WASHINGTON — Nobody can say for sure how much cigarettes will cost when the dust finally settles in Congress. Upward of $3 a pack? Quite likely. As much as $4 or even more? Even that is possible.
And that's not all. Under the tobacco bill approved overwhelmingly by the Senate Commerce Committee last week, the Marlboro Man would disappear from billboards and magazines commonly read by teenagers. No longer would cigarette brand logos be emblazoned on baseball caps or T-shirts. Instead, ads would proliferate showing kids warning other kids that the tobacco companies are out to hook them and kill them.
Seldom since Carrie Nation stormed Capitol Hill to whip up sentiment for Prohibition early in this century has Congress shown such crusading zeal. As a result, it may be on the way to attaching stigma to the act of smoking more successfully than Prohibition did drinking.
At least in the Commerce Committee, the usual ideological restraints succumbed to the backlash against Big Tobacco. Republicans accepted Democratic-style regulation and the equivalent of a massive tax increase. Democrats embraced a moral crusade of the sort usually identified with the GOP.
"It's a blend of Populist Republican morality with Democratic regulation," said Darrell West, a Brown University political scientist.
The Senate bill contains far more anti-smoking measures than the total of all other such initiatives approved by Congress in the nearly 35 years since the first surgeon general's warning that smoking could be harmful. It is as if lawmakers were trying to atone for years of taking millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the tobacco industry and turning a deaf ear to the pleadings of anti-smoking groups.
The full Senate, if it changes the committee's bill at all, more than likely will make it tougher still. Senators of both parties will try to boost the $1.10-a-pack price increase that the committee bill would impose on cigarettes over the next five years and tighten the penalties on tobacco companies that continue to market cigarettes to teens.
House's Bill Might Be Gentler
No legislation has yet emerged in the House. Because lawmakers from tobacco-growing states are more numerous there than in the Senate, a House bill might be gentler on the industry--but after the Senate Commerce Committee's 19-1 vote, nobody is taking any bets.
