Enzi Offers New Tobacco Idea

Source from:  By BRODIE FARQUHAR Star-Tribune correspondent Thursday, July 26, 2007 07/27/2007

While a U.S. Senate committee votes today on a bipartisan bill to bring tobacco under the regulatory control of the Food and Drug Administration, a rival bill by U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., was introduced Monday. It rejects FDA regulation of the industry, in favor of a cap-and-trade approach pioneered in the environmental community for the reduction of acid rain. Today's vote in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is on a bill called the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, with an identical bill in the House. Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and John Cornyn, R-Texas., and Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Tom Davis, R-Va., introduced the identical, bipartisan bills last winter. The Senate bill has 52 co-sponsors, while the House bill has 193 co-sponsors -- not including Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., who has received $25,500 in campaign contributions from tobacco companies, according to federal records. The bill would order removal of dangerous ingredients from cigarettes, allow the FDA to restrict tobacco advertising, mandate stronger warning labels, prevent cigarette sales to minors and bar misrepresentation of tobacco's dangers. Enzi's rival bill, the Help End Addiction to Lethal Tobacco Habits Act, isn't scheduled yet for a committee vote. Enzi based his tobacco bill not on FDA regulation, but on an idea borrowed from environmental legislation. He wants to use a cap-and-trade program for tobacco production, which would diminish annually in order to reduce the numbers of addicted people to less than 2 percent of the population within the next 20 years. The cap-and-trade section of the bill wouldn't start until 2015. Enzi has received only $2,000 in campaign contributions from tobacco companies during his Senate career, according to federal records. While the bill up for a vote today has the support of the nation's major health organizations, Enzi's bill is already getting some criticism. Paul Billings, American Lung Association's vice president of national policy and advocacy, is an ardent supporter of the Kennedy/Cornyn bill, and calls Enzi's bill "unworkable." Billings said the language in Enzi's bill about cap-and-trade reads very much as if someone grabbed an electronic version of the Clean Air Act "and ran a search and replace program" to make it apply to tobacco. Given the timing of Enzi's cap-and-trade tobacco bill, and his opposition to FDA regulation of tobacco, Billings suggested that Enzi's bill has one purpose: to undermine the bipartisan Kennedy bill, which has the support of 12 Republican senators. "I think there's a lot of pent-up frustration about the tobacco industry," said Billings, citing candy-flavored cigarettes designed to entice children to smoke. Dick Woodruff, Billings' counterpart at the American Cancer Society, said Enzi's bill is a late entry and a novelty, designed to provoke debate. "The way the Senate works is that members of the opposition party will introduce an alternative bill at the last minute," Woodruff said. He expects Enzi to offer his bill as either an alternative to or as an amendment to the other bill, but doesn't think it will really go anywhere. Enzi's cap-and-trade plan doesn't make the first 30 percent reduction in the number of cigarettes available to American consumers until 2015, Woodruff said. That's a lot of tobacco addicts chasing fewer cigarettes, he said. And until 2015, the tobacco industry wouldn't have to change its marketing behavior. Enzi, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said his proposal is offered as an alternative to a Democratic proposal strongly supported by Philip Morris. "Cap-and-trade programs have a proven track record in the environmental arena, particularly in addressing acid rain. My tobacco plan is based on the successful program in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990," Enzi said." This system achieved the desired results faster and at lower cost than had been anticipated. The same can be done for tobacco." The cap-and-trade program would require tobacco manufacturers to meet specific user level limits by specified deadlines, and the plan would set up a market share allocation and transfer system in which allowances could be used, banked, traded or sold freely on the open market. "Some have suggested that FDA regulation of tobacco is the way toward safer tobacco products," Enzi said in a written statement. "But we know that there is no such thing as a safe cigarette. Proposals to have FDA regulate tobacco are a misguided attempt to force a deadly product into the regulatory structure developed for drugs and devices -- products which do have health benefits." Enzi's case was reinforced Tuesday by former FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark McClelland, who told reporters that the FDA wasn't the right agency to regulate tobacco. "The agency doesn't have any staff that's used to thinking about how do you make an unsafe product relatively more safe," he told reporters. Enzi came up with the idea in discussions with his health policy staff. "First, you have to look at your legislative goal," Enzi said in a Tuesday statement. "The goal with respect to tobacco is to reduce the number of users. There have been bills in past congresses with similar goals, but those bills were lacking the tools to reach those goals. We needed a bill with the mechanisms to meet the milestones. "My staff and I did some research, and we saw that the cap-and-trade model has met with some success in the environmental realm, so we thought, why not emulate that success in the health area?" he said. "The private sector is more efficient than the federal government at meeting goals once they are set, and I believe in market forces." Enzi press secretary Coy Knobel explained that the senator just introduced his bill and has not actively sought co-sponsors until now. In the next few days he plans to circulate what's known on the Hill as a "Dear Colleague" letter to other senators. The letter will explain the merits of the bill and ask them to consider co-sponsoring it. "He wants this to be a bipartisan effort so it has a chance to pass, so he will be looking for a lead Democratic co-sponsor," Knobel said. "It is early still, and it is not your run-of-the-mill legislation, so it may take a little time for people to get their head around it." Enditem