Blake Brown: He is an agricultural economist at North Carolina State University and provides economic analysis and educational programming for tobacco and peanut producers. Brown has worked with the tobacco industry and health advocates to understand factors that affect the demand for tobacco products.

“It’s very hard to quantify the impact of regulations on the demand for tobacco. But I would think there would be two effects as a result of this legislation. One is, over time, we will see a substantial decline in cigarette consumption. I think the other potential impact is that these regulations call for modified-risk tobacco products. That will change the technology of the way cigarettes are made. These technology changes would likely lead to less tobacco per cigarette. (more…)

For most of the last 15 years, the Food and Drug Administration’s authority to regulate tobacco has been either a thwarted promise or a fitful threat, depending on your point of view.

It has been pressed by anti-smoking crusaders and public health groups, put on hold by the Supreme Court and beaten back repeatedly by the tobacco industry and its political allies. Last year, the latest such proposal was left for dead after President Bush threatened he would veto a measure, passed by the House of Representatives, if it made its way to his desk. (more…)

We’re all supposed to hate the tobacco companies, right?  Smoking is evil.  We’re not supposed to do it.  And the government is going to use taxes and regulation to make sure we don’t do it.  Or, if we are going to do it, we’re at least paying heavy taxes to fund massive health care entitlements.

Well what about the impact of all that tax and regulation on American jobs? (more…)

President Obama today signed legislation giving the federal government sweeping new power to regulate the manufacturing, advertising and marketing of cigarettes and other tobacco products.

Obama signed the bill into law during a Rose Garden ceremony, where he hailed it as a landmark measure that would help rein in some of the health damage caused by smoking, which is responsible for more than 400,000 deaths in the United States each year. Additionally, one in five children in the country is estimated to smoke by the time they graduate from high school. (more…)

The great judge Learned Hand once said, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” If so, the tobacco regulation bill recently passed by Congress indicates that the spirit of liberty is even scarcer than usual in the halls of government.

What motivates advocates of stricter tobacco regulation is the unassailable assurance that they are not only completely right but that their opponents are a) wrong and b) evil. This invigorating certitude makes it possible to justify almost anything that punishes cigarette companies, even if it does no actual good — or does actual harm. (more…)

Leave government out of quitting smoking addiction

Smoking and other addictions are misunderstood by the public and distorted by those in authority. Any addiction is genetic and hereditary with painful origins. The Food and Drug Administration cannot change a disease. It is not God. (more…)

California legislators are grasping at tax straws that don’t exist as they seek to raise billions of dollars that don’t exist for a balanced state budget that doesn’t exist, according to the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association. Two bills propose to increase tobacco taxes to as much as $2.10 per pack of cigarettes on top of the current $.87 per pack state tax and recently increased federal taxes of $1.00 per pack plus correspondingly stiff increases on other tobacco products like cigars and pipe tobacco. (more…)

The marketing and advertising restrictions in the tobacco law that Congress passed last week are likely to be challenged in court on free-speech grounds. But supporters of the legislation say they drafted the law carefully to comply with the First Amendment.

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WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Larry Mabe’s story is like so many others working at Reynolds American Tobacco. “My dad and my mother worked here, and they retired from here,” he says.

Linda Jones has spent a lifetime in tobacco, too. “Thirty-three years ago, when I first started with the company, I planned on retiring from here and I still hope to,” she says. (more…)

The June 11 passage of the FDA Tobacco Regulation Bill, which provides the U.S. government with extensive power to regulate tobacco products, is a major step for federal regulation of cigarette manufacturers. The bill provides the Food and Drug Administration with its most expansive authority over the tobacco industry to date: not only does it grant the FDA the power to dictate product ingredients and overrule new products, it compels tobacco companies to eliminate potentially misleading labels like “light” and “mild,” regulate a product’s ingredients and increase the size of the warning labels on cigarette packs. The tobacco industry is no stranger to regulation, however. Over the past half-century, cigarette manufacturers have found ways to successfully sell their product despite increasing advertising restrictions and will no doubt try to continue to do so in the face of this new legislation. (more…)