President Clinton plans to announce today that the federal government will begin conducting annual surveys to determine cigarette brand share in the market for underage smokers, a defiant gesture aimed at tobacco companies and their congressional allies.
Recoiling from the demise of comprehensive anti-smoking legislation in the Senate last week, Clinton will issue an executive order today directing the Department of Health and Human Services to begin documenting which brands enjoy favor among smokers age 12 through 17, as part of the yearly National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, senior administration officials said yesterday.
The tobacco bill, which stalled after failing to win the necessary 60 votes to end debate, would have called for such research into the youth smoking market. In one of its more controversial provisions, the bill also would have imposed large financial penalties on cigarette companies that did not reduce their sales to youngsters by 30 percent over the next five years and 60 percent over the next decade.
Those penalties, to which the tobacco firms vociferously objected, cannot be imposed now that the legislation has died. Moreover, they were likely targets for a challenge on constitutional grounds had the bill passed. But Clinton aides said there is logic to performing the market research anyway.
Clinton, they said, has two objectives. The first is to project a public message of optimism: Clinton maintains there is a chance that comprehensive tobacco legislation will pass later this year, and it makes sense to get a head start on the brand surveys that will be needed to monitor the performance of the cigarette companies in reducing sales to minors.
But even if the legislation never becomes law, administration officials said, the surveys will be a useful way to put public pressure on the firms.
"For the first time, we'll have clear evidence of which companies are responsible for this problem," said one senior administration official who works on the tobacco issue. "We'll be able to see which companies are targeting youth."
Scott Williams, a tobacco industry spokesman, said yesterday that cigarette companies have agreed to support general research into the reasons for youth smoking, but that the industry objects to performing brand surveys or imposing fees on individual companies. He dismissed Clinton's planned action as a "political gesture" aimed at stigmatizing tobacco and diverting attention from Clinton's failure to pass tobacco legislation -- his top domestic policy priority.
"It sounds like somebody just thought, 'What do we do now?' " Williams said of the executive order. "Brand surveys will not tell you what will work to reduce underage smoking."
Williams said Clinton is to blame for not exerting greater leadership to implement a settlement agreed to by state attorneys general and the major cigarette makers last June after close consultations with the White House.
Among several provisions of that June 20 agreement, cigarette companies reluctantly agreed to pay the government up to $2 billion in annual "look-back" penalties if youth smoking did not fall enough. The fees would have been paid by the industry as a whole, without reference to which brands were popular with young people.
The failed bill, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and amended at White House insistence, would have increased the maximum annual penalty to $3.5 billion, and imposed additional penalties on individual companies that missed their targets. These company-specific fees would have been $1,000 per smoker for every smoker beyond the target.
While there are no reliable government studies, an administration official said academic studies suggest that Philip Morris USA, which makes Marlboro cigarettes, has about 60 percent of the youth smoking market and RJR Nabisco, manufacturer of Camels, has about 20 percent.
Under the agreement last June, cigarette companies would voluntarily curb their advertising, which many experts say is the biggest factor driving youth smoking, in exchange for limits on their liability in lawsuits. But the tobacco firms later abandoned voluntary limits, complaining that the legislation drafted by Congress and the administration had become too expensive and punitive. The industry committed some $40 million in advertising to defeat the bill.
Clinton plans to make today's action the first in a series of executive orders aimed at keeping the profile of the tobacco issue high, administration officials said. The strategy is patterned after Clinton's extensive use of executive orders in 1995 and 1996, when he was laboring to demonstrate his political and policy relevance in the face of opposition by the new Republican majority in Congress.
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