ANTI-SMOKING FUNDS LOST IN FLAP OVER TOBACCO BILL

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

Grab-Bag Of Programs

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 Sunday 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.

``This is typical of what politicians do when they get their hands on
money,'' said longtime tobacco foe Michael Pertschuk of the Advocacy
Institute. ``Public health invariably takes a back seat.''

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 their funding 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.

``After bearing all of the risk initiating the suits and all of the expense
of years of arduous negotiations and litigation . . . it is only reasonable
and sensible that any final settlement include a protected core of funding
for states,'' the governors wrote.

Endless Debate

The bill, which the Senate has been debating for three weeks with no clear
end in sight, creates a tobacco trust fund made up of the revenues from the
bill's proposed $1.10-a-pack increase in the price of cigarettes 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 cigarette
manufacturers. A separate account would fund research on tobacco-related
diseases.