Barry Meier
When RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company recently test-marketed a new cigarette throughout Oklahoma, it promoted the product as having a special “flavour” filter that improved its taste.
But during the cigarette’s two-year trial, company officials never told buyers that they believed that its special filter and tobacco also reduced many of the most dangerous compounds in smoke, including some that cause cancer. Officials of RJ Reynolds said they wanted to publicize the cigarette’s benefits but feared that federal officials would challenge them for making health claims they could not prove.
But now as the United States Congress gets ready to consider the future of the nation’s tobacco policy, law-makers, cigarette companies and regulators will confront one of the most contentious and complex issues in that debate: are less dangerous cigarettes possible?
“We have skirted around this issue for decades,” said David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. “These products need to be regulated and criteria need to be developed so the science can be done to know whether they are safer.”
The proposed settlement reached in June between cigarette producers and state attorneys general includes a provision that encourages manufacturers to develop and market “less hazardous tobacco” products. And there is little doubt that cigarette producers will seek to introduce such products if Congress adopts tobacco legislation. That will leave federal officials to grapple with how to regulate these cigarettes and what advertising claims to allow.
Tobacco industry officials and public- health experts agree that scant scientific criteria exist to determine what constitutes a less dangerous cigarette. And it is by no means clear that smokers will buy the products.
Some researchers say it is impossible to know what levels of carcinogens are safe or how the dozens of toxic compounds in cigarette smoke interact in the body. But other experts believe that a product with reduced levels of carcinogens might still give smokers the nicotine they crave while saving some of the 400 000 lives lost each year to smoking-related diseases.
Over the decades, tobacco companies have developed dozens of prototype cigarettes that might reduce risks. But the few products introduced in the marketplace, like “Eclipse”, a product of RJ Reynolds that heats rather than burns tobacco, have failed to attract many smokers.
David Townsend, vice-president for product development at RJ Reynolds, said that cigarette producers would like to publicise the advantages of cigarettes that appear to reduce hazards. But they do not because they fear that the Federal Trade Commission, which currently regulates tobacco advertising, would challenge them for making claims they could not support.
“If we communicate to the consumer what we have it often carries an implied health message,” Townsend said. “But there is no way to prove that a cigarette is safer or not.”
The RJ Reynolds cigarette that was tested provides a glimpse of the types of predicaments companies and regulators will face if Congress adopts tobacco legislation. To test the product, RJ Reynolds put the new cigarettes into all packages of its existing Winston Select brand sold in Oklahoma. The wording on cigarette packages and in advertising was altered slightly to make note of a “special flavour” filter that improved the product’s “smoothness”.
Townsend said the product, which the company code-named “EW’,’ uses a carbon- scrubber filter to capture many dangerous substances, as well as specially grown and treated tobacco low in cancer-causing compounds known as nitrosamines. The cigarette produces increased levels of some problem compounds. But he said data released by RJ Reynolds suggested that overall it reduced the most dangerous compounds found in tobacco smoke by 50%.
But interpreting such results for smokers may not be simple. Dietrich Hoffman, a long-time tobacco researcher, said he believed that the technologies used in the new cigarette represented advances but cautioned that the hazard reductions might be overstated because they reflected how machines, not people, smoked cigarettes.
Hoffman, who is the associate director of the American Health Foundation, said studies have shown that smokers of “light” or low-tar and low-nicotine cigarettes, like the Reynolds product, draw on them more frequently and deeply to get the same level of nicotine as a regular cigarette. And a study published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that smokers of such cigarettes were developing high incidences of a particular type of lung cancer because they inhaled the smoke deeply.
Recently, a number of groups opposed to smoking charged that RJ Reynolds was making an implied health claim in connection with another new product that the company says is an additive-free line of Winston-brand cigarettes. A marketing campaign says these products contain “only tobacco and filtered water”.
Company officials deny making health claims in the advertisements, which they say relate only to the cigarette’s taste. Townsend said recently that the company’s additive-free products had as many dangerous compounds as were found in conventional cigarettes with additives like ammonia and flavourings.
But whatever the claims, since the additive-free cigarettes were introduced several months ago, sales of Winston products have climbed.
As for the company’s new test cigarette, its fate is unclear. Townsend said trials were ended because the testing had run its course and because the company converted all its Winston products to the additive- free formula. “We are still assessing our options,” Townsend said.- New York Times