IS IT REALLY A GOOD DEAL?

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A third of a century has passed since the first U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking persuasively assembled the scientific case on the lethal effects of the habit. Yet the rest of the Federal Government, deftly manipulated by the powerful tobacco industry and fearful of antagonizing the industry's tens of millions of addicted customers, has allowed the cigarette to remain our most deadly but least regulated consumer product. Its manufacturers, meanwhile, doggedly denied that the ever mounting medical evidence against them constituted conclusive proof, yet insisted, with ultimate brass, that smokers had been amply warned of the health risks they might be running--and got the Supreme Court essentially to agree with them. As a result, Americans have prematurely lost 4 million collective years of life annually in our worst, if routinely accepted, public-health scandal.

Last week's proposed settlement between the industry and the public's representatives, if its often murky words can be satisfactorily translated into federal statutory language, gives real hope of at last reining in the cigarette makers' unconscionable conduct, in which the nation as a whole has too long been complicitous. Some key points to bear in mind about the deal:

It is tantamount to a rogue industry's confession of decades of malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance. True, most smokers have grasped that they were flirting with grave health consequences, but their awareness owed no thanks to the industry. Its Council for Tobacco Research and in-house scientists failed to undertake serious, sustained inquiry into the causal links between smoking and disease formation (no doubt out of fear that what they might find would put them out of business). Its Tobacco Institute picked apart every new Surgeon General's report and trivialized the damning findings of dedicated independent public-health investigators. And its executives, in what amounted to a premeditated conspiracy to disinform the American people, continued to deny what they and their scientists, according to a critical mass of internal documents unearthed during the past decade, knew to be true about the addictive and fatal nature of their product. By capitulating now, despite all its past success in defeating liability claims by victimized smokers, the industry is at least sparing the nation years of litigation that the companies were doomed to lose sooner or later and that might delay indefinitely the onset of vitally needed tobacco-control measures.

The punishment money is the least important part of the package. It cannot resurrect all those millions of dead smokers or cure those now terminally afflicted. Besides, current high cigarette excise taxes already cover much of the states' public-health outlay to care for sick smokers. The settlement price is really meant to put a dent in the American tobacco industry's bottom line. But by gradually jacking up the retail price of the 24 billion packs they sell in the U.S. annually and saving much of their present multibillion-dollar-a-year advertising, promotion and merchandising budget (thanks to restrictions on those outlays in the settlement package), the companies will be able to meet the $15 billion-a-year punishment cost without remotely jeopardizing their solvency.