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Weighing Tobacco Control Alternatives, Their Illusions and Realities by Donald C. Smart

President Clinton has rejected the settlement negotiated between the tobacco companies and several of the states' attorneys general, but by early indications, the program the president would put in its place is likely to be at least equally faulty. In fact, the most obvious objection to the negotiated settlement applies equally to the president's plan: It too would leave the tobacco companies free to continue violating the public health peddling cigarettes. With smoking estimated to cause 450,000 deaths per year, neither the attorneys general nor the president has bothered to explain exactly why the tobacco companies should be allowed such license to kill.

The president's plan pretends to provide greater protections to children against the industry's efforts to seduce them to smoke, but in fact, the president's plan, like the negotiated settlement, sets the stage for a prosperous black market in tobacco products, and children are always the easiest target for victimization by black marketeers.

A black market in tobacco products is a fearsome thing to contemplate. The black market in illicit drugs has defeated the seventy-some year old drug control effort. So successful has been the black market in drugs, that it has caused an enormous increase in the number of addicts. In consequence, despite the huge growth of the general population during those same seventy-some years, addicts are now estimated to constitute about the same fraction of the population as before national drug control laws were first adopted.

If we allow our policy makers to blunder into a black market in tobacco, and if the resulting black market follows the usual course of development, we will find ourselves a few years hence with approximately equal numbers of children smoking, but: newly developed cigarettes will have become more potent, more destructive of health and more powerfully addictive; the tobacco commerce will be underground and completely beyond the regulatory reach of the Food and Drug Administration; the job of tobacco control will have been handed over to police authority; youthful gangsters will be warring for control of an insanely profitable tobacco commerce; the courts of our land will be clogged and our jails filled with alienated young tobacco pushers.

We are already in the early stages. A New York Times article carried in the San Francisco Chronicle of August 25, 1997, reports that a "huge" international black market in tobacco products has already developed. To quote just three details from that article: "The largest tobacco companies are selling billions of dollars of cigarettes each year to traders and dealers who funnel them into black markets in many countries..." and "...researchers say one-fourth of the cigarettes sold overseas pass through smuggling rings set up to evade foreign taxes and sell major brands at