The filtered truth.

• Author: Segal, David
• Position: Low tar cigarettes

With low tar cigarettes, rather than stonewall the health issue, tobacco companies exploit it. Here's how

The Surgeon's General's office declared war on smoking in 1966 and 29 years into the fight, it's hard to tell who's winning. Yes, the percent of adult Americans who smoke has dwindled from 40 percent in 1964 to 25 percent in 1992. But since the U.S. population has increased over that period, the total number of cigarettes annually sold has dipped only slightly. The first 25 years of the anti-smoking campaign avoided or postponed 789,000 deaths. But smoking claimed about half that many lives in 1985 alone. Anti-smoking forces point out that recent morbidity figures reflect the bad habits of older smokers 20 years ago. But three thousand teenagers take up smoking each day.

Of course, if the Surgeons General and their allies have managed anything close to a draw in this battle, they all deserve medals. This isn't what you'd call a fair fight. The tobacco industry spends upwards of $4 billion per year on advertising and promotion, pushing a product more additive than either heroin or cocaine. And thanks to the industry's friends in Congress, using government to protect smokers has been extremely difficult. By legislative fiat, cigarettes were exclude d from the Consumer Product Safety Act and the Fair Labeling and Packaging Act. Tobacco is also exempted from the Toxic Substances Act, even though a cigarette has more benzine in it than what was thought to be in Perrier, and more cyanide in it than was found in those tainted Chilean grapes. The Food and Drug Administration won't get involved because it decided about 90 years ago that tobacco isn't a drug and hasn't changed its mind since. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is only interested in whether cigarette makers have paid taxes. The courts haven't been helpful because juries tend to believe that warning labels shield the industry from liability, which is why the companies were proponents of the pack warning when it was first introduced. In sum, the most destructive of commonly bought consumer products is also the most insulated and hardest to curb.

Outspent and outmaneuvered, the health advocates' strategy has been simple and effective: spread the word about the hazards of smoking. Today, 80 percent of smokers say they want to quit. That may sound like a period that makes cigarette executives dyspeptic - as it turns out, it's a factoid that makes them money. Back in the sixties, right around the time that the public mind began connecting cigarettes to cancer, the tobacco industry started marketing low tar, low nicotine cigarettes to meet consumer demands for "safer" smoke (tar is what gives cigarettes flavor and causes disease; nicotine is what keeps smokers addicted). Since then, low yield cigarettes have steadily captured more and more of the market. In 1967, low tar cigarettes - 15 mg or less - had two percent of the market; today they have just under 60 percent.

You'd think, and the cigarette companies would have you believe, that this stampede to low tar would result in a net health gain for all concerned. In fact, the surge in low tar sales marks the triumph of one of Tobacco's most brazen and successful cons - a con which has helped make cigarettes the nation's leading cause of preventable deaths. While polls show that millions of adults now believe that low tar means safer, a welter of scientific evidence says just the opposite: Any possible benefits to trading in that heavy-duty Camel for something lighter are substantially, often entirely, offset by changes in the way people smoke. "What you smoke," says Jeffrey Harris, a physician and health economist at MIT, "is not nearly as important as how you smoke." Since people tend to make up for reductions in tar and nicotine by inhaling harder, many scientists, and the Surgeon General's office, believe low yield cigarettes are actually a greater hazard to...