THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 27, 1996 TAG: 9608270002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 59 lines
President Clinton never figured to win the South's electoral votes. His nod Friday to the embattled Food and Drug Administration to regulate cigarettes and smokeless tobacco as nicotine-drug-delivery systems virtually assures that the South will go overwhelmingly for Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole.
But Clinton's standing up to the megabillion-dollar tobacco industry ought to play well in California, where opinion polls show the president far ahead of Dole. It should play well, too, in New York and other states with big electoral votes outside the South.
Smoking is the leading preventable cause of premature death in the United States. Ninety percent of smokers became addicted to nicotine as children. Three million U.S. children smoke, and the number is growing.
By authorizing the FDA to treat tobacco as a drug, Clinton aims to cut teen smoking by half. But the tobacco giants are already in court trying to keep the FDA from acting - a move that could stall action for years. And the Clinton order will multiply attacks upon the FDA by its foes in Congress, the pharmaceutical industry and assorted groups for its tardiness in approving some apparently lifesaving drugs for use in the United States.
A tobacco spokesman predicts that the FDA's stopping makers and distributors of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco from pitching their products to the young won't make a dent in the number of children using tobacco. The industry argues that minors are turned on to tobacco by their peers.
That's true - but not the whole truth. Many minors do start using tobacco because that is seen by them as the cool, rebellious and adult thing to do. But R. J. Reynolds' Joe Camel is only the latest conspicuous evidence of how assiduously the tobacco industry seduces youngsters to light up or chew.
Any industry prophecy that FDA rules designed to diminish tobacco use by children are destined to fail could turn out to be as flawed as cigarette and smokeless-tobacco manufacturers' straight-faced denials that nicotine is addictive and that causal links between the weed and a host of mortal ills has yet to be demonstrated scientifically.
Three decades have passed since U.S. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry reported ``the lung-cancer death rate for male smokers (to be) 10 times greater than among male nonsmokers'' and identified smoking as ``the most-important cause of chronic bronchitis, emphysema and coronary heart disease.''
Smoking, still chic in 1964, is scorned now. Smoking is banned from public transportation and countless enclosed public spaces and workplaces, not only in the United States but in more than 60 other countries. In 1979, 33.5 million adult Americans used tobacco compared with 26.5 million today.
The tobacco industry is working overtime and spending big time to help defeat Bill Clinton, who rightly sees tobacco use as a menace to health and productivity, and to elect Bob Dole, who wrongly sees no reason for government to discourage tobacco use.
But Clinton is in step with public opinion. Most smokers, no less than nonsmokers, don't want children to use tobacco. Getting the stamp of approval and big bucks from Big Tobacco are less and less assets to ambitious pols outside the tobacco states. November may suggest that backing from the makers of coffin nails is hazardous to political success. by CNB