Barack Obama has just signed tough new anti-smoking legislation, writes EWEN MACASKILLin Washington
NO ONE has yet managed to snap a picture of Barack Obama sneaking a quick puff behind a hedge in the White House garden or anywhere else since he became president. But that does not mean he has quit.
Asked in an interview before taking over the White House in January, Obama, who has been a smoker all his adult life, fudged a question about whether he had given up. He said he had quit, but then added that he occasionally fell off the wagon.
It is one of the oddities of US politics that George Bush, who did not smoke, resisted all attempts to curb the tobacco industry while President Obama, a smoker, yesterday did just that. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden, Obama signed into law one of the most sweeping pieces of anti-smoking legislation the US has seen. The Bill was passed by Congress last week in spite of intense lobbying by the tobacco industry. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act allows the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new powers to regulate the tobacco industry.
It can order tobacco companies to reduce the amount of nicotine they put into cigarettes. It also signals the end of the description of some cigarettes as “low tar” or “light”. And for the first time, the FDA will monitor and inspect tobacco companies, with the firms having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, register with the agency, and provide a list of all the products they make.
Other new powers include the requirement that cigarette packets carry large, graphic warnings, as they have to in the UK. At present most packs sold in the US carry only a small warning from the US surgeon general calling on people to quit to reduce health risks. As for Obama, it is a matter of continuing to chew the nicotine gum.
As White House press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged last week when he was asked about Obama’s smoking habit, “struggling with a nicotine addiction is something that happens every day”. – (Guardian service)