CLINTON: SMOKING INITIATIVE NEEDED

WASHINGTON--President Clinton called today for strong bipartisan
legislation to keep the tobacco industry out of the youth market and permit
the regulation of tobacco as a drug.

After decades of denials from the industry, Clinton said, newly released
documents from a major cigarette producer show a longstanding campaign to
hook teen-agers and create a new legion of lifetime smokers.

"This is not about politics. This is not about money; it is about our
children," the president said in his weekly radio address, recorded Friday.
"The 1998 Congress should be remembered as the Congress that passed
comprehensive tobacco legislation, not the Congress that passed up this
historic opportunity to protect our children and our future."

Clinton commented two days after the release on Capitol Hill of secret
memos showing that R.J. Reynolds, the nation's second-largest cigarette
producer and marketer, developed and sustained a direct advertising appeal
to younger smokers -teen-agers as young as 13 -beginning in the 1970s that
resulted in the hip Joe Camel campaign and even a special brand aimed at
boys.

Reading from the Reynolds documents, Clinton quoted one 1970s line that he
said he found startling: "Our strategy becomes clear: direct advertising
appeal to younger smokers" who represent "tomorrow's cigarette business."

"For years, one of our nation's biggest tobacco companies appears to have
singled out our children, carefully studying their habits and pursuing a
marketing strategy designed to prey on their insecurities in order to get
them to smoke," the president said.

"Today I want to send a very different message to those who would endanger
our children: Young people are not the future of the tobacco industry; they
are the future of America," Clinton said. "And we must take immediate,
decisive action to protect them."

Clinton urged the Republican-controlled Congress to take early action on
legislation he first proposed last September.

It would:

- -Require development of a plan to reduce teen-age smoking "with tough
penalties for companies that don't comply."

- -Affirm the full authority of the Food and Drug Administration to regulate
tobacco products.

- -Include measures to hold the tobacco industry accountable, "especially for
marketing tobacco to children."

- -Adopt measures to protect public health, "from reducing secondhand smoke
to expanding smoking cessation programs, to funding medical research on the
effects of tobacco,"

- -Protect tobacco farmers and their communities "from the loss of income
caused by our efforts to reduce smoking by young people."

"If Congress sends me a bill that mandates those steps, I will sign it,"
Clinton said. "Our administration will sit down with them anytime, anywhere
to work out bipartisan legislation."

"Reducing teen smoking has always been America's bottom line," he said.
"But to make it the tobacco industry's bottom line we have to have
legislation."

Copyright Los Angeles Times