Ed Whitfield: “last summer, State attorneys general, representatives of health care groups, representatives from the White House, and…”

“last summer, State attorneys general, representatives of health care groups, representatives from the White House, and the tobacco industry met to see if they could come up with a settlement of a tobacco controversy regarding teenage smoking. After many hard hours of negotiation, and in fact, many days of negotiation, an agreement was reached, and the tobacco companies agreed that they would pay the sum of $368 billion every 25 years forever. In addition, they said that they would allow and agree that a health care agency, a third party, would set targets to reduce teenage smoking by a certain percent each year. If that target was not reached, the industry would pay $80 million for every one percentage point that the target was not met. In addition, the industry agreed that it would pay $5 billion annually into a trust fund to take care of any court judgments obtained against the industry. In addition, the industry agreed that they would allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the tobacco industry, going far beyond the FDA regulations proposed by former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, in fact, going much further than had ever been recommended before. They agreed also that they would waive their constitutional right to advertise their product.”