Bill Dubbed ‘Marlboro Monopoly Act’

Washington, D.C., July 17, 2007—The Senate health committee on Wednesday is scheduled to mark up a bill that would put the Food and Drug Administration in charge of regulating tobacco, despite major problems associated with the agency’s current regulatory duties.

“Tobacco does not need FDA regulation, and regulating tobacco is the last thing that FDA needs to being doing,” said Sam Kazman, General Counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “The agency is already performing poorly in making new drugs available to the public, and a major new regulatory program would only worsen that situation.”

A recent CEI survey of orthopedic surgeons, for example, showed that most of these specialists view the current FDA approval process as already too slow. And a CEI report explains why FDA already labors under a deadly culture of risk aversion, which unnecessarily delays product approvals.

“Ultimately, FDA’s inclinations are ‘prohibitionist’; it would come as close as it could to making cigarettes unpalatable, unaffordable, and possibly unavailable,” Kazman explained.

The FDA-tobacco bill is troubling for other reasons, too.

“Philip Morris sees FDA regulation as a major competitive advantage,” said Kazman. “As the dominant company in the industry, Philip Morris is able to absorb regulatory costs that many competitors cannot.”