Challenge to FDA tobacco bill nixed

WASHINGTON -- The Senate on Tuesday rejected the main challenge to legislation giving the Food and Drug Administration controls over tobacco products, easing the way for passage of the measure this week.

The alternative was offered by the two senators from North Carolina, the nation's biggest tobacco grower. It was defeated 60-36.

Republican Richard Burr and Democrat Kay Hagan sought to deny the FDA a role in overseeing tobacco products, saying it was the wrong agency for the job and that giving it broad powers to decide what ingredients can go into cigarettes would hamper the development of safer tobacco products.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., argued that the FDA was the right organization, with its history in regulatory and scientific expertise, to control a product linked to 400,000 deaths and that adds $100 billion to the nation's health-care bill every year.

The FDA bill, said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., would be a "historic accomplishment" that would significantly reduce health care costs.

Dodd said the Burr-Hagan bill provided less authority to remove harmful ingredients in cigarettes, did not go far enough to protect children from marketing and had less effective health warnings. Both are financed with new fees on the tobacco industry, but Dodd said the FDA bill would generate four times more money over the first three years.

The Burr-Hagan alternative would have created a new Tobacco Harm Reduction Center in the Health and Human Services Department dedicated to regulating the manufacture, marketing and use of tobacco products and focused on reducing the health dangers from smoking.

Burr said his measure "does allow the development of new products that might encourage individuals to give up smoking and to turn to products that are less harmful."

The two approaches have similarities. Both would require manufacturers to further disclose ingredients and stop using terms such as "light" or "mild" that might mislead people into thinking that there was less of a health risk. Both establish tougher warning labels.

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a strong supporter of the FDA bill, said the Burr-Hagan alternative fell short in giving limited authority to an underfunded new agency, imposing few restrictions on smokeless tobacco, and creating obstacles to the regulation of cigarette contents.

The base bill, sponsored by the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., would for the first time give the FDA authority to restrict and change the sale, marketing and production of tobacco products to protect the public health.

Lawmakers, backed by anti-smoking groups, have been trying to impose government controls over what goes into tobacco products for at least a decade. But FDA bills consistently ran into resistance from the tobacco lobby and the Bush administration.

This year, however, the House has already passed a very similar bill and President Barack Obama, who is struggling with his own smoking habit, supports it.

Also this year, the bill has the support of the country's biggest tobacco company, Virginia-based Philip Morris USA. Numbers two and three in the industry, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and Lorillard Tobacco Company, both based in North Carolina, are against it, arguing that restrictions on new tobacco products will lock in Philip Morris' share of the market.

---

The bill is H.R. 1256.

On the Net:

Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov