A LAW ordering the Food and Drug Ad ministration to regu late cigarettes is moving through Congress — but is it truly good for public health? Hint: Cigarette maker Altria (formerly Philip Morris) is one of the bill’s strongest supporters. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has already gotten the measure passed in the House; Sen. Ted Kennedy is on track to get it through the Senate soon.
The bill would give the FDA regulatory authority over tobacco — but in the process, it gives cigarettes a virtual government stamp of approval, while impeding consumers’ access to less-harmful alternative forms of tobacco.
The FDA will claim to be monitoring, safety-testing or otherwise overseeing cigarette production. Yet it’ll be doing nothing to decrease the vast harm cigarettes cause — because quitting smoking, not some imagined minor tinkering with cigarettes’ chemical composition, can reduce that harm.
What pleases the cigarette makers? The bill would impose high legal hurdles to marketing newer, competing, less-harmful forms of tobacco — including snus.
Snus is a smokeless form of tobacco, used as small pouch in the mouth, that delivers nicotine to those unable to overcome the addiction — but offers the fix without the vast risks of inhaling smoke and tar.
Snus isn’t completely harmless — some studies suggest it carries a slight oral-cancer risk. But this is minuscule compared to the numerous forms of cancer (including a higher risk of oral cancer) and other diseases caused by smoking, which remains the leading preventable cause of death.
Lung cancer rates have plummeted in Sweden since its nicotine cravers began switching in large numbers from smokes to snus.
Yet we may soon find ourselves living in a world in which snus is all but impossible to market and, perversely, the public thinks the FDA is making sure cigarettes are “safe.”
This would be the most ludicrous pretense of protecting the public since we slapped a tiny warning label on cigarette packs — declaring, in effect, that everyone would henceforth know what they were getting into when they took their first puff.
The so-called “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act,” concocted by one anti-tobacco group in cahoots with Altria, will actually lead to more deaths from smoking:
* People will assume cigarettes have gotten safer.
* The bill focuses attention on “chemicals” in cigarettes, as if we could remove a few known impurities in cigarettes to make them harmless. In fact inhaling tobacco smoke, whether regular, “light” or herbal — and unregulated or regulated — will remain just as deadly.
* The law gives FDA the authority to reduce (but not eliminate) the levels of nicotine in cigarettes. But if nicotine is reduced, smokers will smoke more to get their desired jolt. And nicotine is not the harmful component, so the damage will actually increase as smokers inhale more deeply.
* Fewer people will hear about smokeless alternatives like snus under this bill than would under alternative bills (such as North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s bipartisan bill) that would permit cigarettes and snus to be marketed on an equal footing. (If anything, the smartest move for public health would be to favor snus marketing over cigarettes.)
Even recent FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach opposes the idea of giving FDA regulatory authority over a deadly product like cigarettes — and thereby sending the phony message that cigarettes can ever be safe.
Altria is hoping Congress will endorse just that lie — and pass this law that, its pretenses to the contrary, will encourage smokers to keep on smoking.
Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org).