Cool, Refreshing Legislation for Philip Morris
Print
Comment
Email
RSS
Twitter
Cool, Refreshing Legislation for Philip Morris
Why it’s politically impossible to ban menthol cigarettes, even if they’re the most addictive.
By Paul Smalera
Posted Monday, June 8, 2009 - 2:56pm
Indulge me in a thought experiment. Pretend that drinking something called "lethalcoffee" has been found to cause cancer. There are five or six kinds of gross-flavored lethalcoffees that hardly anyone drinks, like chocolate, cherry, banana, and vanilla. But there's one flavor, mint, that 30 percent of all lethalcoffee drinkers are hooked on. And there's one particular group of lethalcoffee drinkers—let's call them investment bankers—who drink mint lethalcoffee like there's no tomorrow.
Allow 40 years for several million lethalcoffee-related deaths to pile up before the pandemic is taken seriously by the government. (Try to put aside any negative feelings you harbor about investment bankers.) Finally, Congress introduces a Lethalcoffee Safety Act that has a chance of becoming law. Would you imagine that law would:
A) Order the FDA to regulate lethalcoffee but withhold from the agency the power to ban it?
B) Ban every flavor of lethalcoffee except mint, the one most people drink?
C) Make it really hard for people to sell badcoffee, a new but much less hazardous cousin of lethalcoffee?
D) Be co-authored by Starbucks (SBUX)?
How about "E," all of the above? Because that's what Congress is proposing to do in the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, probably soon to head to President Obama's desk for a signature. Mint-flavored lethalcoffees are menthol cigarettes. The 80 percent of investment bankers who prefer menthols are African-Americans. And the bill was largely shaped by Philip Morris (now called Altria), which sells more cigarettes than nearly every other American tobacco company combined.
"It is a dream come true for Philip Morris," Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me. "First, they make it look like they are a reformed company which really cares about reducing the toll of cigarettes and protecting the public's health; and second, they protect their domination of the market and make it impossible for potentially competitive products to enter the market." Other tobacco companies have taken to calling the bill the "Marlboro Monopoly Act of 2009."
It's hard to fathom where Congress is finding the political cover necessary to pass an industry-sponsored love letter like this one. But it's coming from Philip Morris' partner in crafting the legislation: a nonprofit anti-smoking organization called Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
Graphic by bamby/Shutterstock.
Comments
Its amazing!
I think its crazy that these companies can get away with murder. Hundreads of thousands of people die each year to smoking related causes. I have a instruments acoustic guitars website and if my product started killing people imagine how long I would be in business. This is scary, just because these companies have people in Washington that protect their intrests they can get away with this. This is truly amazing!
FDA abuses power
Unfortunately, the FDA is starting to interfere with the rights of Americans by abusing their power. There becomes a point where the FDA stops advising Americans (As is its role) and starts withholding their rights. A perfect example of this is their attempt to ban the electronic cigarette, even though they have the potential to save millions of lives. The FDA feels its within their power to take a product off the market that has thousands less chemicals than traditional cigarettes. Is this not an abuse of power? Informing people of the health ramifications of products is well within reason, removing a product that could save their life is not.
Johnny Blaze
If 80% of all African-American smokers smoke menthol...
then I suppose that there's an 80% chance of a menthol preference for a certain African-American in the Oval Office. That would certainly be a rather, um, large obstacle.
the Philip Morris Aid Bill
Kudos to Paul Smalera. A beautiful and accurate picture of this fraudulent legislation--of, by, and for Philip Morris--which stands a good chance of increasing cigarette-caused deaths in the US. The bill has just been passed by Congress. The next step must be to convince the President not to sign it. That effort can be made by e-mails to his web page, by public statements such as editorials and public letters, and by other means that will occur to inventive readers of Slate. Readers in touch with ongoing efforts to replace this bill by genuine anti-smoking legislation ought to inform the rest of us of their work; we need to join in their efforts. The Senators who voted against this bill ought to speak out. In case the President signs the bill we need a creative and organized strategy to undo it and replace it by legislation that will truly cut into the death toll. The first step ought to be the immediate legalization of electronic cigarettes. They resemble cigarettes in delivering nicotine, but differ from them in delivering no tobacco tars whatever--the cause of the deaths. They resemble the entirely legal nicotine patches and gum in delivering nicotine, but differ from them in mimicking the effect of cigarettes. It is surely no coincidence that the bill seeks to ban the one cigarette replacement that has a chance of large-scale success. Make no mistake. This is a bill that will cost lives. If you have lost a good friend or relative to cigarettes, isn't it worth it to make an effort--in their name--to fight back? I am posting my actual name and email address as a step in encouraging opponents of the Philip Morris Aid Bill to come together and organize. Stephen Voss shvoss@gmail.com