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With all the heat they've taken for promoting smoking,
cigarette manufacturers have spent fortunes trying to develop a "safer"
cigarette.
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"Safer" Cigarettes: A History
by Tara Parker-Pope
Although the cigarette industry has spent much of the past 50 years denying a
link between smoking and disease, the industry has also dedicated a significant
amount of time and money to develop a "safe" cigarette. A safe cigarette that
can both satisfy smokers' demands for taste and nicotine delivery and placate
public health concerns is the Holy Grail of the tobacco industry. The company
that comes up with it first likely could dominate the entire industry by
selling the newfangled smoke at a significant premium and grabbing market share
from its competitors. Indeed, in the 1950s, Philip Morris researchers already
saw the potential of a "healthy" cigarette and had even begun to suggest that
the company could capitalize on health concerns by admitting that cigarettes
were harmful. "Evidence is building up that heavy smoking contributes to lung
cancer," wrote a Philip Morris scientist in July 1958. He then suggested that
the company have the "intestinal fortitude to jump to the other side of the
fence," and that the company would have a "wealth of ammunition" to attack
competitors who did not have safer cigarettes.
But several factors have stood in the way of the development of a safer smoke.
Taking the toxins out of cigarette smoke has turned out to be a technological
challenge. The biggest problem has been maintaining the taste and smoking
sensations that smokers crave—so far, no company has overcome those
obstacles. And industry lawyers have balked at the suggestions that cigarette
makers embark on research to make safe cigarettes out of fears of the tricky
legal problem such research would create for the entire industry. Patrick
Sheehy, the former chief executive of British American Tobacco, wrote in 1986
that safe cigarette research would be tacit admission that cigarettes are
dangerous. "In attempting to develop a "safe" cigarette you are, by
implication, in danger of being interpreted as accepting the current product is
unsafe, and this is not a position that I think we should take," he
wrote.
Among cigarette manufacturers, finding
a way to remove toxins from cigarette smoke is, well, a burning
desire.
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Finally, the safe cigarette has been stymied by the very groups who are most
concerned about the health effects of smoking: antitobacco groups and public
health officials. The cigarette industry's efforts to market safer cigarettes
have been met with fierce opposition by antitobacco activists, who want to see
such products labeled as nicotine delivery devices and subjected to government
regulations. Although the opposition of health groups to a safe cigarette would
seem contradictory, it is borne out of a deep mistrust of the cigarette
companies, whose strategy of denial over the years has created a credibility
gap with the public health community.
The "tar derby"
The cigarette makers first began making noises about safer cigarettes in the 1950s
during a period now known among historians as the "tar derby." As a result of
growing public concerns about smoking and health, the cigarette makers
responded with a variety of new filter cigarettes that would ostensibly reduce
tar levels. But the rise of the filter cigarette was more a marketing ploy than
anything else. There was little evidence to suggest that filter cigarettes were
any healthier than regular cigarettes, and the tobacco companies' own
researchers knew this to be the case. A 1976 memo from Ernest Pepples, Brown
& Williamson's vice president and general counsel, noted that filter
cigarettes surged from less than 1 percent of the market in 1950 to 87 percent
in 1975. "In most cases, however, the smoker of a filter cigarette was getting
as much or more nicotine and tar as he would have gotten from a regular
cigarette. He had abandoned the regular cigarette, however, on the ground of
reduced risk to health," wrote Pepples.
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One of the competitors in the "tar derby."
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Even today, many smokers think that low-tar or so-called light or ultra-light
cigarettes are better for them than full-strength smokes. Because reducing tar
levels also tends to lower nicotine levels, studies have shown that smokers
inadvertently compensate for the loss of the nicotine. Smokers of low-tar
cigarettes inhale more deeply, take puffs more often, and even cover up the
tiny holes near the filter that were put there to reduce the amount of smoke,
and subsequently the amount of tar, that a smoker inhales. (To take a closer
look at ventilation holes and other design elements in today's cigarettes, see
Anatomy of a Cigarette.)
Toward "safer" smokes
During the 1960s cigarette makers embarked on extensive research to create a safe
cigarette. The goal was to remove the toxins from a conventional cigarette
without altering the taste or smoking experience. Memos from that time period
show that some tobacco company executives were genuinely interested not only in
profits but in making their products healthier. In 1962, Charles Ellis, a
British American Tobacco research executive, noted that painting mice with
"fresh" smoke condensate, more similar to the "fresh" smoke inhaled by smokers,
might prove to be more harmful than the older, stored condensate often used in
such experiments. "This possibility need not dismay us, indeed it would mean
that there really was a chemical culprit somewhere in smoke, and one, moreover,
that underwent a reaction fairly quickly to something else. I feel confident
that in this case we could identify this group of substances, and it would be
worth almost any effort, by preliminary treatment, additives, or filtration, to
get rid of it."
Industry documents show that tobacco companies focused their safe-cigarette
research on several areas, including the development of synthetic tobacco,
boosting nicotine levels in low-tar cigarettes (so smokers wouldn't have to
compensate for a loss of nicotine), and selective filtration of the most toxic
substances in cigarette smoke, such as carbon monoxide. Research into safe
cigarettes also has focused on the removal or lowering of four types of
carcinogenic compounds: nitrosamines, widely viewed as the most deadly
cancer-causing agents in tobacco smoke; aldehydes, formed by the burning of
sugars and cellulose in tobacco; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH's),
which form in the cigarette behind the burning tip; and traces of heavy metals
present in tobacco as a result of fertilizers used on the plant.
This animation shows how the heat from tobacco combustion
causes molecules to fragment into unstable arrangements, which recombine to
form carcinogenic compounds of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or
PAH's.
See the animation in:
QuickTime |
RealVideo
Get video software:
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But despite the industry's early optimism about simply removing the toxic
elements from a cigarette, the quest for a safe cigarette proved to be a
technically and politically daunting challenge. Industry researchers often
found ways of lowering one or two of the dangerous compounds, only to discover
that their tinkering had either increased the level of some other harmful
compound or so dramatically altered the cigarette that it wouldn't be accepted
by consumers. In 1975, Brown & Williamson introduced a new cigarette, Fact,
which had been designed to selectively remove certain compounds, including
cyanide, from cigarette smoke. But the product was pulled from the market after
just two years.
Scientists also experimented with tobacco substitutes, including ingredients
made with wood pulp, that were said to be less toxic than tobacco. But those
products ran into a new set of problems because they were no longer a naturally
occurring tobacco product but a synthetic creation about which health claims
were being made. That meant government regulators viewed the tobacco
substitutes more like drugs, subjecting them to a regulatory morass that the
cigarette makers wanted to avoid. In 1977, a few British tobacco companies,
Imperial, Gallaher, and Rothmans, which could avoid U.S. Food and Drug
Administration scrutiny, launched several versions of cigarettes made with
tobacco substitutes. But the products met with resistance from health groups,
who claimed the new cigarettes were still unsafe, and the products floundered
and were withdrawn after just a few months.
Continue: The XA Project
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Anatomy of a Cigarette |
"Safer" Cigarettes: A History |
The Dope on Nicotine |
On Fire
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© | Updated October 2001
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