Posted on 07/15/2004 5:43:39 PM PDT by knak
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate overwhelmingly approved a landmark tobacco deal on Thursday to give the Food and Drug Administration long-sought power to regulate cigarettes and give $12 billion in aid to tobacco farmers.
Though hailed as a breakthrough by public health groups, the measure faces an uncertain future because it was approved as part of a massive corporate tax bill that must still be reconciled with the House of Representatives's version. Those talks are expected to be long and complex.
The lopsided 78-15 vote will strengthen the Senate position in those negotiations, and many lawmakers who want greater public health jurisdiction over tobacco were more optimistic than they had been since 1998, when a tobacco bill linked to multibillion-dollar state lawsuits against tobacco companies collapsed.
"This represents a fundamental change and a fundamental step forward," said Matt Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
While the House and Senate have had extensive hearings and probes of Big Tobacco, Myers noted this would be the first time either chamber had passed meaningful regulation of the companies' advertising, marketing, ingredients and safety claims.
The FDA itself tried to assert its authority over tobacco in the 1990s, but the battle went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2000 that the FDA did not have jurisdiction under existing law. This legislation would change the law and grant the agency that explicit power.
Under the proposal, the tobacco industry would finance a $12-billion buyout of Depression-era crop quotas, an arcane price support system that no longer serves farmers' economic interests in an increasingly global market.
Mitch McConnell, who represents the tobacco-growing state of Kentucky and is the number two Republican leader in the Senate, agreed the components of the bill had to be linked if either was to pass.
MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE
"It's not a shotgun wedding, it's a marriage of convenience," said McConnell, lead author of the buyout legislation.
"Yes it's a marriage of convenience, but I believe it's a good marriage," agreed Ohio Republican Mike DeWine, a co-author with Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy of the FDA bill.
"This is the most important step we can take for public health short of curing cancer itself," Kennedy said.
The proposal would give the FDA expanded powers to require more forceful health warnings on cigarette packs, regulate advertising, more aggressively combat underage sales and regulate ingredients to make cigarettes less harmful. It could not ban cigarettes or completely eliminate nicotine.
The major cigarette companies are divided over the measure. The Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris, has endorsed it, but R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co on Thursday repeated its "vigorous opposition."
A rival House version of the tobacco measure attached to the corporate tax bill would cost taxpayers -- not the industry -- $9.6 billion, and is not linked to FDA regulation.
Smoking is the top preventable cause of death in the United States, leading to 400,000 deaths a year. Ninety percent of smokers get hooked as children or teen-agers, according to public health groups.
I dare them to ban it! I double dog dare them to try to live without the billions of dollars. I triple dog dare them to raise the gas tax to cover the shortage. It certainly would convince the large public that would absorb the costs to shoot their spending eye out!
The Detroit News
October 18, 1992
by Nickie McWhirter
Computer blows out smoking-related death figures with no real human facts.
I recently read that 435,000 Americans die every year from smoking-related
illnesses. That sounds like a rock-hard, irrefutable fact, and pretty scary.
How are such statistics determined? I phoned the American Lung Association's
Southfield office to find out.
No one there seemed to know. However, a friendly voice said most such
number[s] come from the National Center for Health Statistics. That's a
branch of the National Centers for Disease Control. The friendly voice
provided a phone number in New York City.
Wrong number. The New York office collects only morbidity data, I was told. I
needed mortality data. I was given another phone number to try. Wrong again.
Several bureaucratically misdirected calls later, I spoke with someone in
Statistical Resources at NCHS. He said his office collect mortality data
based on death certificates. Progress! Data is categorized by race, sex,
age,geographic location, he said, but not smoking. Never. No progress.
He suggested I phone the Office of Smoking and Health, Rockville, Md., and
provided a number. That phone had been disconnected. Was I discouraged? No!
Ultimately, and several unfruitful phone calls later, I found a government
information operator in Washington, D.C., with a relatively new phone
directory and a helpful attitude. She found a listing for the elusive Office
of Smoking and Health, in Atlanta.
Bingo! Noel Barith, public information officer, said the 435,000 figure
probably came from its computers. S&H generates lots of statistics concerning
"smoking-related" stuff, he said. It's all done using a formula programmed
into the computers. Really? Since I had already determined that no lifestyle
data on individual patients and their medical histories is ever collected,
how can the computer possibly decide deaths are smoking related? Barith
didn't know. Maybe the person who devised this computer program knows. Barith
promised to have a computer expert to return my call.
The next day, SAMMEC Operations Manager, Richard Lawton, phoned. SAMMEC, I
learned, is the name of the computer program. Its initials stand for Smoking
Attributed Morbidity, Mortality, and Economic Cost. The computer is fed raw
data and SAMMEC employs various complex mathematical formulas to determine
how many people in various age groups, locations, and heaven knows what other
categories are likely to get sick or die from what diseases and how many of
these can be assumed to be smoking related.
Assumed? This is all guess work? Sort of. Lawton confirmed that no real
people, living or dead, are studied, no doctors consulted, no environmental
factors considered.
Lawton was absolutely lyrical about SAMMEC and its capabilities, however,
provided one can feed it the appropriate SAFs. What are SAFs? "That's the
smoking attributable fraction for each disease or group of people studied,"
he said.
It sounded like handicapping horses. Lawton began to explain how to arrive at
an SAF, using an equation that reminded me a lot of Miss Foster's algebra
class.
"Wait a minute!" I commanded. "I don't need to know that. I need to know if
the SAFs and all the rest of this procedure and program yield valid, factual
information.To know that we must know if sometime, somewhere, some human
being or human beings actually looked at records of other human beings,
smokers and nonsmokers, talked to their doctors, gathered enough information
from reality to begin to devise a mathematical formula that might be applied
to large groups of people much later, without ever needing to study those
people, and could be expected to yield true facts within a reasonable margin
of error? Who did that? Can you tell me, Mr. SAMMEC expert?"
Nice guy, Lawton, but he didn't have a clue. He said he thought the original
work concerning real people, their deaths and evidence of smoking involvement
was part of work done by a couple of epidemiologists, A.M. and D.E.
Lilienfeld. It's all in a book titled Foundations of Epidemiology, published
about 1980 by Oxford University Press, he said. SAMMEC came later, based on
the Lilienfeld's work. Maybe. He wasn't sure.
I was unable to find the book, or the Lilienfelds.
So there you have it. Research shall continue, but so far it has only
revealed that no one churning out statistics knows anything about smoking and
its relationship, if any, to diseases and death. A computer knows everything,
based on mystical formulas of unknown origin, context and reliability. Raw
data in, startling statistics out. SAMMEC speaks, truth is revealed! Oh,
brave new world.
Are there 435,000 smoking-related deaths per year in America? Maybe. I can
tell you this with absolute certainty, however: No human beings are ever
studied to find out.
Yes, and all paid for by the smokers who pay taxes on cigarettes. Don't forget that.
Don't sweat it. This legislation expressly forbids the FDA from banning the product.
If they ban it, think of the lost revenue for the GOVERNMENT. We have told and told and told until we were blue in the face to the ANTI SMOKERS that if tobacco is banned, and there are no more taxes collected from smokers.............my dear..............those TAXES will have to come out of SOMEONE ELSE'S pocket!
So all you anti-smokers out there..............get ready. YOU WILL BE NEXT.
Still hate the smokers????????
Are you reading the same article that I am? They passed this last night!
From the emails I have been getting about this, it's a done deal and it's not a GOOD thing.
Now, we have to wait to see IF they water it down and how the FDA is going to CONTROL this.
In my state they would have to double the gas tax to cover for the lost $1.1 Billion. Of course it isn't their money, so how do they lose it? But that answer is a different discussion.
Just received the following in email. Stay tuned.
Senate gives the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products.
Though hailed as a breakthrough by public health groups, the measure
faces an uncertain future because it was approved as part of a
massive corporate tax bill that must still be reconciled with the
House of Representative's version. Those talks are expected to be
long and complex.
As a smoking lady who will be 72 in September I am afraid,very afraid. LOL
Fed.gov ain't scared of lost revenue if they ban tobacco. They know they'll make more money off of it on the blackmarket, on both ends.
Just like the WOD.
What I want to know is how do they know that?
Logically, we cannot say for any individual smoker how many years prematurely he or she died when he or she happens to die. All we can do is look at averages. If the average non-smoker lives until they are 79 but the average smoker lives to 67, then you can say the average smoker has lost 12 years of their life. The epidemiology is actually more complicated than this. Perhaps smokers are also more likely to drink heavily or to not exercise? The epidemiologists must compensate for these sorts of things. They use powerful statistical methods, developed for medical research, to do this. The stakes are high in this kind of research and the epidemiologists are very good at it. Much of the research is based on huge studies such as the Framingham study, where 12,000 people were tracked for five decades to see how smoking, diet and exercise affect coronary health.
Smoking shortened my grandfather's life by 8 years. He only made it to 92 should have been 100. Dang unfiltered Pall Malls. Was never sick a day of his life, just didn't wake up one morning. This was 15 years ago, his father who is also a smoker is still grieving.
Oh give me a break!!! rofl...92? and you feel like his life was shortened? My 2 grandmothers never smoked a day in their lives and died at 95 and 96. Gosh...wonder what or who we blame for those. (Women usually out live men anyway) Duh....how about old age!! Just flat ran out of time? The ole engine gave out? To bad people don't put the same demands on the lives of their vehicles...course probably the smokers cars just quit running alot sooner than the non-smokers and they probably have more engine problems due to the smoke being circulated thru the system. OMG I killed my car!!! Wasn't just normal wear and tear....I KILLED IT!! rofl RED ALERT!! A NEW organization to stop smokers from killing their cars, who wants to help me get this started....we could make thousands!!!
Not if we parse things using the "Clinton" method. The article states:
It could not ban cigarettes or completely eliminate nicotine.
Nothing in that sentence says that they couldn't ban tobacco. As far as nicotine, they couldn't completely eliminate it.
Thanks for the info. I still double dog dare them to ban it! In addition to the lost revenue, the control freaks may actually be seen for what they are. That would out the WOsDers too.
I was just going along with the 12 year crap. Both my Grandfathers smoked unfiltered cigarette one lived to 92, the other 87. Pall Mall and Camels. Neither died of any illness, they just quit living.
If I may as gentle and charitably as possible suggest that this is complete nonsense. The famous five-decade-long Framingham study, involving more than ten thousand people, showed the relationship between smoking, heart attacks and strokes: http://www.framingham.com/heart/backgrnd.htm.
Also, please bear in mind that of the 150,000 lung cancer deaths each year, three-quarters of them are smokers. There are about 120,000 deaths due to emphysema and other chronic obstructive lung diseases, and most of these are also in smokers.
Amen to that. I can't wait for fat old drunken Teddy figures it out that smokers pay a bunch of money in taxes and that is going to dry up if they mess with the content of cigarettes. Gee I wonder what programs they will cutt to make up for less income?
Thanks for the laugh!
Wow! This could be Hugh. Maybe even series, huh ???
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