WASHINGTON – NACS learned on Friday that the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) is expected to vote on July 18 on a bill that would allow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate tobacco.

With slightly more than two weeks until the vote, NACS urges its members to speak to senators on the HELP committee and emphasize three points:

1. Retailers who have done everything that can be reasonably expected of the operator of a business to avoid a sale of tobacco to a minor – trained their employees, enforced a zero tolerance policy for violations of below age sales laws, etc. – should not be denied the right to sell tobacco. More than one third (34 percent) of the in-store sales of the average convenience store is tobacco. Consequently, a convenience store that cannot sell tobacco is out of business.

2. The federal government in general, and FDA in particular, is the wrong entity to regulate retail sales of tobacco. There are more than 300,000 retail tobacco outlets in the U.S. To regulate these, FDA will have to either contract with the states or create an entirely new, very large bureaucracy for which no one has yet provided funding. The correct way to accomplish the bill's objects is for the federal government to establish a standard to which these businesses must conform and require the States to assure that they are regulated to that standard. This will create little if any more bureaucracy – the States have police, prosecutors and judges as well as their own laws on these topics already.

3. All retailers, including Internet, mail order and Native Americans, must be required to meet the same standard. If children's safety is the issue, cigarettes obtained from mail order or on-line retailers are no less harmful than ones obtained from disreputable retailers.  

Click here to learn more about this issue. 

A listing of HELP Committee members is at http://help.senate.gov/.