TOBACCO BILL LOSES MONEY FOR ANTI-SMOKING EFFORTS

WASHINGTON - In the recent trench warfare over the Senate's tobacco control
legislation, one casualty has gone hardly noticed: money for programs to
help smokers quit, to prevent nonsmokers from starting and to keep children
from buying cigarettes.

To gain support for the legislation, the Senate added a substantial
income-tax cut and a grab-bag of anti-drug programs, among other
provisions. With each addition, fewer dollars were left for the public
health programs that were initially one of the core reasons for the
legislation.

In fact, the measure has become so laden with new provisions that Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., is warning that it may collapse of its
own weight.

"This bill is so bad right now, I just don't think it should be passed in
this form," Lott said yesterday on ABC's "This Week." "Everybody that has
touched it has made it worse."

The bill that arrived on the Senate floor last month would have set aside
$11.5 billion in the first five years exclusively for smoking prevention
and related programs.

Now, with the bill facing further Senate action this week, there is no
money dedicated exclusively to public health.

Public health accounts are not the only losers. The governors are up in
arms over what they say amounts to a midnight raid by the Senate.

"The nation's governors are no longer able to support the state financing
section of the Senate bill," the National Governors Association wrote
Thursday in a letter to the Senate leadership. The politically powerful
group urged senators to restore funding for states before completing action
on the bill.

The tobacco control legislation arose out of a proposed national settlement
reached last June between the cigarette manufacturers and 40 states that
sued them to recover their share of the costs of treating smoking-related
illnesses.

The bill creates a tobacco trust fund made up of the revenues from the
bill's proposed $1.10-a-pack increase in cigarette prices and the penalties
paid by the tobacco companies if youth smoking failed to drop to specified
levels.

The trust fund would be divided into accounts to pay the states to settle
their lawsuits with the cigarette manufacturers, to help tobacco farmers
whose livelihoods would be threatened, to pay for anti-smoking programs and
to enforce tough new Food and Drug Administration standards for the
cigarette manufacturers. A separate account would fund research into
tobacco-related diseases.

For months, observers have been predicting that the hardest issue in the
tobacco legislation would be how to spend the money generated by raising
the price of cigarettes. Now that fight is turning out to be even more
complicated than anyone imagined.

For instance, the amendment cutting the marriage tax penalty, which was
designed to make Republican senators feel more comfortable with the bill,
alienated the governors, the majority of whom are Republicans.

When the Senate proposed to cut the marriage tax by $16 billion over the
next five years, it paid for the tax cut by reducing the amount available
for states, farmers and public health. Similarly, a $3 billion program to
help veterans with tobacco-related diseases cut into all the bill's
spending programs.

Even if public health ends up with only a fraction of the money, it will be
substantially more than it gets now. Still, the bill had promised so much
that now many in the public health community are furious.

"It's shameful that the Senate would vote to effectively strip out all the
money for the only programs in the bill specifically designed to reduce
tobacco use," said Matthew Myers, general counsel for the National Center
for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Not all public health advocates view the situation in such dire terms. They
point out that key steps to stop young people from smoking, such as raising
the price, making cigarettes harder to buy and putting strict limits on
cigarette advertising, are still in the Senate bill.

"It's more important to raise the price than to fight over how to spend the
money," said former FDA commissioner David Kessler, who is now dean of Yale
Medical School.

"In the end, I'm confident there will be enough money for public health
programs, or the president won't sign the bill," Kessler said.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)