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Obama signs law giving FDA authority to regulate tobacco

Expressing a hope that America's teens will not be hooked as he was, President Obama just signed into law a bill granting the Food and Drug Administration sweeping new authority to regulate tobacco.

The president, shown here at the signing ceremony with lawmakers and teens representing the generation they're all trying to save, said he's trying to reduce the estimated 1,000 teenagers a day who become smokers.

"I was one of these teenagers. And so I know how difficult it can be to break this habit when it's been with you for a long time," said Obama, who has been public about his own struggles to quit smoking.

The bill represents "the strongest action the federal government has ever taken to reduce tobacco use," said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Obama said the focus is on stopping sales pitches to children.

"The kids today don't just start smoking for no reason. They're aggressively targeted as customers by the tobacco industry. They're exposed to a constant and insidious barrage of advertising where they live, where they learn, and where they play. Most insidiously, they are offered products with flavorings that mask the taste of tobacco and make it even more tempting," the presient said.

The law Obama signed aims to end that. By this fall, it will take flavored cigarettes off the market. By January, it will require tobacco manufacturers and importers to give the FDA about ingredients in their products to their products; by next April, tobacco companies will be banned from putting their logos on sporting, athletic or entertainment events or on clothing and other promotional items. By next July, the terms "light," "low" or "mild" may no longer be used to market tobacco products. By 2011, all tobacco products must carry larger and stronger warning labels.

As USA TODAY's Wendy Koch outlined in a story earlier this month, Obama's signature culminates a better-than decade-long effort by members of Congress to give the FDA regulatory power over tobacco,a product that played such an important part in the early U.S. economy that some of the pillars on the first floor of the U.S. Capitol are topped with marble facsimiles of the Golden Leaf.

The Campign for Tobacco-Free Kids says more than 1,000 organizations, including public health and faith groups, joined to support the bill, which passed overwhelmingly in both the House and Senate.

A bipartisan delegation of House and Senate members who helped shepherd the bill through Congress was on hand for the White House signing ceremony. Absent was the bill's chief author, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. Kennedy, who remains in Massachusetts undergoing cancer treatment, issued a statement hailing passage of the "long overdue" bill and suggesting it's a promising sign for the president's efforts to overhaul the health care system.

Decade after decade, Big Tobacco has seduced millions of teenagers into lifetimes of addiction and premature death. Enactment of this legislation will finally put a stop to that. It is truly a life-saving act, and a welcome demonstration that this Congress is capable of enacting major health reform.

(Posted by Kathy Kiely)