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World
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| Jennings tobacco special is special8 September 2004 17 16 Source »»»“Peter Jennings Reporting: From the Tobacco File,” airing at 9 tonight on ABC (Channel 9) is a brash, opinionated and highly watchable work of passion from Jennings and producers Keith Summa and Tom Yellin. It offers a front-line report from another one of our easily forgotten wars: the war on cancer and, more specifically, the battle to punish Big Tobacco for selling us cigarettes. It was a decade ago that federal negotiators sat down with U.S. tobacco companies to hammer out an agreement with the industry, which had been cowed by court rulings and a public fed up with denials that cigarettes didn't kill. Only it didn't work out that way. Jennings points the finger at two public health icons, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop and then-drug commissioner David Kessler, saying they helped stymie the legislation, which would have regulated Big Tobacco for the first time ever. Jennings takes sides here, no doubt about it. The report suggests that Sen. John McCain, who sponsored the bill, was right and Kessler and Koop were wrong. “I think history will show that they squandered an historic opportunity,” McCain says. Then the states rushed in, and the prospecting began. The industry settled for a quarter trillion dollars. Of that, just 5 percent has been spent combating tobacco use in young people, and Jennings even found one state that spent tobacco settlement money to build … a tobacco warehouse. Meanwhile, anti-smoking efforts — like the groundbreaking “truth” campaign in Florida — which were demonstrated to cut smoking by middle-school kids by as much as 50 percent, “have been gutted,” Jennings says.
AARON BARNHART
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