This fits into the pattern I've seen for about 40 years in studying the regulatory agencies. I focused on insurance regulation, but long ago concluded the industry regulates the insurance commissioner, not vice versa. But that's the rule, not the exception for almost all regulatory agencies such as the EPA, FDA, FCC, and all the rest.
Why do industries actually favor regulation? Because they know they can dictate the terms of regulation to their advantage. Over decades, when I've done a story about some dangerous, defective or otherwise deficient product, I've always been able to predict what the offending company would say when confronted with the facts. The typical answer includes this defense, "We meet all government standards, laws and regulations."
That defense often has legal value when they are sued, and it certainly has advertising and public regulations value.
The legal defense may be complete. For example, awhile back, Michigan passed a law that provides no victim of a medication can sue if the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that regulates drugs, has approved the product in question. When I found out about this law, I pointed out that government approval often means nothing. One of my favorite stories involved the approval by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency of first-aid instructions on products that happen to be poisonous (e.g., a windshield washer with methanol) that, if followed according to label instructions, were likely to product salt poisoning, dehydration of the brain and death. When I called the companies (and they were major ones such as big oil), I was told, "We meet all federal standards." That's true. But what they overlooked and apparently did not challenge were the standards that were fatally defective in every sense.
I filed a petition with the government agencies, but did not get the problem solved until I had a chance to interview President Jimmy Carter during the closing days of his second campaign. I asked him a question on the subject, and embarrassed him to forcing the agencies to act.
Philip Morris knows all this even if the mainstream national media don't. What the tobacco industry wants is a regulatory regimen that it can control and that will promulgate regulations to protect big tobacco, not regulate it. If big tobacco can easily buy Congress and the Presidency (as they have done over recent decades with the exception of one president), buying up and influencing one government agency won't even require their lobbyists to break a sweat.
Of course, the mainstream national media is so corrupted by the influence of big money that they are now part of the problem. In my view the mainstream national media are not the people's voice and the country's conscience in riding herd on the tobacco industry that has a history of killing people in genocidal numbers, and lying, defrauding, and deceiving the American public in unprecedented degrees.
In fact, the story I read quoted up front the senior vice president of Philip Morris, Steven Parrish, who explained the company position: "I just would say our approach as we have talked to members of Congress is that we understand there is some skepticism, but we are committed to trying to do this." Some members of Congress, already the paid servants of big tobacco (and mass killing), have supported big tobacco all along. They will be able to come up with a vote that suggests they are trying to protect the public and at the same time continue to serve their benefactors in big tobacco.
If big tobacco wanted regulation, it was already on the table. The FDA proposed to regulate tobacco as a drug, labeling cigarettes nothing more than a delivery system for nicotine, a drug already regulated by the FDA. But big tobacco opposed such regulation for many years, and finally defeated it when the matter went before the U.S. Supreme Court. The same 5-4 majority that elected Bush president also killed tobacco regulation. Now, in view of government attitudes toward regulation, big tobacco is probably no longer fearful of FDA regulation. Perhaps the tobacco giants have concluded that the FDA can do for tobacco what it has been doing for the drug companies - regulating them in the interests of the industry, not the public.
Again, going back to the mainstream national media report on this matter, the story I read, quotes, in the last two paragraphs, a financial analyst at Dean Witter, David Adelman. He said that Philip Morris is close to developing a cigarette with low carcinogen levels. Adelman says the company couldn't market the cigarette as a healthier product without FDA regulation. Adelman's punch line: "They (Philip Morris) genuinely need FDA's blessing to make a health-based claim."
They know the FDA (or other federal agency) would now be glad to give them permission to do pretty much what they want. That shows you how outlandish the regulation is likely to be. Calling a new kind of cigarette healthier than the present variety is like saying arsenic is healthy compared to cyanide. In any event, the media missed the fundamental explanation: Regulation in the environment of an industry-controlled government is designed to protect the industry supposedly regulated, not to protect the public.
Big tobacco, as we've already suggested, will get more than approval of a "safe" cigarette. It will get additional legal protection from the FDA's regulations. It will get some good public relations. So I'd recommend one more warning on the cigarette label:
"WARNING: Regulation proposed and favored by Philip Morris and the tobacco industry is hazardous to your health. The industry kills over 400,000 Americans a year, without the help of the FDA. Think of what they can do, with the help of tobacco-proposed regulation, when they join forces."
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, professor at the Wharton School, and
Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National
Academy of Sciences and is a board member of the Center for Safe Medication Use. He is an adjunct
professor of insurance and information science and technology at Cabrini College. You can write Herb
at POB 7301,St. Davids, PA e-mail him at hdenenberg@aol.com or reach him at his two Web sites:
thedenrep_archive.org or denenbergsdump.org