Clinton Wants Tougher Tobacco Curbs For Teens He Will Consider Fda’s Request To Treat Tobacco As A Drug

President Clinton stepped into the politically volatile tobacco fray Thursday, saying he favored tougher government action to curb smoking among young people and would consider new regulatory proposals from the federal Food and Drug Administration.

“My concern is apparently what the FDA’s concern is, and that is the impact of cigarette smoking, particularly on our young people, and the fact that cigarette smoking seems to be going up among our young people,” Clinton told reporters in the Rose Garden.

“We ought to do more about that than is being done, and I’m willing to do that,” Clinton said. “But I want to see exactly what their recommendations are.” He said it would be “premature” to say he had reached a decision.

Clinton’s remarks, prompted by news reports that the FDA plans to recommend regulating tobacco products as drugs because of their addictive nicotine content, touched off a furor on Capitol Hill and threatened to put the president in political peril in southern tobacco-growing states.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal quoted administration officials Thursday as saying the FDA planned to ask Clinton to permit the agency to begin regulating tobacco products, which would shift authority over the $40 billion tobacco industry from the historically friendly Congress to the FDA.

FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler, without discussing his recommendations in detail, said Thursday he is attacking the tobacco issue as “a pediatric disease” because most smokers take up the habit as minors.

Kessler said his agency and White House officials were in discussions over tobacco “to find ways to discourage children from starting in the first place.”

But House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia said the FDA had “lost its mind” in considering regulating tobacco products. He joined other tobacco-state lawmakers in blasting the notion that Congress should relinquish authority over tobacco products to the federal drug regulatory agency.

“If you want an example of big government interfering,” Gingrich said, “it would be the FDA picking a brand new fight when we haven’t won the far more serious fights about crack and cocaine and heroin.”

Several House Republicans called for the resignation of Kessler, who was appointed by President Bush.

“If the government wants to be an officious intermeddler, which is precisely what it’s doing, I think it’s time someone afix a muzzle to the chin of the intermeddler,” said Rep. Howard Coble, Republican of North Carolina, the heart of tobacco country.

White House spokesman Michael McCurry portrayed GOP calls for Kessler’s resignation “an exaggerated response to good work addressing the health and science implications of tobacco use.”

McCurry said White House discussions about regulating tobacco “are at a very preliminary stage.”

Clinton “is anxious to see that we address these issues quickly,” McCurry said, “but it is premature in the least to say that any definite course of action has been determined at this point.”