ATTORNEYS general for 40 states huffed and puffed. They blew a few shingles
off the roof of Big Tobacco. The house still stands, and the tobacco wars
remain the country's biggest act of cowardice to protect the public health
of the world.
Getting Big Tobacco to cough up $368 billion over the next 25 years for the
damage done by cigarettes seems better than nothing, especially if you
listen to the attorneys general.
Mississippi's Attorney General Michael Moore hailed the pact as "the most
historic public health achievement in history." Florida's Attorney General
Bob Butterworth boasted, "The Marlboro Man will be riding into the sunset
on Joe Camel."
These big, bad wolves are merely yapping Chihuahuas. First of all, Big
Tobacco is not paying for any settlement. Addicted smokers will simply pay
higher prices. Philip Morris and RJR will then pay the states and claim it,
incredibly, as a business deduction.
While the $368 billion is for health costs because of smoking, government
figures place the 25year health costs and lost productivity because of
cigarettes at 10 times more, $3.75 trillion.
Second, newly addicted people would have very limited rights to sue for
damages, leaving little recourse in the face of Big Tobacco's uncanny
ability to repackage itself, as it will surely do, In the form of "safer"
cigarettes.
Third, the agreement would not allow the Food and Drug Administration to
ban nicotine in cigarettes before 2009 and create such a labyrinth of
procedures to alter its level that former FDA commissioner David Kessler
said regulating nicotine could be "almost impossible."
Fourth, the proposed fines of up to $2 billion if youth smoking does not
go down is nothing next to the $13 billion a year in profits if Big Tobacco
hooks smokers for life.
This Is not to say the attorneys general wasted all their time. America
would be more beautiful without cigarette billboards, without tobacco
sponsorship of sporting events and concerts, without cigarette vending
machines, and without cigarette placement in television and movies. It
would be important to get the cigarette companies to agree to larger
warning labels that say for the first time that smoking can kill you.
But getting a company to admit that its product kills people and then
leaving them solvent to keep doing so is hardly a public health achievement.
Derrick Z. Jackson
The Boston Globe