The greater threat is from cigarettes
From both sides Would the anti-tobacco bill gouge the poor and boost a black market, or save children's lives?

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On the long list of political atrocities against the poor, raising the price of cigarettes ranks pretty low.

Yet that is a key argument some congressional conservatives are using against legislation to hike the cost of cigarettes by $1.10 a pack over the next five years. It would be too harsh on low-income smokers, they say.

They also fret about big government, taxation and the risk of devastating the tobacco industry, but this sudden compassion for the poor inspires their most passionate rhetoric.

OK, then, if pricing a serious health risk out of reach of the needy is truly a disadvantage, let's weigh it against the dent a hefty tax hike would make in the next generation of smokers.

Tobacco use among American teens is up by nearly a third in the past six years, thanks largely to skillful advertising campaigns. Lawsuits have shaken loose stacks of embarrassing internal documents that contradict the laughably feeble claims by tobacco executives that they don't target kids.

A Philip Morris memo as early as February 1983 observed an ``encouraging upward trend'' in youth smoking.

Why wouldn't they be encouraged? If people don't start smoking as teens, they rarely start at all. Years later, they quit -- 400,000 of them a year by death -- while the tobacco industry thrives.

That's the reason for federal legislation, debated this week in the Senate, to raise the price of cigarettes ultimately to over $3 a pack and to require manufacturers to curb teen smoking in exchange for limited immunity from liability lawsuits.

Facing suits by 41 state attorneys general, tobacco companies cooperated briefly in the search for a negotiated solution, then walked out -- a tactic consistent with their history of deception and callous arrogance.

At present a workable, bipartisan middle is allied behind the legislation that conservative Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain sponsored and President Clinton supports.

Ideologues on the right and left may yet unravel it. If so they'll gain an election year campaign issue. But they'll lose the chance to address a major health peril facing our children.

And by the way, if heavy cigarette taxes hit the poor the hardest, then it's today's poor children whom they will benefit the most.

Doug Floyd/For the editorial board