FDA Cigar Regulation Update…
—-
Letter by Anti-Tobacco Organizations to Congress is Wrong, Says Premium Cigar Group
Columbus, Georgia!
September 16, 2011
Forty disparate organizations ranging from the American Cancer Society to the United Methodist Church either inadvertently or deliberately misstated the facts in a letter to Congress with respect to H.R. 1639, according to the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association.
“Contrary to the claims o these organizations, H.R. 1639, also known as The Traditional Cigar Manufacturing and Small Business Jobs Preservation Act of 2011, does not exempt cigarettes or any of the other machine-made tobacco products listed in their letter to Congress.?
Apparently, no one from these organizations actually read the bill or knows what’s in it – and that’s absurd because it is only two double-spaced pages long – or they deliberately falsified their claims,” said Bill Spann, chief executive officer of the IPCPR.
The bill is designed to exempt premium cigars and only premium cigars from the jurisdiction of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Doing so will save thousands of small businesses, tens of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenues. The groups claim it will exempt all cigars, large and small, and that is absolutely and completely false,” he added.
According to Spann, the groups’ letter to Congress also is filled with the inaccuracies and misstatements that have become the standard of many prohibitionist groups.
“Not only are their conclusions wrong, but their so-called supporting statements include unchallenged false science and fabricated assumptions that have become part of the myths surrounding secondhand smoke,” he said.
The FDA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, received jurisdiction over most tobacco products in 2009 by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. The FDA has already moved to regulate e-cigarettes and other categories of tobacco products in addition to cigarettes under the Act but has not moved to put premium cigars under its regulatory wing – yet.
“Before it comes to that, we need to be sure premium cigars are treated as the unique, hand-made products they are, just like fine wines, liquors and craft beers,” Spann said in behalf of the IPCPR, a nonprofit association of some 2,000 small-business retailers and manufacturers of premium cigars, pipes, tobacco and related accouterments that employ some 85,000 Americans.
“Retail members of the IPCPR are small, family business operators who own and operate neighborhood smoke shops employing tens of thousands of people and paying millions of dollars in sales, payroll, income and excise taxes to federal, state and local governments.
If the FDA regulated premium cigars in the United States, our members would be out of business in a heartbeat and their customers would have to find other ways to get their cigars or not at all,” he said.
“We understand that people want tobacco products restricted from underage buyers and there are plenty of laws preventing that, which IPCPR fully supports.? IPCPR members have a strict policy against marketing or selling products to youths. Most of our members don’t even let them in their stores,” he said.
Spann urged that the organizations send another letter to Congress correcting their mistakes as well as posting the corrections on their respective websites. “And perhaps they should take the time to actually read the bill,” he said.
# # #
EDITORS: The letter to Congress may be found at http://aarc.org/headlines/11/09/cigar_bill/letter.pdf. The Spann letter follows:
Dear Association/Organization President:
It has come to our attention that your organization and 39 others have communicated inaccurate information regarding H.R. 1639, the Traditional Cigar Manufacturing and Small Business Jobs Preservation Act of 2011, in a letter dated September 7 to members of the United States Congress.
Premium cigars are the only cigars included in H.R. 1639.
This legislation was specifically researched and drafted to ensure that only these artisan cigars be exempt from FDA regulation.
Included are only cigars wrapped in leaf tobacc, with no filter or tip, and weighing at least 6 pounds per 1,000 cigars. “Wrapped in leaf tobacco” explicitly eliminates those products you mention in your letter to Congress.
Cigars wrapped in homogenized tobacco paper do not qualify as premium cigars and are not exempted under H.R. 1639.
H.R. 1639 explicitly excludes cigarettes or little cigars. Additionally as H.R. 1639 excludes cigars with filters or tips, those “little cigars” and similarly filtered products would not qualify for exemption.
Premium cigars as defined by H.R. 1639 are not products of choice for minors. Their higher price points and difficulty of access by youths under existing state laws and the recently enacted tobacco regulatory statute make these products unattractive for purchase by minors.
Your letter to Congress also inaccurately parallels the health effects of premium cigars to those attributed to cigarettes.
It is important to point out that Monograph #9, released by the National Cancer Institute in February 1998, clearly demonstrates that the alleged health effects of premium cigars are not the same as those attributed to cigarettes.
Your misrepresentation of H.R. 1639 has resulted in the dissemination of erroneous information about this important legislation.
We respectfully urge that you retract and correct those erroneous misrepresentations from your website and that you send another letter to the U.S. Congress correcting that erroneous information.
Thank you for your time and attention to this critical matter.
Sincerely,
Bill Spann, Chief Executive Officer
IPCPR
# # #
Contact
Tony Tortorici
678-493-0313
tony@tortoricipr.com
Fight to Prevent FDA Cigar Regulation Gets a Boost
Andrew Nagy
Posted: August 11, 2011
The fight to prevent the Food & Drug Administration from controlling the premium cigar industry recently received a major boost.
Last week, Florida Sens. Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio, a Democrat and Republican respectively, introduced Senate bill 1461, otherwise known as the “Traditional Cigar Manufacturing & Small Business Jobs Preservation Act.”
The legislation aims to remove the FDA’s jurisdiction over the premium cigar industry by amending the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
The measure is the companion bill to H.R. 1639, which was introduced in May by lawmakers and pro-cigar lobbying groups Cigar Rights of America and the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association as a cooperative effort.
“We have been working with Nelson’s office for a year,” said Jeff Borysiewicz, an IPCPR board member, co-founder of the CRA and owner of the Corona Cigar shops in Orlando, Florida. “There’s a lot of leg work in this bill. Both bills, really.”
In 2009, President Obama granted the FDA full regulatory control of tobacco products, such as cigarettes, roll-your-own tobacco and smokeless tobacco when he signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law.
Cigars, however, were not included in most of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act’s restrictions.
They still are not. But the lingering fear among those in the cigar industry is that such limits could one day be imposed on cigars. Industry observers point to the example in Canada, specifically Ontario, as an example of what the future could hold.
There, a law known as the Tobacco Display Ban prohibits businesses from displaying tobacco products within retail stores, and any shop not registered with Canada’s Ministry of Health Promotion must frost the glass of their walk-in humidors, to obscure the view from the outside. Customers aren’t allowed to handle a cigar before buying one.
Rather than wait for such potentially industry-threatening legislation to occur, though, the CRA and IPCPR have decided to act. Members of both lobbying groups have been visiting Washington D.C., off and on (more heavily in the past year) to educate lawmakers and ask them to co-sponsor H.R. 1639.
These efforts are starting to show, as 43 House members representing 22 states are now co-sponsoring H.R. 1639.
Although Congress is officially in recess at the moment, Borysiewicz says the lobbying effort does not have to cease. In fact, he asks that cigar retailers and smokers take advantage of the fact that many of these lawmakers are now back in their respective electoral districts and can be reached directly.
“If you’re a small business owner, invite your representative to your cigar shop and show him around,” said Borysiewicz. “We need cigar smokers to individually reach out to their senators and congressmen.”
You can check out the CRA’s petition to the FDA at: HERE.
