White House Backs Plan to Curb Cigarette Marketing : Health: The proposal would include bigger warning labels on packages, ads. Opponents say the restrictions violate free speech guarantees.

WASHINGTON —  The Bush Administration, while opposing some proposed new restrictions on cigarette marketing, expressed support Thursday for larger and more prominent warning labels on cigarette packages, billboards and print ads.

The bigger labels, including one that would read “Cigarettes Kill,” were endorsed by James O. Mason, assistant health and human services secretary, during a packed congressional hearing on a sweeping initiative to restrict cigarette advertising and promotion.

One provision of the bill calls for bluntly worded warnings emblazoned across the top 20% of any cigarette ad. It would require similar warnings that fill 25% of the two most visible sides of a pack of cigarettes.

“Current labeling . . . is inadequate and warrants reform,” Mason told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health and the environment. He said that existing warning labels are “too small.”

The proposed new rotating labels would include warnings that “Tobacco Is An Addicting Drug” and “Cigarette Smoke Harms Nonsmokers.” Others would state flatly that cigarettes cause lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and stroke and may cause fetal injury.

The pending legislation, sponsored by subcommittee chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), represents the latest battleground between smoking foes and the $40-billion-a-year tobacco industry and its congressional allies.

At Thursday’s hearing, the initiative was alternately praised as “the most important pro-health bill” in 52 years and denounced as “the most unconstitutional advertising proposal ever considered by Congress.”

At stake, proponents said, is whether to allow tobacco firms to continue to lure 3,000 young people a day into an addictive habit that kills 390,000 Americans annually and costs billions of dollars in health care and lost productivity.

Opponents, including advertising industry leaders and the American Civil Liberties Union, countered that the issue is whether Congress should attempt to restrict constitutionally protected free speech.

The measure, a compendium of anti-smoking initiatives, would bar the use of human or cartoon figures in advertising by allowing only “tombstone” ads containing written text but no illustration other than a picture of the cigarette brand.

Proponents said that the restriction would prevent tobacco companies from targeting young people, women and minorities with ads that associate smoking with sex appeal, glamour and success.

The proposal would prohibit tobacco companies from sponsoring athletic, musical and artistic events and distributing free samples. It would permit states to ban cigarette advertising by rescinding a federal prohibition against state regulation of such ads.

The measure also would withhold federal alcohol and drug-abuse funds from states that fail to adopt laws setting and enforcing a minimum age of 19 for cigarette purchases and prohibiting sales from vending machines accessible to minors. Current state laws restricting sales to minors are generally not enforced, according to a recent HHS study.

Waxman’s proposal is modeled after similar controls adopted in Canada, France and Australia. In Canada, such restrictions and other recent anti-tobacco measures led to a 12% decline in smoking in the first five months of 1990, Ken Kyle, public issues director for the Canadian Cancer Society, told the panel.

Representatives of the tobacco industry, which spends $3.3 billion annually on advertising, expressed vehement opposition to each of the bill’s provisions, most of which they called misguided.

“There is no proof that anybody starts to smoke because of advertising,” said Charles O. Whitley, senior consultant to the Tobacco Institute, the industry lobbying group. “Peers, siblings, parents and co-workers are the forces behind smoking.”

The industry spokesmen denied that cigarette advertising targets youth, insisting that firms advertise to persuade smokers to switch brands or to stick with brands.

Larger warnings are unnecessary because surveys show that more than 90% of Americans already believe that smoking is dangerous, the spokesmen said.

The pending bill would amount “to total prohibition of advertising and promotion of tobacco products (because) the only message that would be left would be one that says, ‘Don’t buy this product,’ ” Whitley said.

Mason said that he and HHS Secretary Louis W. Sullivan oppose withholding federal funds if states do not crack down on sales of cigarettes to minors.