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IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA II |
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 Views from a Smoke-Filled Room
by Rich Perelman
Editor-in-Chief
Los Angeles, July 22 – The so-called "Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act" (S. 2461) was passed last week as part of a massive tobacco buy-out bill by the U.S. Senate.
The ultimate fate of both bills will depend on a House-Senate conference committee report and a re-vote in both Houses of the Congress. In the meantime, the language of the Senate bill creates a series of new requirements for manufacturers and distributors of all tobacco products, including cigars, and gives the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its sub-department, the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), broad latitude in regulating advertising, manufacture and distribution.
The costs, of course, will end up being bourne by the smoker, even though the levy will be made on manufacturers and distributors.
The bill specifies that 92.07 percent of the costs of the HHS and FDA must be paid by cigarette manufacturers, with the second-largest burden – 7.15 percent – levied on manufacturers and importers of cigars. No other category pays more than 0.43 percent. And the burden is not light.
In the first fiscal year of operation, the bill specifies costs of $85 million, of which cigar makers and distributors would pay $6.08 million. In the second year, the specified costs go up to $175 million with cigar makers paying $12.51 million and by year three, the program is specified to cost $300 million! Now cigar makers must pay $21.45 million, and the costs will go up from there according to the Consumer Price Index.
How much each manufacturer or distributor will pay will be determined by the number of cigars they sell, according to a report they must file quarterly.
Higher costs and more paperwork are predictable outcomes of any new Federal program. But the devil in this bill is the wide latitude given to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration to establish requirements for the manufacture and distribution of tobacco products under the guise of protection of health.
This is yet another intrusion on cigar smokers, thrown into the same camp with cigarettes. The supposed reason for this act is youth smoking, but cigars have little to do with this. Cigars are, especially in the handmade sector, an essentially natural product. Cigars were excluded from the 1965 legislation concerning cigarette and smokeless tobacco labeling and should be excluded from this act as well.
HHS and the FDA can’t outlaw cigarettes or cigars under this legislation, but a zealous Secretary or FDA Commissioner could make a run at it if he or she chose. In the end, this kind of bill could lead to an open-ended attack on cigarettes which has a devastating effect on cigars . . . and perhaps a revolt that brings smokers together in a way which the anti-tobacco forces currently riding high have not contemplated.
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