by John Hall / Richmond Times-Dispatch
The same White House that has now begun a campaign to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug has just negotiated a trade agreement that substantially increases cigarette and tobacco exports to China.
In a conversation with a U.S. trade official a few days ago, I asked her how the administration could be doing both -- restraining cigarettes at home and pushing them overseas; taxing them to the hilt here, and lowering tariffs there. Her answer was that she didn't know, but her job was to level the playing field for U.S. businesses against their foreign competitors, not to determine which industry is worthy of her best effort.
She is right about that. The job of determining whether tobacco is a health hazard and addictive drug belongs to our elected officeholders. They are paid to make decisions. But they have decided to position their collective backside on the fence.
Congress, the same body whose halls rang with thunderous rhetoric on the evils of smoking not long ago, has consistently voted against allowing the Food and Drug Administration or any other agency to regulate smoking.
President Clinton has decried this. Yet while he endorses his own surgeon general's declaration that cigarettes are a health hazard, he sends his trade representative abroad to make the world safe for them.
China is, if anything, more confused than we are about what to do about tobacco. The Yuxi Cigarette Factory, as it goes on producing cigarettes for China's 320 million smokers, is about to open up a museum displaying documents about the dangers of smoking. China, which is recording about 10,000 deaths per week from smoking, already has the highest death rate in the world.
The Chinese, who railed against the West's policy to addict them to opium in the 19th century, don't seem at all resistant to another foreign scourge in the 21st. They already have their own home-grown scourge.
So, they caved in on lowering tobacco and cigarette tariffs very early in the process, seeing that the ticket to selling textiles and electric fans in the United States was to allow more American tobacco products into China.
China's government will have no cause to attack evil roundeyes when its health bills start mounting.
Whatever concern it has had about the cigarette trade was not about keeping another addictive substance from enslaving China but about preserving the national tobacco company, the largest in the world.
Hard-nosed negotiating by American trade representatives has now brought the Chinese around, just as they earlier forced Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand to open up their markets to U.S. tobacco.
Asia, with 60 percent of the world's population, is awash in U.S. cigarettes, ads, billboards and giveaways. Some of the same practices are now banned in the United States.
To be fair, Congress and the administration are in a quandary without much of a roadmap to guide them.
Not since Prohibition, which drove the alcohol industry underground, has an entire American industry been under the kind of withering assault Big Tobacco faces.
It was left to the black robes on the Supreme Court, in rejecting the FDA's plea for regulatory authority, to explain the politics at play here.
Tobacco is "an industry constituting a significant portion of the American economy," said the court.
To give the FDA authority to ban cigarettes would be to give it authority to destroy this industry. That Congress has refused to do.
"Owing to its unique place in American history and society" Congress has created a unique regulatory scheme for tobacco that precludes any agency from exercising significant policy-making authority in the area.
"For better or for worse," that's just the way it is, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor reasoned for the majority.
The court said it didn't necessarily agree with that political decision.
In fact, it went out of its way to say that tobacco use, particularly among young people, is a certified national health hazard -- perhaps "the single most significant threat to public health in the United States."
But the court said its hands are tied until Congress passes a bill to give the FDA the power it seeks.
So, back this case goes to the political world, where the partisans have also amply demonstrated they do not have the will or skill to bring the debate to a rational conclusion.
It's kind of a Washington merry-go-round, to borrow a phrase.
John Hall is the Washington bureau chief of Media General News Service. E-mail him at jhall@media-general.com:
