Tobacco Deal: Get It Right or Cut Our Losses? By Richard Craig September 19, 1997

In the week that President Clinton's beloved daughter left for college, he believed he was doing a good thing for her and future youth when he insisted the proposed multi-billion dollar settlement with tobacco companies be tougher.

The president announced he wants new stipulations included in the bill that would aim to curtail teen smoking. In conjunction, Congress killed a $50 billion tax break for tobacco companies. In the abstract, these moves are both good ones -- tobacco companies have grown rich by brazenly poisoning generations of Americans, and it's about time they paid for their sins.

However, for all his good intentions, Clinton has probably just gotten the tobacco lords off the hook for another 10 years.

The original deal was cut between the tobacco companies and the attorneys general of several states that are suing the industry. The agreement would have allowed the FDA to regulate nicotine as a drug, would have required the tobacco companies to pay billions to compensate smokers and their families, and would have severely restricted the companies' right to advertise and market their products. In return, the companies would never again have to face class-action lawsuits or punitive-damage claims.

On one hand, such changes would be a major step forward in forcing the tobacco companies to pay for some of their crimes, and toward blunting the seductive hold tobacco has on America's youth. On the other hand, it is a flawed deal -- the companies pay an incredibly huge one-time price and then continue their business.

As with most compromises, no one would have emerged completely happy. However, the deal did have the tremendous advantage of having been agreed to by the tobacco companies themselves. The importance of this is impossible to overstate given the companies' tremendous success rate in abusing the legal system. This is what's troublesome about the current actions.

In a closer-to-perfect world, Congress and the president would eventually agree on a deal that would force the tobacco companies to fully capitulate. (In a truly perfect world, no one would be dumb enough to smoke, tobacco wouldn't be profitable, farmers would raise different crops, and millions of people we love would still be here.)

In the world we know, however, peer pressure often drowns out intelligence, tobacco barons build mansions on the bones of their victims, and their lawyers can tie up virtually anything in court for years at a time. While it is true that the president doesn't need the tobacco companies' permission to regulate them, they can make his attempts to do so a nightmare of lawsuits and appeals.

So the question arises -- what's better, an imperfect deal right now or a better bill that gets bogged down in court forever? Is it more important to eventually get the deal done correctly, or save lives now?

These aren't easy questions to answer, but it now looks like we're in for a long debate that could die before any major tobacco legislation ever comes to a vote. And this time, the tobacco industry actually emerges looking good, because it agreed to a settlement that lawmakers voted down.

For his part, it's hard to doubt Clinton's sincerity in trying to stop the influence of big tobacco. After all, his mother died of lung cancer, and his daughter is heading off to college, that land of endless peer pressure. Yet Clinton blithely succumbs to what a lot of parents do. Every time he chomps on a stogie, he sends a message to Chelsea -- "Tobacco's okay for me, but not for you." By doing this, not only does he invalidate everything he says about tobacco being a corrosive influence, he also spits on his own mother's grave.

Whatever his intentions, by providing the tobacco companies an opportunity to again tie up legislation, he's inadvertently assuring that another generation of kids will be given the same implicit message.

©1997 Richard Craig. All rights reserved.

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