Advocacy Archive
Tobacco Settlement Bill Includes Behavioral Research
April 2, 1998
Dear Colleague:
Late yesterday, Congress took its first step toward a tobacco settlement when the Senate Commerce Committee approved legislation to change how tobacco is regulated and to require tobacco companies to pay billions for past harm. Money from the settlement would fund an enormous increase for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in FY 99 (which I wrote about in an earlier email). The Commerce Committee bill was sponsored by its chair, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). It provides $2.5 billion a year for NIH research, with a third of that money going to 'epidemiological, behavioral, and social science research' specifically related to smoking and health and the remaining two thirds for NIH research generally (which also includes behavior), but still loosely tied to smoking diseases. So now there are two streams of money going to NIH from the tobacco settlement: one for NIH generally, and one for behavioral and social science research on smoking and health.
The McCain bill is a compromise that cobbles together bills in the works since the beginning of the year. I'm pleased to report that we have been able to make behavioral and social research a standard part of the legislation as it evolved. The NIH portion of the McCain legislation takes verbatim the language that APS developed in conjunction with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids in earlier bills sponsored by Sen. James Jeffords (R-VT) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) as they were being merged in a Jeffords-chaired Committee. (The merged bill was to be the primary tobacco bill under consideration but has now been superceded by the McCain compromise.)
The language includes a definition of behavioral research in the portion that would fund research on smoking and health to establish a limit on what is and isn't behavioral science. Research in which 'the behavior of an organism is observed for the purpose of determining activity at the cellular or molecular level' will not be appropriate under the smoking and health one-third. (Bonus points if you recognized this language. Its Congressional history is that we worked with Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) several years ago to make the same distinction in the creation of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research.) In addition, behavioral research was inserted into the original legislation both in the portion pertaining to NIH more generally and in the smoking and health portion. This language also carried over to the McCain bill.
While the Commerce subcommittee's approval of the McCain bill is an enormous first step in Congress, the bill must clear many more hurdles before NIH actually sees the money. An effort to smooth the way is being made by the chair and ranking minority member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee for NIH, Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA). Right now, the law governing the federal budget contains limits on domestic spending that are virtually set in stone, so technically, even if NIH gets the money, it would not have the authority to spend it because the money is in excess of the budget limits. Specter and Harkin are proposing an amendment that would change the limits to free up the money that the McCain bill proposes to spend on public health programs, including NIH. Along with many other groups, we have been asking the Senate to pass the Specter-Harkin amendment.
But even if this NIH-way-paving clears the Senate, other parts of the bill are being contested by the cigarette industry, public health advocates, influential Senators, and the Administration. Even Wall Street is adding its (more than) two cents. And the House of Representatives has taken a pass on the issue so far, so don=t be spending that money yet. (Go ahead and make a list, though.)
More as it happens, Alan