Cigarette Ban Not Full Answer, Elders Declares

WASHINGTON — Cigarettes should be regulated by federal health officials, but banning them “would not solve the problem” because millions of Americans already are addicted to nicotine, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders said Sunday.

Elders said she supports Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A. Kessler’s efforts toward regulating cigarettes as delivery systems for nicotine.

“I’m not sure they would have to ban them, but I certainly think they would have to say cigarettes are addictive, we’d have to tell people that they kill, they would need to know the ingredients so they could make a decision about it,” she said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation.”

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of a House health subcommittee, said: “The regulations we’re going to have to adopt at the congressional level will be to have a nicotine-free cigarette or, if it has any nicotine in there, a warning label about the addictive qualities of nicotine.”