Tobacco.org

• COOPER: Louis Brandeis, Federalism And The Changing Politics Of Tobacco  

For those of us who covered the tobacco wars of the 1990s, it's hard to believe how much has changed. . . .

But for years one element of tobacco control that the Left craved had been missing: Regulatory authority by the Food and Drug Administration.

Tobacco is one of the few consumable products, along with most of the herbal medicine aisle at the drug store, that's not FDA regulated. . . .

Consider it part of the beauty of federalism. The small ideas that incubate in laboratories of democracy, as the former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states, have grown wildly. Causality is the hardest thing to trace. But I suspect without the heavy-duty smoking bans begun in earnest after 2004 in Mike Bloomberg's New York, you wouldn't have seen the conditions change so dramatically that the passage of FDA regulation of tobacco is a relatively minor story. When the FDA bill is signed, Bloomberg should be there because it's very much his.

Jump to full article »