Ashes to Ashes (108 page)

Just how slowly the tobacco industry would be made to yield ground at the federal level was evidenced by the fate of one provision of the 1984 act—the companies’ surrender of the list of tobacco additives. For ten years—during which Congress would pass only one other real tobacco control measure, a two-stage ban on smoking during all domestic airline flights—the list of added ingredients was locked away in a safe in the OSH office while that tiny bureau, starved on a budget that barely allowed it to prepare the Surgeon General’s reports and conduct a minimal antismoking educational program, could never find the money or resolve to have thé additives investigated by qualified scientists. Finally, in 1994, with the first avowedly antismoking President in the White House, an activist FDA commissioner suggested that cigarette manufacturers appeared to be manipulating the nicotine level of the product, with the help of additives, to keep smokers addicted.

This seemingly startling disclosure—of manufacturing procedures well known to public-health investigators for more than thirty years and testified to by the yields listed in cigarette ads and monitored by the FTC since 1967—allowed Waxman to pressure the industry into making public its long-secret list of additives. Included among the nearly 600 substances listed were irritants like ammonia; ethyl 2-furoate, known to cause liver damage in laboratory animals; and Sclareol, which induced convulsions when combined with certain other substances. But the industry issued the familiar assurances that these ingredients were safe in the amount present in cigarettes—precisely what they had long contended about all the compounds yielded during the smoking process. Yet such is the nature of massive media attention that these newly identified additives, composing a fraction of the ingredients in each cigarette, were treated as a major revelation and potentially grave health menace while the tobacco itself, making up more than 90 percent of every cigarette and long known when burned to produce dozens of carcinogens and toxic substances, was ignored as very old news.

IV

NOT
blind to the slippage in their mastery of Capitol Hill, the lords of tobacco struck a deal in 1985 to narrow the divergence between their own interests and those of the prime source of their political power—the growers.

For nearly half a century the federal tobacco price support system had brought a decent livelihood to more than half a million farm families while assuring the manufacturers of a ready supply of the world’s best leaf. The system worked because the farmers accepted acreage allotments and crop quotas that kept the leaf supply in close balance with the demand and guaranteed them a floor price geared to their costs of doing business. As a result, a tiny percentage—as low as 2 percent in some years—of the crop went unsold and had to be taken up under government loan by the farmer cooperatives, which eventually sold off most of the surplus. The industry contended that the program was not a subsidy but a boon to all parties, since 99 percent of the loans were repaid and the cumulative total of $200 million in lost principal and forgiven interest over nearly fifty years of the system’s operation was dwarfed by the cigarette excise taxes—$7 billion in 1981 alone—that federal and state treasuries reaped.

The situation remained stable so long as cigarette consumption kept rising in the U.S., along with demand for American leaf by foreign manufacturers who prized its taste and texture. The public’s willingness to sustain the support program to benefit tobacco farmers and manufacturers at minimal governmental cost vied with its awareness that the program helped sustain a health hazard under increasing censure. By the early ’Eighties, though, that precarious tolerance tipped over into discernible unhappiness with the arrangement. The price of U.S. tobacco leaf, artificially sustained by the support program, had climbed to as high as twice the going rate in developing countries, like Brazil and Zimbabwe, where the crop was becoming a mainstay of the domestic economy and labor was much cheaper. Imports soared twentyfold between 1960 and 1980, when they made up one-third of the leaf used in American cigarettes. Demand for U.S. leaf was further reduced by increasing use of reconstituted tobacco sheets and puffed leaf, allowing 523 cigarettes to be made from a pound of tobacco, compared with 382 only a dozen years earlier. On top of all this, per capita smoking was now dropping by a percentage point or two annually in response to the health charges.

These conditions damaged tobacco growers, especially small ones; the larger ones were now benefiting from modernized means of harvesting and curing the crop, like mechanical pickers and metal bulk barns where the leaf
was no longer tied into “hands” and hung up to dry. Even so, tobacco required 200 man-hours of work per acre, and U.S. leaf was pricing itself out of the market except for the richest buyers like Japan, which paid up for the genuine article. But even with exports accounting for up to 40 percent of the U.S. crop, the harvest by the early 1980s was only two-thirds of what it had been three decades earlier. The proportion of the crop going unsold and put under government loan rose now along with antismoking sentiment. Senator Bob Packwood of non-tobacco-growing Oregon conveyed the national sentiment when he remarked that it was “unconscionable to allow Americans to go hungry while supporting an inedible and unhealthy crop like tobacco … .”

The fight to end tobacco supports was joined in earnest in 1981. The program’s most enlightened defenders like Charlie Rose did not bother anymore to deny the health charges against the leaf; their concern was the economic survival of the farm families still dependent on tobacco—about 250,000 of them in twenty-two states. If the support program was shut down and the growing quotas eliminated, Rose and his comrades argued, planting would almost surely expand and seriously depress prices, abetting only the largest growers, who would probably survive by contracting directly with the cigarette companies. But unless the program was revised, even its most ardent backers saw, only the manufacturers would benefit from the widening gulf between U.S. and overseas leaf prices. The cigarette makers, though, could not let their growers dwindle to the point where there were too few to assure the industry of an adequate supply of high-quality domestic leaf and, equally important, enough political clout in Congress.

The tobacco congressmen struck a bargain with the Democratic leadership by which the doubled cigarette sales tax was put through on a provisional three-year basis, while the tobacco support program was continued on the condition that it inflict no net cost on U.S. taxpayers beyond the $15 million a year required to administer it. The growers agreed to cover the cost of any ultimately unsold leaf taken under loan so that the expense of the inventory held in farmers’ cooperatives, already over a billion pounds, could be brought under control. The Agriculture Department was given the right to slash the support price by about one-third, which meant that the growers would absorb the shortfall due to reduced demand for leaf and ever-rising costs for their fuel, fertilizer, bank interest, and other necessities. But cigarette companies were left free to buy abroad as they chose, keeping downward pressure on U.S. prices, so that more of the American crop went unsold and under loan—up to 25 percent now—and growers had to pay a penalty of about twenty-five cents a pound, or more than 15 percent of the sales price, under the no-net-cost-to-taxpayers formula. By 1985 federal loans to growers from the Commodity Credit Corporation had hit $3.5 billion, with $1 billion of that in the form of an
unsalable stockpile and likely to go unrepaid. More growers were being driven to the brink of bankruptcy even as the cigarette companies were coining unprecedented profits.

Putting aside a deep enmity, the populist Charlie Rose, the growers’ champion, and economic royalist Jesse Helms, who held the fort for the manufacturers, pushed a deal through Congress in 1985 which headed off an irreparable breach within the tobacco industry. Its leadership agreed to a permanent doubling of the federal excise tax on cigarettes—indeed, congressional sentiment was running high for an even suffer boost—and the manufacturers conceded the need to relieve the growers’ distress by splitting the costs with them for all future loans on unsold crop that could not be repaid. They also agreed to bail out the government by buying up the huge stockpile of unsold tobacco held by growers’ cooperatives over the next five years at a discount of 10 percent on the newer leaf and as much as 90 percent on the older leaf, thus assuring the manufacturers an abundant supply of cheaper leaf and reducing their buying needs when the new crops came to auction. But in order not to inflict still further pain on farmers, the cigarette makers agreed to advise the Agriculture Department confidentially of their individual buying needs for the coming year so that the growers’ overall quota could be adjusted accordingly; the companies also pledged to buy no less than 90 percent of their stated needs.

“We saw that our political base was going to disappear,” recalled Frank Resnik, then president of Philip Morris-USA, “so we made a decision that cost us a lot of money.” But relatively speaking, the companies’ concession was a modest enough investment in good will and political survival; only 8 percent of the cost of state-of-the-art manufacturing and marketing of cigarettes was represented by tobacco. A year into the new support program jointly funded by growers and manufacturers, tobacco acreage in the U.S. fell to half of what it had been only a decade earlier. For the tobacco industry to retain political influence, it would have to move beyond dependency on a regional power base and invest seriously in other forms of enterprise.

V

UNTIL
the ’Eighties, the core of the tobacco issue had been the health of smokers, but with the emergence of scientific evidence, however fragmentary, that environmental tobacco smoke imperiled nonsmoking bystanders, the debate broadened to include social issues and grew more charged. A decade earlier, you were considered rude or a crank if, out of annoyance at having your eyes and nose offended at close quarters, you asked a smoker to refrain in an elevator or other confined place. Many smokers declined to oblige, assuming that it was their right to feed their habit when and where they
chose and thereby breeding a latent resentment among nonsmokers. Their distress mounted with the disclosures about ETS from the medical community and led to outbursts edged with real anger. Comedian Steve Martin captured the change in mood in one of his monologues by remarking that when friends asked him, “Do you mind if I smoke?” he now replied, “Not in the least—do you mind if I fart?”

It was not war yet, exactly, but there was a clear lowering of tolerance for smokers, who were increasingly seen as trampling on nonsmokers’ assertedly God-given right to breathe clean air. The tobacco industry was forcibly being made aware of the shift in sentiment by antismoking activists like bioengineering professor Stanton Glantz of San Francisco, who recalled, “Our movement undercut the social support network for smoking by implicitly defining it as an antisocial act.”

Although the nascent nonsmokers’ rights movement was still largely perceived as peripheral to the main issue of smoking as posing a serious peril to those who indulged in it and thus represented a frittering away of the health community’s scarce antismoking resources, in bellwether California the disparate Groups Against Smoking Pollution (GASPs) had captured public attention. Their confederation changed its name in 1981 to Californians for Nonsmokers’ Rights (CNR), drawing sustenance from new data on ETS in studies like those by Repace and Hirayama. The precise nature and strength of these findings was somewhat beside the point. “We were just waiting for science to tell us what we already knew,” remarked one longtime activist—namely, who was violating whose rights; the extent and medical consequences of the violation were nuance. Also fueling the issue were new data on the economic costs of smoking. Seattle University economist William L. Weis, for example, reported in 1983 that smokers devoted 6 percent of their workday to the ritual, took 50 percent more sick days, and made 50 percent greater use of the health-care system than nonsmokers. If they hired only the latter instead, Weis added, employers would shave their personnel costs by 20 percent, their insurance premiums by 30 percent, their office maintenance by 50 percent, and their disability outlays by 70 percent, for a claimed total saving of as much as $4,600 per worker a year. Tobacco industry spokesmen denounced these figures as ludicrously inflated and noted, by way of rebuttal, that the disproportionately higher number of sick days attributed to smokers was readily explained by the fact that there were more smokers in the lower-paid blue-collar sector of the workforce, where it was the often tedious nature of the labor—not smoking—that prompted the higher sick-day claims. Another frequently noted report came from the congressional Office of Technology Assessment in 1985, placing the cost of health care for smoking-related diseases at $22 billion a year and adding to it another $43 billion in lost productivity in the form of wages unpaid to smoking workers absent from the job due to illness,
for an annual total cost of $65 billion, or $2.17 per pack of cigarettes sold. It was far from clear, though, just what proportion of the overall social cost was borne by smokers themselves.

However debatable the particulars, the growing vilification of smokers and smoking contributed to the passage in San Francisco in mid-1983 of the nation’s first truly restrictive rules against smoking in the workplace in a major metropolitan area. The measure, intended to accommodate the wishes of both smokers and nonsmokers, called for separate work areas for each if even a single nonsmoker requested it. CNR and other nonsmoking crusaders viewed work-site regulations as far more important than rules governing restaurants, stores, and public gathering places, because the latter involved shorter exposure to ETS and because where one dined out or shopped or took cultural nourishment involved voluntary choices, while where one worked often involved far less, if any, choice. Inconveniencing smokers, moreover, by limiting the time and/or places they could smoke was viewed as sound public-health policy aimed at discouraging a harmful habit. And the San Francisco ordinance left enforcement of a segregated workplace up to health officials and peer pressure, not police. Reading polls that showed the public favored the step by a two-to-one margin, Mayor Dianne Feinstein rebuffed objections from the tobacco industry, unions, and some other elements among Democrats who argued that the restrictions were an elitist concept, and signed them into law. Within a month, the cigarette makers, knowing that San Francisco as a tourist mecca attracted worldwide media coverage, gathered 30,000 signatures in protest of the new smoking restrictions and put the issue up to a citywide referendum.