Tobacco Documents Online

TECHNOPOLITICS--Program No. 412 GUESTS: ATHENA MUELLER, Action on Smoking and Health; PETER HUBER, Forbes Magazine BW-20-01 page# 1 HOST: TIM WHITE AIRDATE: JUNE 18, 1994 TRANSCRIPT BY: FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE 620 NATIONAL PRESS BUILDING WASHINGTON, DC 20045 FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE IS A PRIVATE FIRM AND IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. COPYRIGHT 1994 $Y FEDERAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS CORPORATION, WASHINGTON, DC 20045, USA. NO PORTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT MAY BE COPIED, SOLD, OR RETRANSMITTED WITHOUT THE WRITTEN AUTHORITY OF FEDERAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS CORPORATION. COPYRIGHT IS NOT CLAIMED AS TO ANY PART OF THE ORIGINAL WORK PREPARED BY A UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT OFFICER OR EMPLOYEE AS A PART OF THAT PERSON'S OFFICIAL DUTIES.

TIM WHITE: -'Ilus weex on "recnnoYolitlcs -- Smoking-tobacco kills people. What should your government do about it? A TechnoPolitics report. Up.next, the tobacco wars. Does your deadly habit hurt other people? Smoking kills perhaps as many as 416,000 Americans every year. That, according to the federal government. If you smoke, you are exposing yourself to increased risks from heart disease, lung cancer and a host of other respiratory ailments. A strong argument could be made that smoking should be banned, because smokers are killing themselves. But that's not the argument being made in Washington. The new political attack against smoking features three separate charges. One, tobacco companies are spiking cigarettes with nicotine in a deliberate attempt to addict smokers. Two, smokers put innocent bystanders at risk by 'subjecting them to secondhand smoke making them engage in 'passive smoking.' Three, smokers drive_up health care costs making the rest of us pay for the consequences of their personal decisions. This broad indictment has attracted powerful political support in Washington and in state capitals across the country. The problem with these arguments is that they may all be wrong. First, the spiking charge. It grew out of an investigation by ABC News' Day One program. The story aired on February 28th of this year. (Excerpt from ABC News Day One) JOHN MARTIN: Now, a lengthy Day One investigation has uncovered the tobacco industry's last best secret. How it artificially adds nicotine to cigarettes to keep people smoking and boost profits. (End excerpt.) MR. WHITE: Dr. David Kessler, head of the Food and Drug Administration, thinks there may be grounds to regulate cigarettes as a drug if tobacco companies are setting nicotine levels with the purpose of addicting customers. The congressional attack on smoking is led by this man, Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Health and Environment subcommittee. REP. HENRY WA}OtAN (D-CA): There is something going on other than just taking the tobacco and rolling a cigarette paper around it that has to do with the level of nicotine. When I asked Dr. Kessler at one of our hearings whether there's any purpose for nicotine other than for addiction he said he didn't know of any other purpose. MR. WHITE: The tobacco companies do have the technology to manipulate nicotine levels. The question is, are they using that technology to raise nicotine content to addict their customers? Kessler's position is still evolving, but in congressional testimony on March 25th, he answered the bottom line question. Kessler said, "we do not yet have all the evidence necessary to establish cigarette manufacturers intent." And what has Congressman Waxman uncovered in his own investigation?

REP. WAXMAN: I have no information as to the practices of any particular company. The Food and Drug Administration's looking into this issue. We're looking into it and I don't think we can conclude yet about all the practices that they've undertaken. MR. WHITE: As for ABC's John Martin, he will have the chance to present his evidence when he shows up with a court date with Phillip Morris. The tobacco giant has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against Martin, his producer and ABC. The company claims that cigarettes contain less nicotine after the manufacturing process than is contained in the tobacco used to create the product. As for passive smoking,• the government's policy is driven by this 1992 EPA report which claimed to establish a link between inhaling the smoke from other people's cigarettes and lung cancer. As we reported in December of 1992, the study took an unusual route to that conclusion. Initially, the data could not meet the EPA's own scientific standard for establishing a causal link between , secondhand smoke and lung cancer. So, instead of concluding that a link could not be proven, the EPA lowered its scientific standard and then labeled smoking as a threat to nonsmokers. Probably no argument against smoking has higher political stakes than the economical argument. Athena Mueller is general counsel for action on smoking and health. ATHENA MUELLER (Action on Smoking and Health): Medical costs, lost time, lost productivity. Also, the question of indifferent performance. People were spending time to light pipes and cigarettes in their time on the job. And other things like burns to furniture and desks adds to higher insurance costs both for health and also for fire insurance. There is really a very legitimate janitorial costs. We have one example of a company out west and when the employer had a non-smoking policy they reduced the actual janitorial costs by $800 a year because windows were cleaned less frequently, carpets to be vacuumed and their ashtrays. So, it's a very large all around amount. MR. WHITE: The government's latest research outlined in a study by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment or OTA says that smokers are costing all of us $68 billion a year in terms of lost productivity, lost wages and added medical costs. But how exactly did the government come up with that $68 billion figure? The biggest portion, $40.3 billion, represents indirect mortality costs. That is, all the money that smokers would have earned if they'd kept on living instead of dying of a smoking related illness. In large part, of course, that's a cost to the smoker and his family, not to society as a whole. The next largest piece of the pie, $20.8 billion, represents medical costs associated with the prevention, diagnoses and treatment

• I • T. 'Y I MW f of smoking related illnesses like lung cancer or emphysema. And then there is $6.9 billion in indirect morbidity costs, which means the cost of lost productivity on the job due to smoking related illnesses. Sixty-eight billion dollars may seem like an unacceptable sum to pay for the right to smoke no matter who picks up the tab. But consider how the government arrived at this number. The OTA cost figure does not subtract the costs that people-would incur if they died from something other than smoking. In other words, it overlooks the medical bills run up at the end of life by nonsmokers. Peter Huber is a Ph.D. engineer and an attorney. PETER HUBER (Forbes): The question isn't whether smoking kills you or makes you sick. It does. The question is whether dying of a' smoking related disease in your 60's costs the rest of us more than dying of a non-smoking related disease in your 70's or 80's. or at least that's the first question. And there's no particular reason that dying of a lung cancer or a heart attack, which are pretty quick killers when you're 63 or 65 is a more expensive way to die for the rest of society than dying of some other disease -- Alzheimer's, another heart attack or a difference cancer -- in your 70's. MR. WHITE: What's more, the study does not subtract the funds that smokers would have taken out of our public treasuries if they'd lived longer, non-smoking lives. MR. HUBER: I certainly don't want smokers to kill themselves. I'd be delighted if everybody quit. But if you're going to make this an economic argument you have to say, well, they're dying younger; therefore they're saving all the rest of us all the social security. They're saving us years of drawing from private pension and so on and so forth. . MR. WHITE: £s it possible that while smokers inflict horrible costs on themselves they actually save money for the rest of us? MR. HUBER: There's a sharp and clear different between how much they're costing themselves, which is a lot, and what they're costing the rest of us. So far as the rest of us goes they're probably saving us money or else it's a wash. MR. WHITE: If you're starting to wonder what kind of economics they practice on Capitol Hill, wait just a moment before you blame OTA. OTA researchers who work for the Congress were just doing what they were told. Senator David Pryor, Democrat of Arkansas, asked them to do the study and to use a controversial methodology created by the Federal Centers for Disease Control. But at the back of their report, in a passage overlooked by many readers, OTA scientists made clear that ~ they did not include "offsetting costs' in their study. Further, OTA fJ1 researchers said, reduction or elimination of smoking would improve ~ ~ health and extend longevity, but may not lead to savings in health care costs. ~ N I Ln ~ cc

x In fact, significant reductions in smoking prevalence and the attendant increase in life expectancy could lead to future increases in total medical spending in Medicare program outlays and in the budgets of the social security and other government programs. One OTA researcher told us that there are even doubts about the raw data they used to calculate lost earnings. So what is the real impact of this kind-of study? In Florida and elsewhere state governments have announced their intention to sue tobacco companies for compensation based on the idea that smoking is imposing massive medical costs on health care programs. So, the battle is joined. The elimination of tobacco products and the end of smoking may or may not be worthwhile social goals, but who's long-term interests does it serve to base policy on what some would see as junk science and feel good economics? And that's it for this addition of TechnoPolitics. I'm Tim White. Thank you very much for being with us. We'll see you next time. Copyright (c) 1994 Federal News Service Received by NewsEDGE/LAN: 6/20/94 12:28 PM