For five days, the negotiators, exhausted and increasingly needy of fresh shirts, darted between Washington's Park Hyatt and ANA hotels, from conference room to mezzanine, hallway to bedroom conference call. Every so often, rumpled lawyers would emerge with wildly divergent claims about the progress of the fractious tobacco talks: a settlement was imminent, negotiators had hit the worst impasse since the start of deliberations on April 3, talks were on the brink of collapse. Wait! There's a settlement! (Well, almost...) Finally, at 3:30 p.m. last Friday, a chorus of state attorneys general gathered around a microphone in the ANA's ballroom to congratulate themselves on what Mississippi's Michael Moore called "the most historic public-health achievement in history."
Although the attorneys general talked as though they had just cured cancer, in truth they may have done the next best thing. They forced the tobacco industry to concede, in so many grudging words and so many, many more dollars, that cigarettes are a deadly regimen. The companies--Philip Morris Companies, RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., B.A.T. Industries PLC's Brown & Williamson and Loews Corp.'s Lorillard--reached a resolution with the attorneys general of nearly 40 states in which the industry will pay out $368.5 billion over the next quarter-century in compensation, drastically alter their marketing programs and submit to the regulatory heel of the FDA.
The money, divvied out in annual payments starting at $10 billion and rising eventually to $15 billion, in perpetuity, will be used to compensate states for health-care costs related to treating smokers, pay individuals who successfully press suit, finance health research and promote education programs aimed at deterring youths from taking up the evil weed. To that end, Joe Camel will soon become a has-been and the Marlboro Man will be put out to pasture, because the industry also agreed to sweeping reforms that proscribe the use of human or cartoon forms in advertising. Billboards, stadium signs, T-shirt giveaways and other promotional freebies are forbidden; so are product placements in films.
The linchpin of the agreement is the effort by the attorneys general and the public-health community--including the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society and the American Medical Association--to cut smoking among youngsters, which has been on the rise. In fact, if the number of teenage puffers doesn't decline by 50% within seven years, the industry will be subject to additional penalties. "Only the discovery of major vaccines," said Massachusetts' Scott Harshbarger, president of the National Association of Attorneys General, "could rival what this proposal promises to accomplish."
That seemingly breathless assessment is backed by dismaying statistics that spurred the attorneys general to consensus. According to the Centers for Disease Control, each day in America 6,000 teenagers light up their first cigarette; 3,000 teens enter the ranks of "regular smokers," meaning they've smoked at least one cigarette a day for a month; and 1,000 adults die prematurely as a direct result of a decision made in adolescence to take up smoking. All told, 400,000 Americans die each year from smoking-related illnesses. Simply put, argued Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, "we're losing lives every day we don't stop this."