CONGRESS BLOWS SMOKE AT DRUG KINGPIN

The biggest drug kingpin has a big court date tomorrow.

He will try to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court not to lay a hand on
him. He will argue that the justices can't touch him because that is
the way his friends in Congress want it.

The friends in Congress want Big Tobacco to get off. No time. No fine.
No probation. No supervision.

That is what these friends, bought with campaign contributions,
decided in 1998 when Congress killed federal tobacco legislation that
would have settled the big state lawsuits and let the FDA regulate the
industry because cigarettes are a device for delivering the addictive
and harmful drug nicotine. It decided then to ignore the decades of
lies, the research that got deep-sixed, the evidence that the industry
spiked cigarettes with additives and did other sneaky things to get
people hooked and keep the customers coming.

It ignored the industry documents that said things like this: "We are,
then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective
in the release of stress mechanisms" (Brown and Williamson memo,
1963). It ignored the evidence that Phillip Morris had done research
on hyperactive grade-schoolers to determine "whether such children may
not eventually become cigarette smokers in their teenage years as they
discover the advantage of self-stimulation via nicotine." Congress is
in so deep with this drug kingpin that it let him off the hook even
though seven cartel leaders - that is, seven tobacco company
executives - testified before Congress itself that they don't think
cigarettes are addictive.

Now the kingpin, his wares responsible for more than 400,000 deaths a
year and his marketing reach extended to the youngest teens, is before
the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is even more significant than the
now-famous state lawsuits that proved Big Tobacco's big lie and became
part of the plot of a holiday-season movie, "The Insider." The movie
makes you think the story of Big Tobacco is about corrupt
corporate-tobacco skulduggery and corrupt corporate journalism and the
lonely fight of one honest man, Jeffrey S. Wigand. He gave up his Big
Tobacco salary and his big house and even his family to expose the
industry malfeasance. The movie does a good job telling this part of
the story.

When it ends, what comes to mind is the part left out. That is how a
corrupt Congress allows the biggest international drug kingpin to walk.

Congress exempts tobacco from every consumer protection law-the
Consumer Product Safety Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the
Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, you name it. It refuses to raise
tobacco taxes, although a majority of its members can be heard
arguing, regularly and heatedly, that the surest way to get people to
do less of something is to tax it. It refused, a few weeks ago, to
provide the Justice Department with the $20 million it says it needs
to pursue its own lawsuit against Big Tobacco. Congress won't spend
$20 million to recover more than 10 times that amount-that is, the $20
billion the government spends each year treating Big Tobacco's addicts
under Medicare and other federal health programs.

In 1996, the Clinton administration proposed that the federal Food and
Drug Administration regulate tobacco on the basis of incontrovertable
evidence that nicotine is addictive and harmful. The tobacco industry
sued, saying its friends in Congress did not intend for this to happen.

This is the dispute the high court must resolve. It gets the case
knowing full well Congress does not intend to regulate this industry.
And it knows why.

The case comes before the court as a regulatory skirmish. But what the
justices must decide is whether to let this great national fraud to go
on.