Clinton Orders Fda Crackdown On Teen Smoking Tobacco Industry Responds With Legal Challenge

President Clinton, declaring teenage nicotine addiction a national epidemic, Thursday authorized the first sweeping federal crackdown on the sale and promotion of tobacco products to minors.

In directing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate cigarettes and smokeless tobacco as drugs due to nicotine’s addictive power, Clinton immediately inspired praise from the nation’s medical groups and enmity from the $47 billion tobacco industry and its powerful political allies in Congress and Southern tobacco states.

Legal challenges to Clinton’s initiative were filed by tobacco and advertising interests even before the president had completed his formal announcement of the landmark effort.

The administration’s goal, Clinton said, is to reduce youth smoking by 50 percent in the next seven years.

“We must act now before another generation of Americans is condemned to fight a difficult and grueling personal battle with an addiction that will cost millions of them their lives,” Clinton said in announcing the controversial crackdown in the East Room of the White House.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” Clinton said, that “cigarettes and smokeless tobacco are harmful, highly addictive and aggressively marketed to our young people.”

“And the threat is immediate,” he asserted.

Tobacco companies and their supporters denounced Clinton’s order as the first step toward a federal ban on all tobacco products.

“My farmers lost out to the zealots,” Sen. Wendell H. Ford, a Kentucky Democrat and one of the Senate’s few smokers, said in an angry outburst on the Senate floor.

Ford’s opposition reflects the political risk of Clinton’s action. The president faces a formidable challenge in the 1996 election in the tobacco states of Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia, which he split with President Bush in a three-way race with Ross Perot in 1992.

Indeed, Clinton carried Georgia by a scant 13,714 votes of the 2.3 million cast. He also won Kentucky but narrowly lost North Carolina and Virginia.

Politicians throughout the region joined Ford in blasting Clinton’s initiative, as did leaders of tobacco workers.

“This attack on the tobacco industry is an attack on the livelihoods of tens of thousands of American families and their communities,” said Frank Hurt, president of the 15,000-member Bakery, Confectionary and Tobacco Workers International Union.

Clinton’s action followed FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler’s recommendation to grant his agency jurisdiction over underage tobacco use to counter “the pediatric disease.”

Anti-smoking sentiment also has risen nationally since House hearings last year, and subsequent documentation indicated that tobacco companies have manipulated the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to maintain smokers’ addictions.

Clinton said 1 million minors become smokers every year, including more than 300,000 who are expected to die prematurely because of tobacco-related diseases.

The five major tobacco companies and an advertising agency filed a federal suit in North Carolina challenging the legality of the FDA regulating tobacco.

“This lawsuit is not about youth smoking,” said Steve Parrish, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA, the nation’s largest cigarette manufacturer. “This lawsuit is about whether, in defiance of 80 years of clear precedent, David Kessler and the FDA can regulate cigarettes.”

Parrish described Clinton’s directive as a “Trojan horse” concealing Kessler’s “real hidden agenda,” the prohibition of cigarettes.

But Clinton rebutted the theory, saying, “It would be wrong to ban cigarettes outright because, No. 1, it’s not illegal for adults to use them.”

He also countered complaints that his proposed advertising restrictions represent improper censorship. Since it is illegal for minors to smoke cigarettes, he said, “how, then, can it be legal for people to advertise to children to get them to smoke cigarettes?”

The president tried to blunt congressional opposition to the plan by offering to drop the regulatory action if Congress enacts his proposals into law.

But such legislation is given little chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress, where House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., responded to Kessler’s recommendation to regulate youth smoking by saying the FDA has “lost its mind.