HANDS OFF OUR CIGARS
FERGUSON, ANDREW
HANDS OFF OUR. CIGARS by Andrew Ferguson WITH THE LONGUEURS OF SUMMER pleasingly upon us, the demand for beach reading is brisk, and so the Federal Trade Commission's Report to Congress: Cigar...
...Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...For the anonymous authors of Cigar Sales (as we will call it here) wanted to do more than report on cigar sales...
...This increase, says the report, "has occurred in tandem with the increase in promotional activities surrounding cigar smoking...
...So what is to be done...
...Still, it's not so dramatic as the old days, before the FTC swung into action against the current crisis...
...Congress should ban broadcast advertising of cigars...
...in 1997, 4.4 billion were sold— an increase of 15 percent, by the reckoning of the FTC's green eyeshades, who are expert in such calculations...
...The report was released last Thursday, ready to be tossed into the tote bag alongside the huarache sandals and the Panama Jack Paba-free SPF 30...
...The chairman of the FTC has announced that if Congress fails to enshrine them in law, the FTC may enact them on its own power...
...Astonishing to contemplate, the federal government has so far kept itself pretty much uninvolved in the cigar trade, making it, along with paper routes and neighborhood lemonade stands, one of the last businesses in America which can make that claim...
...No: If people IF PEOPLE ARE DOING SOMETHING OUT THERE, AND IF IT APPEARS, FURTHER, THAT THEY MIGHT BE ENJOYING IT, THEN THE FTC WANTS TO KNOW WHY...
...The most interesting of these, given their final recommendations, has to do with "electronic advertising...
...For anyone familiar with the logic of public service, the report's reasoning is easy to follow but hard to caricature, since it is so plainly a caricature all by itself...
...And studies show that for those people who do smoke a cigar a day, the "excess risk mortality" (compared to non-smokers) is negligible—an increase of 8 percent...
...The layman's answer would seem to be: well, nothing...
...It is likely that the cigar industry's presence on the Internet is substantially greater than what is reflected in their actual advertising expenditures . . ." Reeling, the authors get down to hard numbers...
...The large majority of adult cigar-smokers smoke fewer than one a day, as the report notes, and the data suggest that new cigar sales have gone to consumers who smoke infrequently...
...in 1973, for example, Americans bought 11.2 billion cigars...
...In addition to the ban on broadcast advertising, it would require warning labels, three of them, to appear on cigar packaging in rotation, which would inform consumers of what they probably know: The more you smoke, the greater your risk of disease...
...This increase the report dubs "dramatic...
...A uniform federally mandated label would preempt state regulation, and forestall the confusion of 50 different warning labels on cigars shipped nationwide...
...At 13 pages, exclusive of footnotes, it is brief, taut, a crisp and compelling read: perfect for all those who care about the inexorable, glacier-like expansion of the federal government...
...The report, I mean...
...Federal Trade Commission's Report to Congress: Cigar Sales and Advertising and Promotional Expenditures for Calendar Years 1996 and 1997—or FTCRCCSAPECY9697, as the acronym-crazed feds call it for short—made some noise on its publication last week...
...As it happens, the state of California already requires warning labels on cigars, and as a result 96 percent of the cigars sold in the United States have them...
...The FTC made three recommendations...
...require that cigars be packaged with health warnings...
...Two magazines devoted almost entirely to cigar smoking have been introduced and rapidly gained popularity...
...Similarly, there are no studies measuring the health effects of cigar-smoking as cigars are usually smoked...
...Such cigar events are now common...
...Cigar Sales was written, the introduction tells us, "in response to information showing a resurgence of cigar use in the United States...
...In 1996, 3.8 billion cigars were sold...
...In any case, that day is now over...
...As the report notes, "there is no data on teen cigar use prior to 1996," so there is no way of knowing whether teen cigar use is increasing...
...Not a big audience, true, but it's free...
...Who would have thought it possible...
...There is a lovely irony here, however—one that could only exist between industry and government in a regulatory state that has grown to such vast dimensions...
...In any case, the amount is anticlimactic, and in keeping with what marketers like to call "industry trends": For all forms of advertising and promotion, the cigar industry spends less than one percent of the total spent annually by cigarette companies...
...The authors continue, with mounting alarm: "Cigar enthusiasts began promoting fancy cigar dinners and smoker's evenings in expensive restaurants and hotels...
...Alas, "Between 1996 and 1997 . . . expenditures for television and radio advertising declined slightly— from approximately $327,000 to $325,000...
...The cigar business is not objecting too strenuously to the FTC's expansion of its powers...
...The new regulations will probably proceed, therefore, with the blessing of the regulated...
...And will stop it if necessary...
...By the logic of regulation, however, this requires that the industry take further steps to reduce the increase that may not be occurring...
...The FTC thinks otherwise, of course...
...They wanted as well to recommend to Congress ways in which those sales might be stymied...
...Responding to a crisis that isn't a crisis, the FTC will require labels on a product that is already labeled and ban advertising that doesn't exist, in order to keep cigars from children who don't seem terribly interested in smoking them...
...are doing something out there, and if it appears, further, that they might be enjoying it, then the FTC wants to know why...
...Cigar Sales is thus a signal document of the age—an elaborate, data-laden rationale that serves to obscure the real reason the federal government wants to launch another flotilla of pointless regulation: Because it can...
...An industry promoting its product...
...No employee of the FTC, faced with such information, would be content merely to note it, murmur, "Bully for the cigar-makers," and then move on to other matters...
...But anyway...
...So "Special Orders" were issued to the cigar industry, by which it was obliged to furnish data on its sales and promotional expenditures...
...Promotional activities...
...Though the authors labor mightily to push them in the other direction, these data tend to the unsensational, not to say uninteresting...
...For infrequent smokers it is almost non-existent...
...CIGARS by Andrew Ferguson WITH THE LONGUEURS OF SUMMER pleasingly upon us, the demand for beach reading is brisk, and so the Federal Trade Commission's Report to Congress: Cigar Sales and Advertising and Promotional Expenditures for Calendar Years 1996 and 1997 arrives just in time...
...Cigars have appeared as props in the plot lines of numerous movies and television shows [the Starr report, too...
...The number is so small that the industry has trouble accounting for it, but those three-hundred-some thousand dollars in "electronic advertising" seem to have been spent on a handful of local cable television and radio shows, mostly in the form of underwriting...
...A warning label would also help indemnify the industry against the predations of trial lawyers, who even now are contemplating lawsuits against cigar manufacturers from the bereaved survivors of men who went to their graves with a Swisher Sweet gripped between their teeth...
...And the 1997 rate of increase, by the way, has since slowed to a less dramatic 4 percent, and seems to be falling further...
...Having learned from the experience of its brothers in the cigarette industry, it welcomes labels, for example...
...The upshot is that the cigar business had a very good couple of years...
...This is how it goes in the regulatory state...
...and require that "youth access to cigars" be limited...
...The authors are undeterred, however, and proceed bravely to their recommendations...
...As is often the case with agency recommendations, however, they were much more than suggestions...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 43
