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• VIDEO: Up in Smoke: How the Tobacco Industry Shaped the New Smoking Bill 

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dr. Nitzkin. Would you say this bill was written by Philip Morris?

DR. JOEL NITZKIN: I would say so. The bill was negotiated between Philip Morris and Tobacco-Free Kids, and it appears from the actual text of the bill that the Philip Morris people did their homework very well and knew exactly what they wanted, while those appointed from Tobacco-Free Kids to negotiate on behalf of the public health community really had no understanding of tobacco-related science, of how and why kids initiate tobacco use, or the steps that could be taken to stop them. So it resulted in a bill that gives the appearance of effective regulation, but not the substance. And with the exception of the graphic warnings, which were added in the Senate, not in the original House bill, every provision having to do with restriction of marketing of tobacco products falls into one of two categories: either it’s already in place as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement, or it has already been thrown out by the US Supreme Court.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And why this alliance between the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Altria?

DR. JOEL NITZKIN: Well, it appears that a political decision was made that the only way they could get tobacco regulation through the Congress is if they could get Philip Morris, our nation's largest and most dominant cigarette company, to endorse the bill. And they felt that without that endorsement, they could not get a bill through Congress. . . .

DR. JOEL NITZKIN: There were strong objections from the African American community about the menthol exclusion. To satisfy those requests, Representative Waxman wrote in a provision saying that the Science Advisory Committee to the FDA would have to consider the menthol issue and issue a ruling on it.

The problem is, the guidelines that the committee is mandated to go by, written into the law, says they can only ban things on the basis that they increase the risk of cancer or some other serious disease, or they increase the addictiveness of the tobacco product. There is nothing in the law that would allow them to ban any ingredient that’s there for the purpose of attracting people to cigarettes who otherwise would not smoke. . . .

To make things even worse, if I could continue for a moment, if somebody with a smokeless product wants to prove that their product is of lesser risk than cigarettes, they have to undergo basically impossible-to-do scientific studies. But if a cigarette company wants to market its cigarette as lower exposure, all they have to do is change the chemical composition by that small amount, and then they can advertise it as lower exposure without any scientific proof that it’s safer or less risky.

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