GOP WOULD LINK TEEN TOBACCO, ANTI-DRUG BILLS

But White House rejects the idea

WASHINGTON -- Hoping to seize the political initiative from President
Clinton, Republican leaders in Congress suggested yesterday that
legislation to keep teen-agers from smoking should be linked with an
anti-drug bill.

Without specifying what such legislation would entail, Speaker Newt
Gingrich said at a news conference, "I think that we should look seriously
at including an anti-teen-smoking provision in an omnibus bill designed to
bring down illegal drug addiction."

At a separate news conference, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority
leader, said he agreed with the Gingrich approach.

But the White House rejected it out of hand. "If this is their way of
copping out on tobacco, we're not for it," said Bruce Reed, the president's
chief domestic policy adviser. "We want to see comprehensive tobacco
legislation, not cosmetic legislation."

Other officials emphasized the observation this week by C. Everett Koop,
the former surgeon general, that 20 times as many Americans die each year
because of smoking as compared to narcotics.

Republicans have been on the defensive all year on the tobacco issue.

Clinton and Democrats in Congress have been trumpeting anti-smoking
measures, and both parties have polls showing that this has worked to the
Democrats' advantage.

The Republicans' standing has been further damaged by their being the main
beneficiaries of campaign donations from cigarette manufacturers.

Republican spokesmen have fretted that if a strong anti-smoking bill
passes, the president will gain the credit and that if one fails, the
Republican Congress will be blamed.

The party's problems have been enhanced by Gingrich's propensity to make
off-the-cuff statements about smoking that can be construed to mean he is
sympathetic to the cigarette companies.

At a fund-raiser in Pennsylvania on Monday night, for instance, Gingrich
suggested that Joe Camel, the R.J. Reynolds cartoon character who was
banished from billboards because critics thought he was too appealing to
children, had been given a bum rap.

"In order to understand what's happened with teen smoking," Gingrich said,
speaking extemporaneously, "this is not complicated -- it has nothing to do
with Joe Camel."

A worse problem, he said, was smoking on screen by Hollywood stars like
Leonardo DiCaprio, the leading actor in "Titanic."

For the second consecutive day, Clinton leaped at the opening Gingrich had
provided. At the outset of a statement yesterday afternoon in the White
House Rose Garden about his legislative agenda, the president declared:
"Now, some in Congress say that teen smoking has nothing to do with Joe
Camel. Medical science and common sense make it plain: Teen smoking has
everything to do with Joe Camel -- with unscrupulous marketing campaigns
that prey on the insecurities and dreams of our children."

Clinton and congressional Democrats have accused Gingrich of retreating
from tough talk on tobacco policy.

They say it's no coincidence that Gingrich denounced tobacco legislation
only days after the tobacco industry, which has poured millions of dollars
into GOP campaign coffers this year, fiercely rejected it.

"When R.J. Reynolds spoke, Newt Gingrich listened," House Minority Leader
Dick Gephardt said in a statement.

The speaker denied at his news conference that he was making excuses for
the tobacco companies. "They clearly were trying to addict 14-year-olds,"
he said, "and they were clearly lying to the United States Congress and the
American people about their behavior."

Gingrich, who does not smoke, said that his father and his adoptive father
had died of lung cancer and that he wished young people who were starting
to smoke could visit a hospital and see someone who was dying from having
smoked.

He also read aloud a newspaper column by Hillary Rodham Clinton in which
the first lady denounced smoking in films.

The speaker's suggestion yesterday that anti-smoking and anti-drug
legislation should be linked was in the context of trying to gain political
advantage from the Clinton administration's announcement on Monday about
needle exchange programs.

The officials had announced that programs to distribute clean needles to
drug addicts could save lives by reducing the spread of AIDS, but that
federal money should not be used for such programs.

Gingrich interpreted this to mean, "Well, as long as your needle is clean,
what's a little heroin or cocaine among friends? Your government would like
to give you a free needle but doesn't have the courage to do it."

At Gingrich's side, House GOP Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said he was
"appalled" by Clinton's needle-exchange position, saying, "At the same time
he's trying to take cigarettes away from teen-agers, he wants to give them
needles to stick in their arms."

The Republican position, Gingrich said, was, "If we're going to communicate
with teen-agers, we want to communicate across the board; we don't want to
drive them from one addictive substance to another."

At another news conference yesterday, Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, the House
majority leader, said he was skeptical of whether a steep cigarette price
increase, which the president favors, would inhibit smoking by young
people.

A smoker and an economist, Armey said that his "rational intuition" told
him that the demand for tobacco was "inelastic." That is the word
economists use to describe products for which the demand does not fall when
the price rises.

Armey said he was unalterably opposed to a tobacco bill approved this month
by the Senate Commerce Committee, but he refused to explain why.

The chief sponsor of the Commerce Committee's bill, Sen. John McCain,
R-Ariz., met yesterday afternoon at the White House with the top
presidential advisers on tobacco matters, and Clinton joined the
discussions part of the time.

The McCain bill would raise the price of cigarettes, strengthen
regulations, and penalize the tobacco industry if goals for reducing
smoking by young people were not met. This is essentially what the
president wants. But neither he nor McCain sees it as an advantage to
embrace the other's position entirely.

Copyright 1998 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.