Dr. Kessler's assessment of the proposal will have a significant effect on its prospects for approval by the White House and Congress. The former F.D.A. chief, who is a respected voice on public health issues and a longtime anti-smoking crusader, has for years been an influential adviser to President Clinton and members of Congress on tobacco issues. He and a former Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, are co-chairmen of a panel of health experts who will advise the Administration and Congress on the settlement proposal. They have promised to give the deal strict scrutiny and have indicated that they have already found major flaws in its details. The role of the F.D.A. is one of many contentious issues that were settled only near the end as negotiators struggled to meet a self-imposed deadline of this week to conclude an agreement.
Few businesses can claim a profit margin that huge.
Big Tobacco even has used its legal muscle to go on the offensive against people not suing the industry. One target was Dr. Paul Fischer, a family doctor who published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1991 of Joe Camel's impact on children. In his study, conducted under the auspices of the Medical College of Georgia, Fischer found that R.J. Reynolds' camel-smoking cartoon character was just as recognizable to kids as Mickey Mouse. Shortly after his study was published, Reynolds' lawyers slapped Fischer with a subpoena, demanding all of his notes and the names and telephone numbers of the 229 children he interviewed. Though Fischer did his work for a state university, the state attorney general's office in Georgia refused to represent him in the legal battle over his research notes.