Smoking Gun

...The statement was made by Kessler, the competent Bush appointee with aspirations to make modest improvements in public health...

...As one tobacco executive quipped, "A cigarette without nicotine is like sex without an orgasm...

...The senator greeted him with a bear hug and said, "Remember Uncle Orrin when you're commissioner of the FDA...

...Worse, the functions of the FDA were spread out in buildings all over Washington, D.C., making it a logistical nightmare to try to run...

...But on the basis of information submitted by one informant code-named—and I am not making this up—"Deep Cough," the agency issued a letter to anti-smoking activists that put the decision not in Congress's tobacco-stained hands but in the FDA's...

...Once Morris had polled tobacco-producing states and determined that strong majorities favored tightening the rules for teens, Joe Camel was a goner...

...And so it did...

...The agency's job, as he saw it, was to regulate in the interest of public health...

...Our children, they assured, must be protected from this noxious substance, and Republicans were complicit in this tragedy...

...Shortly Kessler has, after all, seen the fruits of his nutrition initiative: Americans are now better informed about tubs of lard than ever before...

...Tobacco companies should be stripped of their trade, and the ability to manufacture and distribute cigarettes should be solely vested in the federal government...

...He deems this necessary because if the current arrangement is allowed to continue, "profits are inevitably used to create the same addictive product and to generate more sales...

...The short-run solution was a cram session, with massive research following...

...politics be damned...

...the other rediscovering the history and ferocity of Big Tobacco to survive and expand market share against all impediments...

...A cigarette is such a toxic substance that the moment the agency declares its principal component, nicotine, a drug, it will have to be banned...

...This was important to him because he "knew that diet accounted for the second largest cause of preventable death in the United States . . . and that improving how Americans ate was one of the most important public health actions we could take...

...After reading Kessler's memoir cum indictment of the cigarette industry, one still has not much idea whether "Uncle Orrin" ever came calling, but the author's recall of such amusing incidents at least keeps it interesting...

...Are manufacturers adding nicotine to cigarettes...

...The remainder of the book runs along two parallel tracks: one detailing the discovery of the pharmacological process and properties of tobacco...

...It really is quite a leap from Kessler wanting to "allow people to make educated choices" to the current call for a new near-prohibition, but perhaps we shouldn't be too harsh...

...Bush to head the Food and Drug Administration, he bumped into his former boss, Utah senator Orrin Hatch, at a social gathering...

...AIDS victims managed early on to impress upon Kessler the point that they didn't like the FDA's normal review process holding up potentially life-saving drugs...

...How is nicotine related to addiction...

...Jeff Nesbit, an old Dan Quayle hand, did his best to keep the tobacco regulatory fires from dying, but Kessler had taken no action on the issue...

...Well, some politics...

...Where is the nicotine coming from...

...The first shook the public out of its normal reflexive distrust for government intervention, while the latter wanted Bill Clinton to use it as a campaign issue to beat Bob Dole over the head with...

...A "safer" cigarette was largely a nonstarter because by the time nicotine and the rest of the pantheon of carcinogens were removed from tobacco, nobody would want to smoke it...

...My goal was not to dictate behavior but to allow people to make educated choices...

...Looking back, Kessler thinks that the beast must be killed, not wounded...

...As it did to so many other things, the Clinton administration shifted Kes-sler's focus, producing an increasingly activist agency bent on "regulating" Big Tobacco...

...before the first hearing, Kessler "ticked off some of the questions we had to answer: How are cigarettes made...

...Though a settlement was reached with all the state attorneys general, it appears that tobacco may yet be bled to death through punitive damages...

...We know the rest of the story...

...He has, after all, seen the fruits of his nutrition initiative: Americans are now better informed about tubs of lard than ever before...

...Two things proved decisive in the FDA's historic decision to take the first steps in regulating tobacco: the first was the supposed revelation that tobacco companies were targeting children, and the second was Dick Morris...

...out to bolster the agency's image, consolidate operations and, above all, "enforce the law...

...If public health is to be the center of tobacco control," he says, "the tobacco industry . . . needs to be dismantled...

...To this day," he says "the FDA has not been given some of the most basic powers a regulatory agency should have...

...He also managed to force food companies to alter the packaging of store-bought foods so that they included the now ubiquitous "nutrition facts" labels...

...Kessler acknowledges that "from a congressional perspective, our letter had the word 'hearing' written all over it...

...Shortly after Bill Clinton's inauguration, however, Kessler confided to Harriet Rabb, counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services, that compared with all the other good things the FDA had accomplished, "stopping tobacco use would have a bigger effect on health in this country...

...Until the GOP took back Congress, hearings—under California Democrat Henry Waxman— were the order of the day...

...Where the FDA's own labs came up short, ex-smokers and former employees of tobacco companies—in spite of the stringent secrecy agreements they had signed—were more than willing to fill in the blanks...

...The problem with regulations, Kessler admitted at the time, is obvious to anybody who knows anything about the FDA...

...Perhaps he tired of the picket signs labeling him a murderer, or perhaps he simply thought they had a point: One of his signature acts under Bush was the streamlining of the approval process for such emergency drugs...

...But there's one Kessler assertion card-carrying conservatives are obliged to take issue with...

...Kessler set Jeremy Lott is senior editor of Spintech Magazine...

...Like what, summary execution...

...Another impediment would be that the FDA knew practically nothing about tobacco...

...Tobacco executives were made to answer charges of nicotine manipulation, genetic engineering, and other Very Bad Things...

...The forensic details alternate between fascinating and tedious, with Kessler stressing all along that he did not intend to bring down Big Tobacco, but rather, to get at the truth...

...To hear Kessler tell it, when he assumed the post, "virtually nobody was happy with the FDA . . . . Much of its authority had been diluted by the Office of Management and Budget, which was used by the White House to pursue an aggressive and dangerous deregulatory agenda...

...He writes that he considered resigning if George Bush didn't side with the FDA in the fight over the USDA...

...Bill Clinton, stogie smoker, went up against Dole, the ex-smoker, and painted him as a pawn of Big Tobacco...

...How does the industry set nicotine levels...

...Instead, he had killed it the good old-fashioned Republican way: a series of useless meandering meetings...

...Former demon-weed farmer Al Gore used his speech at the Democratic National Convention to damn the industry for killing his sister...