TOBACCO INDUSTRY LAUNCHES ADS TO FIGHT CONGRESS

WASHINGTON - The tobacco industry is asserting in an aggressive advertising campaign that passage of antismoking legislation would lead to a cigarette black market and a huge new federal bureaucracy to monitor tobacco sales. ''I'm done making a point to these people in Washington,'' RJR Nabisco chairman Steven Goldstone said yesterday in New York. ''My discussions now are going to be with the American people.'' In its campaign, the industry is using a populist, anti-Washington message similar to the one that Republicans successfully tapped during the 1994 congressional election.

Only this time, the attacks are aimed primarily at the GOP. One tobacco industry ad that has been running around the country for more than a week says, ''Washington has gone haywire, proposing the same old tax and spend.'' ''Washington may say it's just punishing the tobacco industry, but it's also really hurting the American people,'' stated a full-page ad published in national newspapers. ''You don't have to like tobacco companies to think there's something really wrong with Washington's approach.'' Tobacco executives say lawmakers are risking the nation's cultural and economic health by considering a bill, sponsored by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, that would bankrupt the companies. According to their vision of the McCain bill: Taxpayers earning $30,000 a year or less would bear the brunt of the tax penalties. It would spawn a black market for cigarettes, in which foreign interests would be free to smuggle cigarettes and hire gang members to sell them to anyone
- - including children. Farmers, retailers, and small business people would be driven from their jobs by competition with black market dealers. More than a dozen new government bureaucracies would be born to regulate everything from tobacco sales to teen-age smoking rates.