Bioethics as commodity: does the exchange of money alter the nature of an ethics consultation?

of the Bioethics Examiner, saying she enjoyed our articles about larger policy questions, and suggesting that the field of bioethics has been conspicuously silent on the issues surrounding the recent agreement between state attorneys general and the tobacco industry. Now that President Clinton seems to have rejected that plan in favor of further negotiations, the debate will be rejoined. How can bioethics add to that debate, and why should it be included among the disciplines included in discussions leading up to a final agreement? One answer to these questions is that bioethics can offer much to discussions of the ethics of public health policy, an area that has received precious little attention from the bioethics community. While leadership for an agreement has been assumed by the legal community, the negotiations are fundamentally about public health—incentives for reducing teen smoking, funding prevention and education campaigns, and paying for the excess health care costs caused by Bioethics and Tobacco