On Monday, June 22, with apparent satisfaction, President Obama signed the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA), a law that gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over tobacco products. The law requires the FDA to develop a new tobacco-regulation center with all related costs to be covered by fees paid by the industry. Among other things, the FDA will regulate nicotine content, which cannot be increased, ban flavored cigarette sales (except for menthol-flavored products), and regulate marketing practices, eliminating the use of such words as “light” or “low tar” unless it can be shown empirically to be associated with products that provide health benefits.
Empowered to regulate industry marketing practices, the FDA must develop warning labels that must cover 50 percent of the side space on cigarette packages. The labels must draw from a catalogue of congressionally sanctioned phrases that include:
WARNING: Cigarettes are addictive. WARNING: Tobacco smoke can harm your children. WARNING: Cigarettes cause fatal lung disease. WARNING: Cigarettes cause cancer. WARNING: Cigarettes cause strokes and heart disease. WARNING: Smoking during pregnancy can harm your baby. WARNING: Smoking can kill you. WARNING: Tobacco smoke causes fatal lung disease in nonsmokers. WARNING: Quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risks to your health.
As dramatic as this all seems, this extension of FDA powers received a somewhat mixed response from the medical and health-advocate communities.
John Cohn, a lung-disease specialist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia said, “It’s sort of like asking the police commissioner to regulate prostitution.” Perhaps Cohn anticipates agency capture of the sort typically seen in Washington.
Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Smoke-Free Kids, a leading lobbyist for the law, took a more optimistic but still somewhat guarded position. “You can stay with the status quo, with industry controlling the level of nicotine in products—no one knows how much—and companies deciding what health claims to make. Or you can give control to an agency with a history of scientific expertise in regulating products. This fills an important gap.”
This somewhat tepid celebration was prompted by uncertainty about how the FDA would really manage its new authority. There is also the feeling that this statute, like many others, had a title that sounded more powerful that the content justified. The word “prevention” in the title sounds rather dramatic, but the teeth in the law itself are more like baby teeth than fully mature incisors. (Consider, for example, the exception made for menthol-flavored cigarettes.)
The politicians’ commentary that followed the law’s passage was much more boastful and self-congratulatory. Senator Edward Kennedy, long an advocate for more government control of the industry and sponsor of the Senate version of the law, exclaimed, “Miracles still happen. The United States Senate has finally said ‘no’ to Big Tobacco…. Public health experts overwhelmingly agree that enactment of this legislation is the most important action Congress can take to reduce youth smoking.”
Had Congress really said no?
In a way, Kennedy misstated what had actually happened. The Senate had not entirely said no. Indeed, the biggest of big tobacco, Altria Group, the producer of market-leader Marlboro, had lobbied long and hard for the bill’s passage. Altria’s two major competitors, Lorillard and Reynolds Tobacco, saw the law as giving Marlboro, with its market share locked and a lead in developing no-nicotine products, an unfair advantage. As is often the case, the Senate picked a winning horse and rode it. The Senate said yes to one and no to two others.
With Kennedy unable to lead the battle for his bill due to illness, Senator Christopher Dodd assumed leadership. Not quite as dramatic in his comment as Kennedy, but in a way equally inaccurate, Dodd said, “For more years than anyone can count, we’ve had an industry that’s gone basically unregulated.”
Unregulated Tobacco?
It is true that tobacco products have not been regulated by the FDA, though the agency has attempted to do so almost since its 1906 founding. But after decades of regulation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), and Congress itself, hardly anyone who has followed the industry would say the industry has gone “basically unregulated.”
Instead, some would argue that it was regulation that defined the industry’s trade practices and, by doing so, maintained the industry’s high profits and expanded the sale of products in just those markets Tobacco Free Kids and others worry about. (See John Calfee’s “The Ghost of Cigarette Advertising Past,” Regulation, Nov.-Dec. 1986.)
How could this be? Consider the following capsules that come from a long tobacco saga (these and more can be found in Bruce Yandle, et al., “Bootleggers, Baptists and Televangelists: Regulating Tobacco by Litigation,” University of Illinois Law Review, 2008):
Industry-Serving Regulation
No, there is no evidence to suggest that the tobacco has until now been “an industry that has gone basically unregulated.” But there is ample evidence that tobacco regulation has served the interests of the industry and the politicians that broker favors to the industry. Meanwhile, consumers of tobacco products, who are generally a lower-income population, have been denied the benefits of competitively determined product information; they also have unwittingly become major sources of revenue for state politicians, who generally provide more benefits to higher income than lower income consumers.
One can only speculate about what might have happened had the FTC not outlawed health-effects advertising and had the industry not become one of the more regulated industries in America.
