Congress Starts Hearings on FDA's Control of Tobacco

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One of the bill's more surprising backers: Philip Morris USA, the nation's largest tobacco producer, which controls about half of the U.S. cigarette market, including Marlboro, the nation's bestselling brand.

The company has said it supports legislation as a way of meeting the goal of FDA regulation that was called for in a recent U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) report.

"These bills provide the framework for comprehensive FDA regulation of tobacco products and provide important policy solutions to many of the complex issues involving tobacco products," Howard Willard, Philip Morris USA's executive vice president of corporate responsibility, said in a prepared statement. "FDA regulation, as introduced in Congress, would be the most effective way to address the Institute of Medicine's concerns."

Philip Morris's support is the prime reason longtime antismoking crusader Stanton A. Glantz -- the director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco -- said he is not supporting the new bill.

"I remain skeptical of the bill, because it's basically going to benefit Philip Morris," Glantz said. "I think that the FDA should have control over tobacco, but not on terms that Philip Morris wrote. I think that the people who are supporting this bill will live to regret it."

Other tobacco companies have lined up against the bill.

John W. Singleton Jr., director of communications at Reynolds American, Inc., whose brands include Camel cigarettes, said that the bill would protect Phillip Morris's market share, in part, by limiting advertising.

"If you make it more difficult to communicate with smokers, and you have half the market, it results in the market share getting locked in," Singleton said. "If you get locked in at 50 percent [like Philip Morris], that's pretty good. The bill gives Phillip Morris a competitive advantage."

Singleton is also concerned about how the FDA would actually regulate tobacco products and the chemicals they contain should the bill become law. "These details aren't clear, and they would need to be worked out," he said.