Smoke & Ire

At a House Commerce Committee meeting last week, several critical Congressmen talked tough to Federal Trade Commission Chief Paul Rand Dixon. They wanted him to forget his plan to make cigarette manufacturers place poisonlike warning labels on their product. It was too late, replied Dixon, who then shocked everybody by disclosing that the order had already been written. Distributing copies to the Congressmen, he remarked somewhat sarcastically: We had our printers working all night in case you wanted one." The timing was surprising, and so was the harshness of the order. If the FTC got its way, the cigarette makers would have to print health warnings on all their packages by next Jan. 1, and write them into all advertisements by July 1, 1965. While the wording was left up to the companies, the FTC made clear that the messages would have to indicate clearly that "cigarette smoking is dangerous to health and may cause death from cancer and other diseases."

Speaking for the industry, Reynolds Tobacco Chairman Bowman Gray called the order " unwise, unwarranted." Tobacco men charged that the FTC had exceeded its authority, made plans to test the case in the courts. They got plenty of support from Southern Governors and Congressmen. Officials in the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Health, Education and Welfare wondered whether they should have jurisdiction in the matter instead of the in dependent FTC -- or whether any labeling rule should be enforced at all. Even some of the sharpest critics of the industry questioned the legality and propriety of the order. Surgeon General Luther Terry, whose fact-finding body triggered it all with the report last January on smoking and health, doubted that the FTC had jurisdiction, suggested that the matter be turned over to the Food and Drug Administration.

With a long dispute certain in the courts and Congress, Dixon himself agreed that the FTC order would not take effect for years--if ever. Meanwhile, climbing sales of cigarettes showed that Americans may be enjoying it less now, but they are smoking more than before the Surgeon General's report.

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