Senate looking to FDA to make safer cigarette

WASHINGTON — The federal agency charged with keeping food and drugs from harming people may soon be asked to take a consumer product that kills more than 400,000 people a year and make it safer.

The product is the cigarette — generally acknowledged as anything but safe. Smoking accounts for nearly one in five deaths in the United States.

That toll can be reduced, tobacco foes say, and they point to a bill that is expected to pass a Senate committee Wednesday as the tool to make it happen.

The legislation would give the Food and Drug Administration the same authority over cigarettes and other tobacco products that the regulatory agency already has over countless other consumer products. It's not something the agency necessarily wants, according to past comments by FDA commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach.

The bill would let the FDA regulate the levels of tar, nicotine and other harmful components of tobacco products. Cigarette smoke alone contains some 4,000 chemicals, more than 40 of which are known to cause cancer.

"Are we going to cut cancer in half with FDA control? No. Can we do with cigarettes things that are important in regulating a product to minimize its toxicity? Yes, I think we can," said Dr. David Burns of the University of California, San Diego, scientific editor of several surgeon general reports on tobacco.

New products would need FDA approval before they could be sold, according to the legislation. The bill also would authorize the FDA to set national standards for tobacco products to control how they are made, as well as force the disclosure of their ingredients, including compounds and additives, and in what quantities. That, supporters claim, should help expose and ultimately limit the ways cigarettes are engineered to the detriment of the public's health.

"This bill wisely doesn't try to predict what a cigarette will look like once FDA begins to take action. Instead, it says to scientists at FDA, 'You have the power to require changes in tobacco products in whatever ways you believe, based on the science, that will reduce the harmfulness of the products or the addictiveness of the products,"' said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The group, once known as the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids, has long supported the bill, which has faltered in previous Congresses.

No one among those for or against the Senate bill, mirrored by matching legislation in the House, believes it could result in a safe cigarette. There is consensus that there is no such thing. But some foes of the bill maintain it could create that impression.