July 2, 2009 Health care advocates applaud new tobacco laws Play video

(NECN: Brian Burnell) - Health care advocates and anti-smoking groups are applauding the new law that gives the FDA authority over tobacco. They say its a big step that was 50 years in the making.

In 1966 the first health warning was printed on a pack of cigarettes. It was pretty mild saying only that smoking may be hazardous to your health. Today the warnings are much more graphic and there is a new sheriff regulating the industry. The Food and Drug Administration. Health officials and anti-smoking advocates credit Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd with leading the fight to make that happen. The FDA will crack down on misleading terms like "light" and "mild" that infer a tobacco product is somehow safer. It also goes after marketing to children.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut: When you eliminate candy flavored cigarette, advertising within a thousand feet of a schoolyard, allowing these promotional advertisements using cartoon animals... Don't have any illusions about what the tobacco industry is involved in. You don't provide candy flavored cigarettes for adults.

Experts feel cutting down on the number of kids who start using tobacco will greatly reduce the number of adults who smoke in the long run.

Dr. Keri Wallace, CT Children's Medical Center: 12 percent of your 7th and 8th graders have used some form of tobacco. That's really unacceptable and it gets even worse because when they get to high school its about 28 percent.

And 90

percent of those high schoolers will keep smoking as adults. That is not to say big tobacco isn't still targeting young people with their products.

Patricia Checko, Anti-smoking Advocate: They are introducing a new candy product... I should say a new candy-like tobacco product... called "orbs". I had trouble getting this out but you can see it kind of looks like a tic tac. It is a smokeless, spitless form of tobacco. Orbs look like mints, they're easy for kids to hide and are packed with addictive nicotine.

Cigarettes in particular contain 50 carcinogens not to mention arsenic and cyanide.

Brian Burnell, NECN: When you see warnings like this on a cigarette pack and hear that list of out-and-out poisons that are in cigarettes and you know what they do to people it begs the question, "Shouldn't they be banned outright?"

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut: Facing the realities here of beginning that process of banning something and creating black markets and other opportunities here we don't feel that would be the right direction to go but ultimately it may come to that.