GRASSROOTS
NEWSLETTER
July-August
2007
Volume 6 Number 1
FDA Regulation of Tobacco For some industries, corporate responsibility is more
than a public relations maneuver. When
science exposes hazard, products change or are discontinued. Fast food will
sell you a salad today and your car is equipped with air bags. Ingredients are listed into minutiae to
evaluate the quality of a product. This
has decidedly not been the case with the tobacco industry. The tobacco cartel has known for over 5
decades that cigarettes killed people. Rather than remedy or diversify, they
have mastered the art of obfuscation, marketing, and political manipulation to
the point of a federal RICO conviction in 2006.
After 50 years, the industry’s largest profiteer, Phillip Morris, is now
on the verge of having a product approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This
accomplished not by changing the product, but by changing the rules under which
it is deemed safe by the FDA.
In 1998 a 5-4 the Supreme
Court decision overturned nascent FDA authority over tobacco because the FDA,
invested with the safety of products, would have no choice but to ban
tobacco. The court ruled that Congress
had not given the FDA authority to ban tobacco. Current legislation is Phillip
Morris’ idea of authority.
Yet the irony is that the
pending legislation is also supported
by several major health groups.
Significantly, the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids has been instrumental
in negotiating without other groups, sometimes in secret, with the tobacco
industry since 2001 according to the Center for Media and Democracy PR Watch.
Eric Lindblom
with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids writes, “Like new smoke-free laws, new
tobacco tax increases, and increased government spending on tobacco control,
implementing the FDA legislation will not put Philip Morris and the rest of the
tobacco industry out of business -- but it will work effectively with those
other tobacco control measures to prevent and reduce tobacco use and its harms,
save more lives, and reduce suffering. Isn't that enough?”
Many tobacco free advocates
think not. Some are concerned that there
is nothing to prevent marketing cigarettes as “FDA approved” while others
cannot fathom any alliance with Phillip Morris even if the rest of the industry
opposes it. The general attitude is that since PM, the maker of Marlboros, has
over 50% of a market share today, this FDA bill would cement that profit margin
as a long term strategy. 70% of tobacco
is grown and marketed overseas.
While major public health
groups have joined Phillip Morris in lobbying for this bill there are
impressive voices against it.
“You would be taking the most
lethal consumer product and, in effect, sanctioning it under the very same
agency that is charged with the safety and effectiveness of our medicine and
our food,” says Alan Blum, the Gerald Leon Wallace Chair in Family Medicine at
the
Stan Glantz
at the
Michael Siegal
from the Boston University School of Public Health says this legislation,
“contains an
escape clause that would allow Philip Morris or any other tobacco company to
appeal to Congress to overturn any major regulation that the company does not
like. The legislation explicitly gives Congress the ability to review and, by
majority vote, to overturn, within 60 days, any major tobacco rules promulgated
by FDA, resulting in such rule having no force or effect.”
Dr. Ruth Malone with UCSF
voices concern that, “A healthy tobacco trade is antithetical to public health,
but this language (in the bill) suggests otherwise.” Dr. Malone continues to
identify the division in the public health community as one of those that sees
the major issues as “youth smoking and altering the ingredients in the product
to make them less addictive or less harmful”
and those who “feel that addiction is not only physiological, but
cultural and social; that for products this deadly to remain for sale on every
street corner requires a kind of blindness and that it is that blindness that
must be challenged; and that the issue is not primarily youth smoking, but the
ongoing promotion of deadly products.”
Also unsettling are internal tobacco industry documents outlining the 1996
Project Sunrise where manipulating the current divsions in the public health
community were actually planned. Tobacco free activists need never be apologetic about
challenging tobacco. To date, the industry would have you think
about public health issues re tobacco as a matter of personal rights, ignoring
corporate or professional culpability for marketing a deadly addictive
drug.
Lastly, few can deny the
tremendous victory the Master Settlement Agreement has become for the tobacco
industry. Only 4 states spend the minimum recommended by the CDC for tobacco
control.
A decade ago, University of Arkansas
for Medical Sciences Emeritus Professor of Toxicology and Pharmacology, Dr.
Karl Ginzel, dismissed FDA authority over tobacco as “...essentially
all we are laboring and fussing about now is how we can let them continue
selling death with impunity, albeit in diminishing numbers. If this type of
mindset had prevailed at the end of the Second World War, we would probably
have stopped our advance on the beachhead at
Many public health advocates,
including the head of the FDA, oppose this limited FDA authority to regulate,
and approve for sale, a product that kills over 450,000 Americans annually.
Much of the pending bill has virtue in identifying ingredients and addressing
marketing issues, but perhaps does not go far enough or may be the wrong venue
for a much needed real federal authority over tobacco.
TFMC cannot, and will not,
lobby for specific laws. An individual should take seriously moral opposition
to a rogue industry that has more lobbyists than the auto industry and educate yourself for the most effective ways to challenge
tobacco. We’ll help.