In the volatile debate on tobacco,
there are no guys in white hats.

By Stefanie Ramp

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
-- Matthew 19:24

One of the trendiest soapboxes for our collective social conscience is that the tobacco industry commits murder in the name of greed. The tobacco debate has become a political tightrope similar to abortion. If one doesn't emphatically hate tobacco, one is accused of perpetrating injury on unsuspecting youth.

The anti-tobacco faction's propaganda about tobacco's evil ways is nothing short of a gift from the re-election gods for politicians. However, the truth is, anti-tobacco zealots prosper from the tobacco industry. In fact, the industry provides so many billions of dollars for state and local governments, health organizations, arts, education and charitable causes that no sane politician would ever really want to slaughter such a sumptuous cash cow by banning tobacco. Rather, they've realized that the key is to bleed the industry until it's almost dead and then revive it just enough to rape it a little more.

In a recent interview with the Weekly, John Singleton of R.J. Reynolds remarked, "What the government seems to be trying to do is to take all the profits out of the industry to use for various government programs and leave us with virtually nothing in the way of profits. What incentive is there to be in the industry if you're going to do all the work, but all the money goes to the government?"

The anti-tobacco legislation known as the McCain bill, which was killed by the U.S. Senate in June, contained a provision outlawing the tobacco industry's use of all human and animal characters in its advertising and marketing materials. The provision wasn't about the infamous Joe Camel campaign, which allegedly targeted the youth market; R.J. Reynolds voluntarily axed Joe a year ago.Had the McCain bill passed, the provision would have unconstitutionally forced RJR to permanently remove the 80-year-old camel logo from Camel cigarettes. Another McCain provision would have allowed the state and federal governments to make 15 times more on each pack of cigarettes than the individual tobacco companies do.

In the volatile debate on tobacco, there are no guys in white hats; on one side, there are big corporations peddling a harmful, but legal product, and on the other side, an equally greedy band of lawyers, politicians and lobbyists who gorge themselves on tobacco money while simultaneously condemning the industry that created the largesse. It's a draw who would have the harder time getting into heaven: the money-grubbing lawyers and pols or Joe Camel?

If legislation similar to the McCain bill is eventually passed and tobacco is either bankrupted or banned, this country should be prepared to face a re-run of Prohibition, complete with a devastating black market and rampant organized crime. Such legislation will also be responsible for an economic crisis affecting millions of Americans, and millions of tobacco dollars which fund art, education and community development will be lost. Furthermore, teenagers will still find a way to smoke. Personal responsibility, not bureaucracy, should dictate good health, and to that end, political posturing, self-righteousness and greed should not be tolerated nor should it be mistaken for beneficent crusading.

The Great Tobacco Money Grab

"Save the children" has been the indignant cry behind the anti-tobacco faction's push for legislation to financially punish and effectively control the tobacco industry. But if deterring underage smokers were really the desired effect, why did politicians sacrifice the industry's cooperation towards that end by adopting measures in the McCain bill solely designed to satiate political greed?

The federal government made more than $6 billion in tobacco excise taxes in 1997. The combined domestic profit of the top five tobacco companies--Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard and US Tobacco--was approximately $7 billion, the same amount the state governments made in excise taxes. Currently, the federal excise tax on a pack of cigarettes is 24 cents, while the average state tax is 38 cents, explained Steve Duchesne, a consultant with Sawyer Miller who works with the tobacco industry. That's 62 cents a pack, which is five times more than what the individual tobacco companies make per pack of cigarettes.

Considering that the tobacco industry has the highest corporate taxes of any industry in the world, the total tax revenue generated by the tobacco industry is extraordinary. As recently reported in the New York Press, the government is expected to make $65 billion in tobacco taxes in 1999. Despite this staggering sum, legislators have been pushing for more tobacco money to stuff in their already fat coffers. Greed is responsible for sinking the McCain bill, and all the tobacco industry's concessions to deter minors from smoking went down along with it.

Facing a mounting pile of lawsuits, tobacco CEOs sat down with 40 state attorneys general last year and in June 1997, agreed on the terms of a tobacco settlement. The tobacco industry agreed that it would part with $368.5 billion over 25 years to compensate states and class-action plaintiffs for the cost of smoking-related illnesses. This figure included $60 billion in punitive damages to specifically punish the tobacco industry for being deceptive about the negative effects of smoking and the addictive quality of nicotine.

The settlement required the tobacco industry to pay for nationwide anti-smoking campaigns, including programs targeting young smokers. If youth smoking didn't decrease by 30 percent in five years, 50 percent in seven years and 60 percent in 10 years, the industry would be fined up to $3.5 billion annually. Waiving it's First Amendment rights, the tobacco industry agreed to stringent advertising regulations, including a ban on billboards, storefronts and the Internet. A provision of the settlement also prohibited tobacco companies from sponsoring any sporting events and outdoor concerts.

In addition, the industry agreed to Food and Drug Administration regulation of nicotine as a drug, and the FDA would have the option of banning nicotine completely after 2009. The tobacco industry also agreed to disclose all findings on the toxic and addictive qualities of cigarettes, to publish the amount of tar, nicotine and other ingredients and to put stronger warning labels on cigarette packaging.

More than any other, this provision of the agreement had the potential to protect minors as well as adults from smoking-related health problems. Openly admitting the hazardous nature of cigarettes would have enabled the tobacco industry to develop and market the so-called "safe cigarette," a project that's been considered but left in limbo for fear of insinuating that cigarettes currently on the market are unsafe. If anti-tobacco factions, including state and federal governments, were really more interested in health than wealth, the development of a safe cigarette would be the obvious answer.

In return for all of these concessions, the tobacco agreement granted the industry partial immunity from further litigation. Although individuals could still sue tobacco companies, the agreement, if made into law, would settle all current and future state lawsuits.

Nine months after the agreement was signed, it was drafted into legislation and introduced as the McCain bill, named after its chief sponsor Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain. Betraying the original settlement agreed upon, the bill increased the $368.5 billion in compensation to $516 billion and almost completely stripped the tobacco industry's legal protections. In addition, the McCain bill called for a $1.10 per-pack federal tax (following President Clinton's lead, Democrats were pushing for a $1.50) increase.

According to several Wall Street analysts who testified before Congress, the McCain bill would actually cost the tobacco companies approximately $861 billion in real world dollars, which would effectively bankrupt them. During a May 20 colloquy between Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Dianne Feinstein of California, both renowned for their anti-tobacco sympathies, the senators supported the Wall Street analysis and discussed the further inequities and constitutional infirmities of the McCain bill.

Realizing that its acceptance of the bill would be suicidal, the tobacco industry pulled its support, or more aptly, its tolerance, of the McCain legislation in April. As Hatch and Feinstein suggested, without tobacco's consent, the bill's advertising regulations would be an infringement on the industry's First Amendment rights to free speech. The look-back penalties for failing to meet youth-smoking reduction targets would also raise constitutional questions without tobacco's cooperation. Most importantly, the two senators agreed that tobacco's support was vital to successfully combating underage smoking.

Said Hatch, "It doesn't take anybody on the side of the tobacco companies three minutes to know that if they face the Commerce [McCain] bill, in which they had no part in drafting, during which they were not even allowed to provide input, for which they gave no consent to waive their constitutional rights, then it is a lot cheaper for them to litigate the matter with a good prospect of winning than to pay over $800 billion in the next 25 years."

Butchering the Tobacco Cash Cow

If the McCain bill had passed, the government would have made half a trillion dollars in tax revenue from its tax increase provision. Proponents of the $1.10 increase extolled its necessity to deter minors from buying cigarettes, but this flimsy guise has crumbled away in recent months revealing the bill's true greedy colors. As quoted in The New York Times, Republican Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri confessed with disgust, "This [$1.10] is a massive tax on low-income Americans, and it is used to proliferate the bureaucracy of this Government."

Not surprisingly, politicians weren't even subtle in their maneuvers to butcher the tobacco cash cow according to their own interests, and the McCain bill was soon bogged down with a multitude of amendments designed to meet this end. An amendment sponsored by Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) earmarked a third of the potential tobacco tax revenue to provide a tax break for married couples. It also allowed self-employed individuals to deduct the full cost of their medical insurance premiums from their taxes. And although it proposed dumping more money into our nation's impotent but politically correct "War on Drugs," the Gramm amendment banned the life-saving use of federal funds for needle-exchange programs intended to combat the spread of AIDS via intravenous drug users.

Had Gramm's amendment not died with the rest of the McCain bill, newlyweds and self-employed individuals undoubtedly would have appreciated the donation to their nest eggs, but it's in poor taste for the government to be so generous with other taxpayer's money. It's also curious that although deep concern over the staggering financial burden of smoking-related illnesses was one of the catalysts for the tobacco agreement and resulting legislation, a sizable chunk of tobacco money was destined to fund programs completely unrelated to tobacco.

Even philanthropic organizations ostensibly operating with the public's health in mind, such as the American Cancer Society and the American Health Association, were susceptible to the acrid whiff of tobacco money. According to a Pioneer Press article, David Ahmann, president of the American Cancer Society, Minnesota Division, said ACS does not support tobacco prohibition--a wise stance considering the tobacco settlement earmarked $500 million annually for ACS and AHA.

According to three Wall Street analysts who testified before Congress, if the McCain bill had passed, the annoying but relatively innocuous looking $1.10 sales tax increase would have blossomed into $5 packs of cigarettes by 2003. Quipped Hatch, "I guess we should ask whether the American public understands that what we may actually be talking about under the Commerce Committee [McCain] bill is a $50-per-carton price for cigarettes."

The Lawyers Hit Tobacco Paydirt

Some of the most rabid anti-tobacco crusaders are the lawyers hired by the states to beat a fat settlement out of the industry. According to the National Association of Attorneys General, there are currently 40 states plus Puerto Rico involved in lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Righteously screaming for justice, these high-profile legal machines will be making multi-billions for serving up tobacco's head on a plate.

It all began with Richard Scruggs who made his name suing over asbestos many years ago. Scruggs is a close personal friend of Mississippi's Attorney General Mike Moore, and in 1994 when Mississippi became the first state to file a lawsuit against the tobacco industry, guess who was retained as the star lawyer?

Scruggs now represents 24 of the states suing the tobacco industry. He works on a contingency fee and stands to keep 25 percent of what each state wins in court. Even if the settlements decrease drastically and the 24 states average only $2 billion each (Texas just settled for $15.3 billion, Florida for $11.3 billion), Scruggs stands to make $12 billion. That's nearly twice the tobacco industry's annual domestic profit going to one man.

Something else to consider: Richard Scruggs is Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's bother-in-law. While Sen. Lott has done an admirable job of staying out of the tobacco fray, it would seem more appropriate for Scruggs to avoid eclipsing his family members so Lott could fulfill his duties as a civil servant unimpeded. Lott is not alone; Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D-CA) husband works for a law firm which is also involved with the tobacco litigation. Of course, the leaders of the free world haven't set much of an ethical example, considering the First Lady's brother, Hugh Rodham Jr., helped negotiate the 1997 tobacco settlement and has worked on and prospered from several state lawsuits.

In the $15.3 billion Texas settlement, lawyers were contracted to receive 15 percent. Lester Brickman, a professor at Cardoza Law School at Yeshiva University, was hired by Texas and concluded that lawyer's fees would amount to $92,000 an hour. Brickman helped draft the Gorton amendment, which was added to the McCain bill on June 16 by a 49-48 vote. Barely approved, this amendment limited lawyers fees on a staggered scale of $500 to $5,000; those lawyers who worked on the earliest lawsuits stood to make the most money. This amendment was pulled from the legislative floor the following day, June 17, along with the rest of the McCain bill.

According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, based on information released July 1, by the Federal Election Commission, lawyers and law firms are Sen. McCain's top industry contributors. And while one of the anti-tobacco brigade's favorite gripes is that tobacco has bought political influence, Sen. McCain himself received $20,500 in tobacco money from 1991 to 1996. While this isn't an astronomical sum, it sticks in one's craw that McCain accepted any money at all from the very industry he's crusading against.

The Mayor of Cornwall's Warning

According to the non-partisan Congressional Joint Tax Committee, even if the McCain legislation hadn't actually bankrupted the tobacco industry, it would have created a black market generating $4.5 billion annually, enough to put it, in terms of a single company, at No. 334 in the Fortune 500. Future legislation similar in expense and structure to the McCain bill (which will undoubtedly surface in the coming months) will do exactly the same thing.

During the May 20 discourse between Hatch and Feinstein, the former pronounced, "There is no question in my mind about it. If we pass this legislation [McCain bill] the way it is currently written, we are going to have a black market like you have never seen before."

Hatch then recalled for his colleagues the mayor of Cornwall's plight when Canada increased its taxes by 150 percent between 1984 and 1994. Testifying before Congress, the mayor of Cornwall warned policymakers about the plagues of the Canadian black market, much of it run by organized crime. The mayor and his family received death threats, not to mention the fact that citizens couldn't go out at night for fear of random gunfire. In response, Canada was ultimately forced to lower it's cigarette tax.

According to a 1997 article in the Richmond Times, The Royal Canadian Mounted Police also testified before congressional committees warning the United States about their problems with tobacco contraband. In 1994 at the peak of the tax increase, the Mounties seized twice the number of illegal cartons than they currently do, and in Ontario and Quebec, the proliferation of illegal cigarettes began to rival legal distribution before the tax was lowered again.

Sen. Feinstein advised that an estimated 40 percent of Canadian cigarettes were contraband from the United States. By 1994, a carton of cigarettes was close to $50 in Canada, the projected price-per-carton had the McCain legislation passed. The tax increase in Canada (and the proposed increase in the United States) was supposed to deter smokers. But as Brown & Williamson's Steve Kottak recently explained to the Weekly, despite the $5 Canadian packs, government studies indicated that few people had actually quit smoking.

As Sen. Hatch pointed out, even without the McCain legislation, it is estimated that one out of five packs of cigarettes in California is contraband. Feinstein confirmed that in her state law enforcement officials reported that there is now a substantial black market, and port authorities advised that California loses
$20 million to $50 million a year in tax revenue due to the current black market. California is not the only state currently affected by a black market. Washington state, which has one of the highest tobacco taxes in the country at 82 cents per pack, reported that about 27 percent of its market was contraband, costing the state $110 million each year in lost taxes. Michigan has had similar problems since it raised its tax from 25 cents to 75 cents per pack. In 1995, the Detroit News reported that the state was bombarded with a dramatic increase in smuggling, and organized crime was responsible for an estimated 30 percent of the black market. According to Michigan tax officials, the state lost $144 million in revenue and only a marginal decline in smoking was reported.

The states' black markets also cost the federal government dearly because, as Kottak remarked, a single tractor/trailer can hold approximately 700,000 packs of cigarettes. If that cargo slips through the cracks without paying the 24 cent federal tax, the government loses $168,000 on a single load.

In response to the Weekly's inquiry about the potentially disastrous black market resulting from his legislation, Sen. McCain's office referred us to a statement made by Treasury Deputy Secretary Lawrence H. Summers to the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 1998. Summers proposed a "sound regulatory system," which would include state licensing of "all entities in the distribution chain for tobacco products," the "marking, branding and identification" of tobacco packages and "penalty and administrative provisions" that would allow "uniform enforcement of controls over distribution." While the proposal is logical, transferring it from paper to the streets and generating enough money to fund it--yet another tax increase?--could be stickier than Summers optimistically suggests.

Summers downplayed the Canadian black market warnings due to Canada's smaller cigarette market and the country's access to contraband sources originating in the United States. He also suggested that Canada didn't develop an "effective licensing and enforcement regime" until it was too late.

Using Summers' own logic, won't Mexico, where a pack of cigarettes costs the equivalent of about one U.S. dollar, be a potential contraband source particularly for California and other border states? In his statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Summers maintained that the U.S. Customs Service "has the expertise and the experience to deal with imported contraband products."However, it would not be surprising if tobacco, a legal product, could infiltrate the country considering illegal drugs are quite capable of doing so.

As RJR's Singleton explained to the Weekly, Mexico is already a problem. "We've found an awful lot of illegal cross border sales going into Texas and California particularly out of Mexico. It's a real issue. It's one of the items we pointed out when we were talking about the problems we had with the McCain Senate bill," he said.

What About The Unemployment Rate?

In a recent interview, Philip Morris' David Quast estimated that the price increases demanded by the McCain bill, along with the smuggling that would result, would have cost 1.2 million jobs across the nation. RJR's Singleton suggested that the McCain bill or similar legislation would sacrifice 449,426 core-sector jobs (growing, warehousing, manufacturing and distribution) with annual compensation of almost $10 billion; another 221, 976 supply-sector jobs with approximately $5.5 billion in compensation would also be at stake.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the economic damage would be even more extensive, affecting an estimated 600,000 tobacco-dependent jobs in the southeast alone along with the 189,000 jobs related to tobacco export.

Retailers, such as convenience stores, would also be adversely affected. According to the National Association of Convenience Stores, tobacco is their top-selling merchandise accounting for almost 30 percent of product purchases. NACS encouraged its members to oppose the McCain legislation and will do so again if similar legislation is proposed in the future. Marc Katz, NACS's vice president of Government Relations, warned that the McCain bill would be "ruthlessly efficient" at closing "thousands of small businesses who are on the front line of the war to eliminate underage tobacco use."

In a March 31 letter to Sen. McCain, Katz wrote, "Your bill could legislate our industry, which is comprised of mostly small businesses, out of existence."

While many of the individuals who depend on tobacco for their livelihood could conceivably find other work in a similar field, bankrupting or banning the industry would flood the job market, drastically increasing unemployment rates. The tobacco industry boasts many highly qualified but highly specialized employees. "We have a lot of employees in our manufacturing area--our makers and packers as we call them--who might have 20 or 30 years of service," RJR's Singleton remarked. "What are they going to do? Those people are going to have substantially more difficulty finding new jobs."

Tobacco affluent states are also going to feel an economic depression if the industry falters. As reported in The New York Times, tobacco generates $2.5 billion annually in Virginia alone, providing for 120,000 farmers and other workers. The Cincinnati Enquirer revealed that Burley tobacco, a key ingredient in most cigarettes, is grown by 160,000 families in all but one of the state's 120 counties; it accounts for $1 billion annually.

The Enquirer also ran the results of a poll administered to 400 of Kentucky's tobacco farmers and jointly commissioned by Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the Kentucky Health and Agriculture Forum. Eighty four percent responded that health groups concerned about smoking are a threat to tobacco farmers and 76 percent responded that restrictions on smoking pose a threat to farmers. Seventy three percent believed the federal government should provide economic development assistance to communities which depend on tobacco as a major industry.

While half-hearted overtures have been made in this direction, comprehensive programs have been overshadowed by anti-tobacco zealots' taste for a good witch hunt. However, Sen. Wendell Ford (D-Ky.) did introduced an amendment to the McCain bill which proposed to spend $30 billion to compensate growers for decreased demand for their crop, provide economic development assistance to tobacco states, pay for higher education and provide dislocation assistance to workers involved in manufacture, processing or warehousing of tobacco. Ford's amendment went south with the rest of the McCain bill, but hopefully, future tobacco legislation will follow Ford's humanistic lead.

The Teen Smoking Smokescreen

Hacking through the rampant weeds of political rhetoric, one discovers that the real solution for underage smoking is developing better regulations for tobacco retail. As B&W's Kottak pointed out during our interview, the tobacco industry doesn't sell a cigarette to a person. It sells its product to wholesalers and distributors who then sell them to retailers. The clerks behind the counter at 7-11 sell cigarettes to minors. Quipped Sen. Hatch, "I get upset when some suggest that we can help children by thinking up literally every measure we can to punish the tobacco companies and then loading them into one constitutionally-infirm bill."

According to Sen. Feinstein, there are 890,000 underage smokers in the United States, and RJR's Singleton noted 47 million Americans smoke. Ninety-eight percent of the smoking population is adult. Furthermore, of the 2 percent of underage smokers, the majority are in high school and are teenagers, not children. While minors should be discouraged from making health-altering decisions until they are mature, teenagers shouldn't do a lot of things, but that fact has never stopped them before, and it never will.

This seems like an appropriate moment for a confession; I am a smoker. I started smoking eight years ago when I was 16. I wasn't persuaded to take up the habit because the Marlboro Man was cute or because I thought Joe Camel was cool. I did it because I was bored and because it was an act of rebellion I couldn't be arrested for. I don't blame my addiction on the tobacco industry; I knew, as anyone with even a modicum of common sense knows, that nicotine is addictive and that cigarettes are bad for you. If I die of lung cancer, I will have no one to blame but myself. In 1952, British researchers published evidence of a link between smoking and lung cancer. Anyone who developed lethal, smoking-related illnesses because they were honestly ignorant of the health hazards associated with cigarettes is dead by now. Individuals need to start taking responsibility for their own actions; this country's social decline will persist for as long as people continue to make bad choices and then blame it on everything and everyone but themselves.

As one of the "children" who apparently needed saving, I find the rhetoric surrounding the tobacco debate to be melodramatic verging on ludicrous. As quoted by The New York Times, our former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wailed, "I hope that the senators who derailed this [McCain] bill today lose sleep every night listening to the sound of children taking their first puff and the sound of emphysema and cancer patients gasping for their last breath." While resonating a certain poetic glow, Koop's imagery conjures 5-year-olds taking smoke breaks in between snack and nap time. And any politician who thinks they have the right to legislate another adult's health should secede from the union and start a dictatorship.

The Times Magazine reported that Koop, in response to tobacco's fear of bankruptcy at the hands of the McCain legislation, scoffed, "The addicted consumer is the best consumer. They'll never go bankrupt. They'll pass through their costs to their addicted customers." A prominent and vocal "save the children" warrior, Koop's logic here contradicts the alleged purpose of the massive tax increase proposed by the McCain bill. If addicted consumers, including those underage, won't be deterred by the increased cost of tobacco, the tax hike's only purpose is to raise more money for the government.

While Koop's overwrought war cries are a bit much, the crusade of Patrick Reynolds, R. J. Reynolds' grandson, is downright scary. As he explained in a recent interview with the Weekly, he was a smoker until his father and oldest brother died of smoking-related illnesses. In response, P. Reynolds started the Foundation for a Smokefree America in 1989 and now heads TobaccoFree.org and lectures to youth. It is Reynolds' belief that there are two major reasons why teens smoke. The first is that based on Coca-Cola marketing research from the early '90s, teens suffer from "an acute sense of diminished expectations." The other is a supposed increase of smoking in films.

In his lecture to teens about their bleak future, he discusses leadership and ethics saying, "Where did I get my strong faith in the future? I listened to, and saw, what many others believed and felt. For example, ancient Jewish prophets predicted that a Messiah would one day come to save the world. Prophets in the Christian Bible predicted that, right when times on Earth were darkest, Christ would come back again and save mankind. Afterward, these prophets said the Earth would enjoy 1,000 years of peace and harmony." This angle screams ulterior fundamentalist agenda neatly nestled in the more politically correct posturing of anti-tobaccoists. And you know, for one-quarter of the American population, that 1,000 years is going to be a real bitch if the Messiah ushers it in with a smoking ban.

In his discussion of smoking in films, P. Reynolds has all the arrogant pomp of a zealous right-winger. "We can give producers, directors and stars who glamorize smoking on screen a dose of healthy shame," he opines. Last time I checked, it wasn't a random celebrity's job to raise a nation of teenagers. God forbid parents take the time and responsibility to educate and monitor their kids on positive choice-making.

The tobacco companies have, in fact, responded to social pressure and made efforts to deter underage smokers. On July 10, 1997, RJR announced its voluntary decision to eliminate the Joe Camel character from all advertisements, despite which, there has been no decline in underage smoking. Out of philanthropy or spin control--does it matter as long as it's effective?--the industry has also initiated programs to eliminate the 2 percent of minors who smoke, which common sense suggests are not financially worth the bad publicity they cause.

RJR's Singleton explained that his company, in conjunction with Philip Morris, B&W and others, has implemented a program called "We Card" which trains clerks on the finer points of carding etiquette. The service is provided at the industry's expense to any store in the nation that's interested. Specific to RJR is the "Right Decisions, Right Now" program which makes information and posters (with no RJR identification) available to schools.

No one wants to see minors make decisions they will regret later on. Upon signing the 1997 tobacco agreement, the industry agreed to fund smoking-cessation and education programs along with accepting infringements on its First Amendment rights in an effort to further deter minors from smoking. Ultimately, it was legislators who didn't accept these compromises and turned their backs on underage smokers in the name of money.

Will Government Replace Tobacco Philanthropy?

Despite being rigorously scorned as evil seducers of innocent youth, the tobacco industry has had a positive affect on much of this demographic through its philanthropic funding. In 1997 alone, B&W donated more than $5 million to programs and organizations focusing on education and economic development with a strong focus on its local community in Kentucky. Through the Louisville Urban League, B&W has helped open new schools and has improved economic conditions for minorities at the local and national levels.

From 1989 to 1993, RJR, located in Winston-Salem, N. C., donated more than $36 million towards educational programs, minority communities, the arts, community development and is a leading supporter of the United Way.

Philip Morris is renowned for its contributions to the arts and helps support more than 100 dance companies worldwide in addition to funding theater and exhibitions. Philip Morris has also invested heavily in other areas; since 1990 it has given more than
$130 million to fight hunger and malnutrition and $11 million to HIV/AIDS-related programs since 1986. It also funds comprehensive programs for education, environmental issues, domestic violence, disaster relief and community diversity.

The tobacco industry provides hundreds of millions of dollars which improve opportunity and quality of life for Americans. If tobacco were banned, bankrupt or even badly bruised, this funding would be cut off. The government would either have to raise more tax money to replace tobacco money or these programs would cease to exist.

Whose Life Is It, Anyway?

Although no one can recommend a smoking habit in good conscience, as RJR's Singleton remarked, "At some point, you have to let people live their lives in a way that's reasonable...You exercise adult discretion and judgment and then you accept the consequences of the decisions that you make.

"I think that's called being grown-up," he continued. "It's sort of what this country was based on--allowing individuals to exercise their freedom and be adults."

Tobacco isn't America's sole social disease; alcoholism and obesity are incredibly expensive and extensive social epidemics as well. During a recent interview with the Weekly, Vincent P. Miller, who heads up Berkeley Economic Research Associates (BERA) and who testified in the Mississippi lawsuit, stated that the direct medical cost of smoking-related illnesses was $56.3 billion in 1993, while total costs have reached $100 billion annually, according to the American Cancer Society. C. Everett Koop's 1994 "Shape Up America" program reported that obesity costs more than $100 billion annually, and the National Institute of Health revealed that alcoholism costs America
$148 billion annually.

These are total costs to society not to the government. The Health Care Financing Administration, which directs Medicaid and Medicare, had no idea how much smoking-related illnesses cost the two government-funded programs and told the Weekly that it doesn't keep those types of figures. The estimated expenses used in state lawsuits are generated by outside sources like BERA. BERA estimated that total smoking-related Medicaid costs were $9.96 billion annually. Medicare expenses were not estimated, possibly because smokers theoretically could be the cheapest recipients since they tend to die earlier than those in good health. I wonder how much smokers save the government in Social Security?

Upholding a lower court decision, the Iowa Supreme Court (the highest court so far to do so) ruled in April that the state can't sue the tobacco industry directly to recover damages calculated with statistical models for reimbursement of Medicaid pay-outs. Instead, the state must prove loss or injury to each individual smoker, and this precedent can and will most likely be cited in other cases.

If the government is going to legislate good health, it should at least be consistent. As Sen. Hatch quipped, "I just hope that the public health lobby does not next focus its attention on the problem of obesity, or we may have chocolate ice cream at $20 a gallon, a $10 package of potato chips, or a $5 slice of apple pie, sold by prescription no doubt, if we continue to follow this type of bureaucratic reasoning...And I didn't even talk about cheeseburgers!"

That smoking seriously challenges one's good health is no secret; this fact is stated clearly on every pack of cigarettes. However, freedom of choice for each individual is one of the essential concepts our democracy is built upon. Stricter regulations should be pursued to deter underage smoking, and that should be the focus for future tobacco legislation, not squeezing every last dime out of a legitimate, legal industry.

Related story: Local Limits on Tobacco