WASHINGTON -- In what is becoming a nearly annual event, Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy and his Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee are expected to revive a bill aimed at giving the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to regulate the sale, distribution and advertising of tobacco products.
Widely debated and argued in Congress over two of the past three years, senators are already lining up on both sides of the issue.
Smoking is the No. 1 preventable cause of death in America. Empowering [image-nocss] the [FDA] to regulate tobacco products is long overdue, Kennedy wrote in a list of his priorities for the Senate HELP Committee, of which he is the new chairman. Effective FDA regulation will help to deter young people from starting to smoke and to assist current smokers in quitting.
Kennedy authored legislation to give the FDA this authority in the past. It passed the Senate twicein 2004 and 2005but was blocked by the House Republican leadership. Enacting this important public-health legislation should be a top priority for the new Congress, he wrote in November.
But U.S. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina said he will actively oppose any plan to give the FDA the power to regulate cigarettes. The Republican is from Winston-Salem, N.C., home to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. Burr told the Associate Press he would use every legislative tool at his disposal to battle the proposal.
His office confirmed the senator's stance for CSP Daily News. North Carolina is the nation's top tobacco-producing state.
Meanwhile, Kennedy's proposalyet to be submitted to the 110th Congresshas the support of the largest cigarette maker in the country, Philip Morris. In 2004, Philip Morris came out in support of the regulation proposal, noting that such federal regulation could clear the decks for it to introduce reduced-risk tobacco products.
Citigroup Investment Research analyst Bonnie Herzog has said she expects that support to continue. In a recent note she wrote, We believe this [regulation] would actually increase the barriers to entry in the category, further entrenching the major cigarette manufacturers.
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