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Description
Members of both houses of Congress have introduced identical bills to include tobacco under the Food and Drug Administration's regulatory umbrella. FDA chairman Andrew yon Eschenbach opposes this legislation. Altria, the largest U.S. cigarette producer with 51 percent of the market, supports it. This seeming paradox grows from and is explained by tobacco roads paved with "bootlegger-Baptist" coalitions.
THEORY Pioneered by Bruce Yandle in this magazine in 1983, "bootleggers and Baptists" is an important addendum to public choice theory. It draws its name from stories behind states' enactment of Sunday alcohol sale prohibition laws. To wit: for moral reasons, Baptists advocated bans on Sunday alcohol sales. Bootleggers quietly and willingly went along for the higher prices and enhanced profit that would result from halted competition. The theory's essence, then, is that durable social regulation forms when two very different groups demand regulation: Baptists' public interest cloaks bootleggers' naked greed, the invisible coalition greases government machinery, and voila.
The history of U.S. tobacco regulation is rife with these alliances. It has taught some public health advocates, as well as some tobacco companies, that "bootleggers" will likely benefit from FDA control.
EARLY BOOTLEGGERS Before the 1964 surgeon general's report on smoking's perverse health effects, the cigarette industry largely avoided regulation for two main reasons. First, smoking was a popular and accepted habit. During World War I, the U.S. troop commander in France cabled Washington that "tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration; we must have... |
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