A Tobacco Control Bill's Unlikely Demise
Sept. 8, 2004 -- Retired Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and former FDA Commissioner David Kessler are two icons of the public health community, recognized for their fight against the tobacco industry.
But when lawmakers created the most comprehensive tobacco control legislation in American history — a landmark deal that would have regulated the manufacturing and sale of cigarettes and put billions of dollars into anti-smoking campaigns — the two men turned their backs on it.
"They squandered a historic opportunity, and now we have a situation where none of their goals are being met," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who drafted the groundbreaking legislation.
For the first time, a senior executive of the country's largest cigarette maker has told ABC News about big tobacco's secret negotiations with public officials. And the major players in the case also speak about why the deal never happened.
‘Sea Change’
The path to the deal began a decade ago, when Kessler was the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He asserted that cigarettes were drugs, and it was time for the federal government to regulate how they were made and marketed.
Never before had a government official taken on the Big Tobacco companies, which had been extremely profitable for decades and appeared invincible. Tobacco had been blamed in the deaths of almost 450,000 people a year, but the industry had never had to pay a penny in lawsuits against it.
When the chief executive officers of seven tobacco companies testified before Congress for the first time ever, in 1994, they said they believed nicotine was not addictive. But then thousands of secret tobacco-industry documents revealed massive evidence that cigarettes were deadly and addictive, evidence the tobacco companies had long suppressed.
An avalanche of lawsuits against the companies began. Smokers sued, and then the government sued. "There was a sea change in attitudes about the tobacco industry in the United States," said Steve Parrish, a senior executive for Philip Morris in the 1990s.
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