Smoking: Oval Office Hot Potato

Cigarettes will kill about 420,000 Americans this year. Little wonder the tobacco industry must find new smokers to replace all those loyal customers lost to cancer, heart attacks and other diseases. Sad to say, about 3,000 children a day become regular smokers, more than a million a year. Eventually, one of three will die from the habit.

The Food and Drug Administration has now taken a cautious but nonetheless significant step toward controlling this, the nation’s deadliest public health problem, where it starts--with teen-agers. Having determined for the first time that nicotine is a powerful addictive drug and therefore under FDA regulatory authority, the agency has proposed a few obvious means of deterring youngsters--such as a ban on vending machine sales and tougher state and federal penalties on merchants who casually sell to the under-aged.

Legally, the agency could have gone so far as to ban cigarettes altogether as containing a dangerous drug, but prohibiting a product to which millions of Americans are addicted is politically unthinkable. So charged is the issue that the FDA, rather than implementing these reasonable proposals, has tossed the decision-making responsibility to the White House.

President Clinton, while expressing some initial support for the FDA recommendations, faces political turbulence. The $45-billion tobacco industry has powerful allies in Congress who are likely to try to clip the wings of the FDA, already embattled in Congress on numerous other regulatory issues concerning food, drugs, cosmetics and medical devices.

Fortunately, the President has powerful support from the American Medical Assn. In next week’s issue of its journal the association will publish a scientific review of internal documents from the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. The documents, the AMA’s board of trustees said, offer “massive, detailed and damning evidence” that the industry has known for 30 years that cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer, and concealed that information.

Clinton should quickly implement the FDA proposals. The industry has long denied that it aims advertising at children or recruits them. It can prove that claim by voluntarily working with the Administration to cut off cigarette supplies to youngsters too immature to evaluate the risks they take by lighting up.