News flash: Tobacco products addictive

June 19, 2009 12:36 am

A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs. --James I

IT TOOK only 305 years, but Congress has finally gotten around to acknowledging that the English king had it exactly right. A new law at long last puts tobacco under the Food and Drug Administration. Despite the industry's past denials that nicotine makes their products intensely addictive, tobacco is now going to be regulated as what it is--an exceptionally dangerous drug.

It's certainly the most lethal addictive substance known, responsible for more illness and death than all other drugs combined. Tobacco causes more than 400,000 American deaths every year, about 20 percent of the total. That's roughly 100 times the number of Americans who've died in the six years of the Iraq war. The World Health Organization has declared tobacco use the second-highest mortality factor on the planet--5 million a year, at a cost of hundreds of billions.

Approximately 47 million Americans still use tobacco--mostly cigarettes--23 percent of adults and about 30 percent of teenagers. While these are terrible numbers, they represent tremendous progress: They're the reverse of 60 years ago, when the overwhelming majority of Americans used tobacco in one form or another.

Smoking bans used to be considered not only unjustified but un-American, an interference with everyone's inherent right to foul the air everybody else was forced to breathe. But even the most unyielding smokers had to know smoking's undisputed reign was ending when Ireland's pubs, renowned for wall-to-wall fumes, went smokeless five years ago. So far, 25 states here have followed, banning smoking in all enclosed public spaces. Virginia--long a tobacco state--has at last adopted a partial ban, effective this December.

Why the sudden about-face in the United States after decades of stubborn resistance to overwhelming evidence? As usual, the answer is: money.

The push for universal health coverage drew a legislative bull's-eye on tobacco. With the number of smokers way down, Big Tobacco no longer had the clout it could previously count on in Congress and state legislatures. Instead, aging constituents' demands for broader, less expensive health coverage has compelled lawmakers to look for major opportunities to save money. Tobacco's extraordinary health care costs for individuals and the overall economy make it the biggest target around.

Tobacco is just the latest industry to fall under increased regulation as a public-health menace. Industries that once freely polluted the air and water with poisonous discharges came under the Clean Air Act, beginning in 1972, and the Water Pollution Control Act in 1987. The 1980 Superfund Act, passed after the Love Canal disaster and strengthened in 1986, was designed to clean up toxic waste dumps around the nation. It has had very mixed results, with 1,255 dangerous sites still on the books as of last year.

High-level radioactive waste won't be stored at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The site was effectively killed this year, after 26 years of searching for a permanent nuclear-waste storage location. It's ironic that low-level waste is controlled, but more than 57,000 tons of the really deadly stuff just sits around in 100 temporary, local storage facilities, like Dominion Power's North Anna plant. Until permanent disposal is resolved, a nuclear power solution to our growing electricity needs should go nowhere.

What history shows is that when industries begin to pollute the environment, they can get away with it for decades, but not forever: They provoke their own regulation.

Paul Metzger, formerly on the Federal Reserve Board's staff, was director of financial and legal studies at the University of Maryland's graduate school. His column appears on the first and third Fridays of the month. He can be reached at pmmva7@gmail.com.