Word: fda
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...rating system; who shepherded the huge telecommunications bill to completion. Gore, whose sister died of lung cancer, has also been the single most persistent champion inside the White House of Clinton's year-old campaign to discourage teen smoking, which culminated last week in the decision to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco products for the first time...
...seesawing stock prices. And now the new rules, part of a bid to stop smoking among teenagers, establish a precedent the industry has feared for decades. Clinton signed an Executive Order that subjects tobacco to regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. As a twist of the knife, the FDA claims its new authority over cigarettes by defining them as the delivery system for an addictive drug, nicotine. Alphabetically, that would put it after morphine and right before opium. Not exactly wholesome company...
Tobacco is not a potted plant--it doesn't take attacks quietly. No sooner were the FDA regulations previewed last summer than the industry filed suit in a North Carolina federal court to stop them, arguing that the agency has no authority to oversee cigarettes...
Tobacco firms have also become heavy donors to the Republican Party, an investment that already has paid off in the G.O.P.-controlled Congress, with its hostility toward government regulation in general and the FDA in particular. Thanks to a bill approved earlier this year, Congress has 60 "legislative days" to overturn any agency regulation...
...fight the new advertising rules in court as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. Earlier this year the Supreme Court struck down a state law that banned the mention of liquor prices in advertising. "The evidence is clear," says Brennan Dawson, spokesperson of the Tobacco Institute, "that the FDA's rules do not address the reasons youngsters smoke, will not work to reduce youth access to tobacco, and are an illegal expansion of this federal agency's authority." Or as they used to say in those old cigarette commercials, we'd rather fight than switch...