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EDITORIAL
Ashes to ashes, butt to butt
 he tobacco deal that Rep. Tom Bliley said was "on life support" officially passed away yesterday. Reporters at the National Press Club got the death notice from R.J. Reynolds head Steven Goldstone. "I have told my colleagues in the industry that effective today I no longer see any purpose in working toward the June 20th national settlement." Philip Morris, Lorillard and Brown & Williamson followed with similar announcements not long afterward.
President Clinton was unmoved. Just because the deal is dead doesn't mean that Congress can't proceed with legislation to reduce teen smoking, he said. Minnesota Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III went further, saying, "The fact is Congress doesn't need this outlawed industry's permission to enact comprehensive legislation that's going to protect our kids and the public health."
Just who "outlawed" the industry isn't clear. Like it or not, tobacco is still a legal product. Still, there is no question that the industry has been demonized to the point that anything goes: stolen documents, rigged courts, bogus second-hand-smoke studies, confiscatory taxes, anything. The man who once dismissed Bob Dole as the tax collector for the welfare state, Newt Gingrich, reportedly said of the tobacco industry, "Let's just tax the hell out of them."
The deal's collapse should surprise no one. Reynolds' unhappiness with the deal had been rumored for more than a week. The company does not have the wherewithal of a Philip Morris. It refused to sign onto a deal that would force it to commit financial suicide.
What the industry and states attorneys general signed onto last year would have cost the companies a staggering $368 billion, but it was a price they were willing to pay for immunity from civil suits in courts where they were denied the kind of defenses available to any other defendant. One would think, for example, that if the states were going to sue the companies on behalf of Medicaid recipients harmed by tobacco, they would have to show how someone's illness was linked to smoking. But that would have been difficult for the states to do. So they simply dispensed with that obligation.
But in a show of bipartisan greed, lawmakers and the administration decided that a mere $368 billion wasn't enough. No, it had to be at least $506 billion, much of it resulting from a tax on cigarettes paid by smokers. Some 80 percent of smokers, Robert Samuelson reports, make less than $50,000 a year; 34 percent make less than $20,000. Just tax the hell out of them, eh? To cap it off, the deal would provide the companies with little or no immunity. So why should the companies sign on?
Washington seems to think it doesn't need the participation of the companies to proceed with the legislation. Certainly there is nothing to stop Congress and the administration from trying to extort the $506 billion. But if they want the ban on tobacco advertising they consider so important to reduce teen smoking, they need the industry's cooperation. Or maybe they figure to take the tobacco industry's First Amendment protections away too.
The point is that even if the deal could have done everything proponents said it would -- reduce teen smoking, recover tax monies for states, fund good intentions -- the cost to liberty, the Constitution and principles of individual responsibility was too high. That it has been reduced to ashes is cause for celebration, not mourning.
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