On Mar. 21, 2000, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 along ideological lines, that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not have authority to regulate tobacco as a drug.

The FDA’s anti-smoking initiative would have required retailers to check the identification of cigarette and smokeless-tobacco buyers under age 27 and prohibited cigarette vending machines except in bars and other adults-only places. But the rules were more important as the first test of FDA authority to regulate the tobacco industry.

“By no means do we question the seriousness of the problem that the FDA has sought to address,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the court. “The agency has amply demonstrated that tobacco use, particularly among children and adolescents, poses perhaps the single most significant threat to public health in the United States.”

However, she added, “It is plain that Congress has not given the FDA the authority that it seeks to exercise here.”

Justice O’Connor was joined in her opinion by the Supreme Court’s more politically conservative jurists—Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. Dissenting were Justices Stephen Breyer, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Writing on behalf of the four dissenters, Justice Breyer said that federal law does allow the FDA to regulate tobacco. “Far more than most, this particular drug and device risks the life threatening harms that administrative regulation seeks to rectify,” he added.

The FDA’s antismoking initiative would have required retailers to check the identification of cigarette buyers under the age of 27 and would have prohibited cigarette vending machines except in bars and other adult only places. Although the rules were restrained by some standards, they had far more symbolic importance as the first test of FDA authority to control the powerful tobacco industry.