saw an opportunity to expand his regulatory turf.

Even though nine-tenths of smokers don't die of lung cancer, there are clearly health dangers in cigarettes, dangers so constantly warned about that smokers are clearly aware that these dangers are the price they pay for the enjoyment and relaxation they get from smoking. As mortals we make all kinds of trade-off between health and living. We drive automobiles knowing that forty thousand people die in them in the U.S. each year; we cross busy streets, tolerate potentially explosive gas in our homes, swim in fast-moving rivers, use electricity though it kills thousands, and eat meat and other foods that may clog our arteries and give us heart attacks and strokes. All the Kessler demagoguery about the tobacco industry killing people could be applied with similar validity to the automobile industry, the electric utilities, aircraft manufacturers, the meat business, and more.

But Dr. Kessler is basing his bid to regulate tobacco on the claim he has evidence that tobacco companies are manipulating nicotine levels to produce addiction in smokers. The claim does not stand up to the most cursory scrutiny, as those congressional hearings last week showed. In efforts to reduce the hazards of cigarettes while still offering a product smokers will buy, the manufacturers have been steadily reducing the tar their cigarettes produce. Average tar in a cigarette has declined from 40 mg. in 1950 to 12 mg. now. The nicotine has gone down too--from 2.8 mg. to 0.8 mg. If the companies were intent on maintaining an addiction, then they would not have been reducing the supposedly addictive ingredient. Nor would forty million people have quit smoking since 1974, as they have done, according to the Feds' own data. Nor were they put into treatment. They just stopped. They were sloughing off a pleasurable habit, not breaking an addiction.

Dr. Kessler has attacked the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company for not using processes, on which it has patents, that completely dissociate tar and nicotine. Reynolds's CEO, James W. Johnston, explained in the congressional hearings that the company is working on such cigarettes but has not been able to make one that smokers will buy. Smokers apparently get enjoyment from some nicotine--the way most coffee drinkers get pleasure from the caffeine, or drinkers enjoy the alcohol in whisky. Reynolds's "Premier" in 1988 and Philip Morris's "DeNic" around 1990 were serious attempts to sell low-tar and low-nicotine cigarettes respectively. Both failed to attract smokers, and instead of being welcomed by the health crowd, they earned their sponsors new tirades of abusive demagoguery The supposed health advocates don't really want healthier cigarettes. They want to stop cigarette smoking.

David Kessler has a characteristically disingenuous line. He agrees that simple prohibition of cigarettes is not feasible but says he wants to regulate them. That could be a distinction without a difference, since the Kessler mindset--arrogant, paternalistic, and quite contemptuous of individual rights--would regulate cigarettes into unsaleability. Such a result would spawn a black market in unregulated cigarettes just as surely as prohibition. It is a formula for another war on drugs with all the accompanying crime, corruption, and waste.