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The FDA's Tobacco Road

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

For most of the last 15 years, the Food and Drug Administration's authority to regulate tobacco has been either a thwarted promise or a fitful threat, depending on your point of view.

It has been pressed by anti-smoking crusaders and public health groups, put on hold by the Supreme Court and beaten back repeatedly by the tobacco industry and its political allies.

... But on June 22 ... President Obama (himself a smoker who's struggled to quit) signed into law a measure giving the FDA all the authority over tobacco that it has periodically sought, and more. That's a measure not only of the doggedness of some lawmakers, but how the American landscape has changed for the makers of tobacco products.