EVERYONE WANTS TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT TOBACCO, BUT FEW AGREE ON WHAT

WASHINGTON -- Normally, when Congress considers legislation that would bring
on big changes in society, there are two main sides: those who want the bill
to pass because they favor change, and those who hope to block the measure
to preserve the status quo.

Tobacco legislation is an exception. No one favors the status quo. Everyone
wants a bill passed this year. But few of the lawmakers and lobbyists
involved are confident that the goal can be reached.

In the Senate on Wednesday, the Commerce Committee will hear testimony from
senators representing various factions, and the Labor and Public Welfare
Committee plans to draft the section of the overall legislation involving
regulation of tobacco by the Food and Drug Administration.

The tobacco companies want the predictability that legislation would give
them about how much money they will have to spend to settle legal claims in
the years ahead. They favor a bill along the lines of the agreement they
signed last June with 40 state attorneys general.

The industry is beginning a nationwide advertising campaign this week on
television and radio and in newspapers and magazines touting the June
agreement.

Public health advocates believe that a tough new law regulating tobacco is
the best way to reduce the number of teen-agers who get hooked on smoking.

President Clinton and nearly all of the Democrats in Congress see a
political bonanza in the issue. They think legislation to limit smoking
would be enormously popular, and they believe they will get credit if such a
measure is enacted.

The Republicans who control Congress also favor passage of a bill, in part
because they fear they will be faulted if legislation fails.

So this is one of the rare instances in Congress when inertia is not a
central force. But that does not mean the smart money is necessarily on a
bill being passed.

The differences in what the parties want in legislation are so vast and the
degree of trust between some of them is so slight that it is difficult to
fathom what the bridges are that can bring them together.

"If we get anywhere, and that's a huge 'if,"' said Sen. John McCain, the
chairman of the Commerce Committee, it's going to be because "we move
together with the White House and the Democrats and the attorneys general
and the public health community."

McCain, R-Ariz., was tapped last week by the Senate Republican leadership to
draft a bill that falls under the jurisdiction of his committee and several
others. He said he hoped to have finished writing a bill by the end of this
month that would command enough support in the Senate that its passage would
not be in doubt.

"There's no way we're going to put out a package that will be defeated on
the floor," he said in an interview.

Work in the House of Representatives is moving more slowly. The Republican
leadership may be waiting to see what happens in the Senate. If the Senate
cannot agree on a bill, there is little point in the House taking up an
explosive issue in an election year. But if the Senate does pass a bill, a
top Republican staff assistant said, "we will certainly move quickly and
decisively."

Clinton has begun to speak out on the issue almost daily. In Connecticut on
Tuesday, he declared that there was an "urgent need for action" on tobacco
legislation and suggested that money raised from cigarette manufacturers
could be spent to improve child care.

The White House chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, and Democratic leaders in
the Senate and House plan to hold a news conference on Wednesday to
challenge the Republican leaders to move more quickly on a tobacco bill.

The issue is a difficult one for Republicans, who have received more
campaign money from tobacco interests in recent years than from any other
single source.

Shortly after Republicans won control of Congress in the 1994 elections, the
party's leaders in the House announced that they would end an investigation
of the tobacco industry that Democrats had begun. Speaker Newt Gingrich
called Dr. David Kessler, the former commissioner of food and drugs and one
of the nation's leading spokesmen against smoking, a "thug" and a "bully."

Things have changed this year. McCain said that many of his colleagues
learned when they were home during the three-month break between last year's
congressional session and this year's that their constituents had become
much more concerned about smoking than the lawmakers had realized.

Now, the tobacco industry has little more support in Congress than the
Mafia, and being on the wrong side of the smoking issue would be like being
on the wrong side of communism.

Republican leaders have begun to change their tune. On Monday, Gingrich and
the Senate leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, indicated that they favored
some form of tobacco legislation. They spoke out against large legal fees
for lawyers in tobacco suits, and they challenged Clinton to be more
specific on his views on particular elements of the legislation.

But Republicans cannot shake their past quickly. "If a tobacco bill gets
passed," said a Republican congressman who insisted on not being identified,
"we won't get any credit. But if no bill is passed, you can bet we'll get
blamed."

The disagreements among the politicians involve issues like how much and how
fast cigarette prices should be raised, how the money from higher prices
should be distributed and spent by the federal government and the states,
how the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission should
regulate tobacco products and what kind of assistance tobacco farmers and
their communities should receive to ease their financial burden.

But those matters, each of them delicate and divisive, can probably be
resolved if the lawmakers can settle the principal dispute over how much
protection the tobacco companies should be given against future lawsuits
seeking damages for illness caused by smoking.

Under the agreement between the industry and the state attorneys general,
the spark that ignited the current interest in tobacco legislation, the
companies would be given permanent immunity from class-action lawsuits and
considerable shelter from other legal liability.

In exchange, the companies agreed to severe restrictions on advertising. Ads
featuring cartoon characters and celebrities, for instance, would be
discontinued, outdoor advertising and sponsorship of sports events would be
ended and print ads would be restricted to publications read primarily by
adults.

The prevailing view in public health circles is that advertising restraints
are essential to dissuade young people from smoking. A study published last
month in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that
advertising was an even more important reason than peer pressure in
explaining why teen-agers started to smoke.

Lawyers for the tobacco companies insist that they have a constitutional
right of free speech and that Congress cannot impose broad restrictions on
their advertising. The only way cigarette advertising will be restrained,
the companies say, is if they do so voluntarily, and that will happen only
if Congress gives them the legal protections they want.

Some prominent lawmakers, including McCain and Sen. Orrin Hatch, the
chairman of the Judiciary Committee, believe that Congress has little
alternative but to accede. "Absent liability provisions," Hatch, R-Utah,
said last week, "we will be unable to change materially the way in which
these products are advertised and marketed."

The White House takes a similar stance. In an interview, Bruce Reed,
Clinton's chief adviser on domestic policy, suggested that the president was
not enthusiastic about giving the tobacco companies legal protection but
thought it was the only way to obtain adequate restrictions on advertising.

But this view has powerful opponents. The country's most prominent public
health authorities, Kessler and Dr. C. Everett Koop, the former surgeon
general, argue strenuously against giving the tobacco companies legal
protection. Their public standing is so high that after meeting with them
for more than an hour last week, McCain said that no tobacco legislation
could move forward without their stamp of approval.

Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota has offered a bill endorsed by Kessler and
Koop and sponsored by 29 other Democratic senators. It is much tougher on
the tobacco companies than any other measure under consideration. "We should
not give privileged protection to this industry, of all industries," Conrad
said.

He suggested that Congress set annual goals for reductions in youth smoking
and impose stiff fines on the tobacco companies if the goals were not
reached. That way, he said, the companies could not afford to advertise.

The Conrad bill stands no chance of passage. No legislation drafted in the
Democratic caucus will be passed by the Republican-controlled Senate.

A bipartisan measure to be offered this week by Sens. Tom Harkin of Iowa and
Bob Graham of Florida, both Democrats, and John Chafee of Rhode Island, a
Republican, follows lines similar to the Conrad bill but would place an
annual ceiling on the total amount of damage claims the tobacco companies
could be required to pay.

Any measure passed by the Senate must be supported by Conrad and his allies
as well as those backing the bipartisan measure, McCain insisted. "We have
to move in lock-step," he said. "Otherwise, it flies apart. The whole thing
is too fragile."