A long shot in the presidential race, greedy writers, a controversial nose, and other matters. CAMEL RIGHTS
By DANIEL SELIGMAN REPORTER ASSOCIATE Patty de Llosa

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your servant has been boning up on the great Joe Camel dispute, which takes a lot of boning. Like an amoeba, the dispute keeps fissiparously dividing itself into subsidiary disputes: Are those Camel cigarette ads featuring Joe targeted at children? Did RJR swamp the fax machines at Advertising Age (which tried to run a fax poll on whether the Joe Camel ads should continue running)? Should the American Medical Association (which attacked the ads) continue taking contributions from RJR? And a special favorite: Is Joe to be deemed especially menacing because his nose has somewhat phallic contours? Our Nexis search shows the Freudians to be far better represented than the business community in op-ed discussions of old Joe. Which seems somewhat odd, as the dispute has turned into a quite interesting test of the right to commercial free speech. If any such right resides in the First Amendment, then something is wrong when the U.S. government (represented mainly by the Surgeon General and the Secretary of Health and Human Services) demands that the ads stop running and urges the media to boycott them. Floyd Abrams, an eminent First Amendment hawk who has been involved in scores of free-speech cases over the years, believes that the government's behavior raises serious constitutional questions (and he has been retained by RJR). He also confesses to being dismayed by the corporate sector's manifest lack of interest in the case. Well, is there a right to commercial free speech? The issue is not one on which the Supreme Court has done well. Its decisions wobble all over the place. For a while in the mid-Seventies, the Burger court appeared to have nailed down some such right. In the so-called Virginia Pharmacy case, it held that pharmacists had a right to advertise their prices (and that a state law banning such ads was unconstitutional). The Supremes did not go so far as to state that commercial speech had as much protection as political speech. But they said advertisements -- statements that merely ''propose a commercial transaction'' -- were entitled to some protection, and added that a ''consumer's interest in the free flow of commercial information . . . may be . . . keener by far than his interest in the day's most urgent political debate.'' But a lot of the rights granted in that decision may have been snatched back in another case, decided in 1986. It revolved around the right of the Puerto Rican government to bar ads by gambling casinos in publications catering to the locals. (The government had no problem with ads aimed at tourists.) This time the court said, sure, the ads could be barred. The decision argued that since the government had the right to regulate casino operations, it plainly had the right to take the ''lesser step'' of regulating casino advertising. That reasoning is ominous, since there is no constitutional bar to the U.S. government's regulating any industry in the land. Does this mean, applying the ''lesser step'' logic, that government inherently retains the right to bar advertising -- even truthful advertising for legal goods and services? As the Joe Camel controversy rolls along, the answer to that question is not clear. What is clear is that business has quite a stake in the answer. You would think that a CEO or two would want to get in on the argument.