IS IT REALLY A GOOD DEAL?

By RICHARD KLUGER

A third of a century has passed since the first U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking persuasively assembled the scientific case on the lethal effects of the habit. Yet the rest of the Federal Government, deftly manipulated by the powerful tobacco industry and fearful of antagonizing the industry's tens of millions of addicted customers, has allowed the cigarette to remain our most deadly but least regulated consumer product. Its manufacturers, meanwhile, doggedly denied that the ever mounting medical evidence against them constituted conclusive proof, yet insisted, with ultimate brass, that smokers had been amply warned of the health risks they might be running--and got the Supreme Court essentially to agree with them. As a result, Americans have prematurely lost 4 million collective years of life annually in our worst, if routinely accepted, public-health scandal.

Last week's proposed settlement between the industry and the public's representatives, if its often murky words can be satisfactorily translated into federal statutory language, gives real hope of at last reining in the cigarette makers' unconscionable conduct, in which the nation as a whole has too long been complicitous. Some key points to bear in mind about the deal:

It is tantamount to a rogue industry's confession of decades of malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance. True, most smokers have grasped that they were flirting with grave health consequences, but their awareness owed no thanks to the industry. Its Council for Tobacco Research and in-house scientists failed to undertake serious, sustained inquiry into the causal links between smoking and disease formation (no doubt out of fear that what they might find would put them out of business). Its Tobacco Institute picked apart every new Surgeon General's report and trivialized the damning findings of dedicated independent public-health investigators. And its executives, in what amounted to a premeditated conspiracy to disinform the American people, continued to deny what they and their scientists, according to a critical mass of internal documents unearthed during the past decade, knew to be true about the addictive and fatal nature of their product. By capitulating now, despite all its past success in defeating liability claims by victimized smokers, the industry is at least sparing the nation years of litigation that the companies were doomed to lose sooner or later and that might delay indefinitely the onset of vitally needed tobacco-control measures.

The punishment money is the least important part of the package. It cannot resurrect all those millions of dead smokers or cure those now terminally afflicted. Besides, current high cigarette excise taxes already cover much of the states' public-health outlay to care for sick smokers. The settlement price is really meant to put a dent in the American tobacco industry's bottom line. But by gradually jacking up the retail price of the 24 billion packs they sell in the U.S. annually and saving much of their present multibillion-dollar-a-year advertising, promotion and merchandising budget (thanks to restrictions on those outlays in the settlement package), the companies will be able to meet the $15 billion-a-year punishment cost without remotely jeopardizing their solvency.

Teenage smoking will not go away--the industry's survival depends on it. However, by making cigarettes less accessible and more costly to youngsters, by deglamorizing the habit through less seductive ads and a ban on brand-name promotions, and by stigmatizing it with a broad antismoking ad campaign paid for by the industry, the settlement materially strengthens the Clinton Administration initiative to discourage teen smoking. It is, in effect, a vigorous exercise in preventive medicine that is both sound public policy and shrewd politics. Remember, though, that kids smoke in part because it's dangerous, not in spite of it, and forbidden fruit, no matter how badly spotted, rarely loses its allure.

The crucial element is the extent of the FDA's regulatory control over the way cigarettes are manufactured and packaged. All the marketing restrictions in the deal will amount to little if the product remains as deadly as ever. And since the entire scientific case against smoking is premised on dose-related data (e.g., the stronger the yields of the harmful ingredients in each cigarette and the greater the smoker's total intake of them, the higher the risk of dying prematurely), all medical logic suggests that forcing the manufacturers to reduce the toxic potency of their product could significantly reduce the horrific toll it now exacts. Under the proposed settlement, the FDA is reportedly to be granted the power to modify cigarettes in this fashion over time--without the industry's fighting it tooth and claw or the need for congressional blessing of each new round of mandated yield reductions. Of vital importance as well, the FDA would be similarly empowered to require far more conspicuous and dire health warnings on every cigarette pack and full disclosure of its harmful ingredients.

Unless this empowerment--to control not only the nicotine content of cigarettes, already approved by a federal court, but their tar, carbon monoxide, carcinogenic flavorings and other additives as well--is a basic part of the deal and not conditioned on the FDA's having to meet evidentiary standards of the industry's devising, the whole settlement package is a toothless wonder and should be tabled. Even granted essential regulatory muscle, the FDA needs both the resolve to carry forward its regimen and the funding to do it properly; perhaps revenues from a higher federal cigarette tax should be earmarked for this purpose. Arguments that government-certified weaker cigarettes might only encourage youngsters to take up the habit, would-be quitters not to, and addicted smokers to consume more cigarettes to compensate for their reduced fix per puff cannot be airily dismissed. But failure to outlaw the present high-yielding brands is a far more perilous course.

Unless the legal fine print unduly favors the industry, there is no political downside for either party in embracing the deal. Bill Clinton has deservedly won wide public support by becoming the first avowedly antismoking President; it is Congress, so long under his party's control, that deserves public scorn for letting a dirty business get away with mass mayhem all these years. The lawmakers will now have the chance to redeem themselves, ideally without resort to the usual antiregulatory rhetoric from the present Republican majority. If government will not act effectively to protect the public health, how can its very existence be justified? Death, after all, is relentlessly nonpartisan.

Social historian Richard Kluger won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for his book Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris.