By Stacie Chan
Last March, Congressman Steve Buyer (R-IN), a member of the House energy subcommittee on health, proposed the Youth Prevention and Tobacco Harm Reduction Act that would eliminate FDA control over tobacco products. Buyer received $14,000 from tobacco company Reynolds American this year, his most generous donor.
For the past ten years, the tobacco industry has donated over $105,500 to his campaign, but the pharmaceutical and health industries have donated nearly $1 million.
Congressman Buyer was not available for comment.
“We believed that Senator Buyer’s legislation would provide a better risk continuum,” Reynolds American spokesperson Frank Lester said. “Meaning, the amendment would give tobacco companies the ability to talk about reduced risk products, like smokeless tobacco.”
Dr. Gilbert Ross of the American Council on Health and Science added, “The amendment was designed to make truthful communication about the relative risks of tobacco products more accessible to the public. Companies could more easily express the scientific facts about their cigarettes.”
Buyer’s amendment would give regulatory power to the Department of Health and Human Services and also create a Tobacco Harm Reduction Center within the department, but his proposal failed on a 284-142 vote in the House.
Major public health groups, including the American Lung Association and the American Medical Association, said they opposed Buyer’s amendment, claiming it could not efficiently regulate tobacco companies and allow them to make unverified claims about the health of their products.
“Over a thousand medical and health organizations believe this legislation is a deeply flawed response to the public health threat,” said Erika Sward, a representative from the American Lung Association.
“Effectively giving FDA stamp of approval on cigarettes will improperly lead people to believe that these products are safe, and they really aren’t,” Buyer said in a statement. “We want to move people from smoking down the continuum of risk to eventually quitting.”
The American Council on Science and Health agreed with Buyer’s intention to remove control from the FDA’s hands to a more independent department that would approve e-cigarettes, a more innocuous form of tobacco cessation therapy.
“Current law is very stringent when it comes to discussing the fact that smokeless tobacco products are much, much less harmful than smoking cigarettes,” Ross said. “The current bill has serious major impediments in communicating this fact to potential consumers and addicted adult consumers.”
Last June, President Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act proposed by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA). Congressman Buyer tried to amend the bill with a completely new bill of his own.
“Right now, I can’t even talk about the health benefits of some of the smokeless tobacco products because of the FDA legislation that President Obama passed,” Lester said.
Yet many of Buyer’s critics said they aren’t swayed by the merits of his bill.
“After his Foundation received hundreds of thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical interests, Buyer took up a number of pharmaceutical industry priorities and sponsored bills they supported,” author Mike Bailey wrote on the Veterans Today website. “After tobacco interests gave generously, Buyer opposed a bill giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco.”
Another critic noted Buyer’s support record.
“If accepting the biggest kickbacks from tobacco companies is one of Buyer’s moral values, then I’d hate to see what his immoral values are,” Jason Hsu said in a post on Democracy for America.
Another commenter on a Politico story added: “Steve Buyer is the recipient of the largest amount of tobacco money of any Congressman in the history of Indiana. He is nothing but a spokesperson for his corporate donors.”
Buyer also received unwanted publicity due to an IRS and House ethics investigation. The Senator’s empty charity had not awarded a single scholarship after nearly $900,000 in donations over seven years.
Buyer established Frontier Foundation in 2003 and intended to grant scholarships to college-bound Indiana students. In June 2008, PhRMA, the drug industry umbrella group, hired Buyer’s son, Ryan Buyer, to direct the foundation. The Foundation also shares space with Buyer’s campaign office, which no longer has a physical address, Buyer told CBS in an interview.
Buyer announced last month that he would not seek re-election because his wife had been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease. Yet many critics said they believe the myriad offenses could be the cause.
In 2009, Indiana had the 2nd highest adult smoking rate in the nation with 26.1 percent compared to the national rate of 20.6 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
