Stogie News: More Congressional Tobacco Shenanigans

As if massive tobacco tax increases weren’t enough, a Senate panel voted yesterday to subject tobacco products to regulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The move would give FDA bureaucrats the ability to regulate tobacco as well as tobacco advertisements, a power both current and former FDA Commissioners don’t even want, citing limited resources and the fact that regulating tobacco as a “drug” the same way it regulates pharmaceutical drugs doesn’t fit into the FDA’s mission – potentially jeopardizing the health of cigarette smokers.

But while the health bureaucrat-types oppose FDA regulation of tobacco, an unlikely coalition supports it. Altria/Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company, and anti-smoking groups teamed up to push FDA oversight. Both want to cut back the ability of tobacco companies to exercise their first amendment right to advertise their legal products, but for different reasons.

Altria/Phillip Morris knows that without the ability to advertise, its competitors can never challenge its dominance of the cigarette market. Meanwhile, anti-tobacco groups see pharmaceutical-style FDA regulation of advertisements a step towards the FDA declaring all tobacco products unsafe and thus prohibited.

In an interesting twist, the law forbids the FDA from certifying that some forms of tobacco are safer than others, despite a mountain of evidence. This means smokeless tobacco or cigar manufacturers cannot tell consumers that their products are safer than cigarettes even if such claims are empirically proven.

So how does this law affect cigar smokers?

Besides being another step down the road to complete tobacco prohibition, FDA regulation may mean substantially limited advertising of cigars in magazines like Cigar Aficionado, Smoke Magazine, and Cigar Magazine, and also potentially on websites such as this one.

In addition to harming publications that rely on advertising, such Draconian rules threaten to stifle the recent streak of innovation that has been seen in the premium cigar market, as introducing new products often requires an advertising campaign to inform potential consumers.

More drastically, future FDA regulation may mean the removal or reduction of certain chemicals – such as nicotine – from tobacco products. For cigar makers that simply roll together leaves with naturally occurring chemicals, the regulation of certain chemicals would spell the end for the entire handmade cigar industry.

–Patrick S

Tags: cigars