Big Tobacco Easily Evades “Light” Cigarette Ban

Color coding allows smokers to easily identify their former brands.

The tobacco industry has once again made a mockery of the Food and Drug Administration’s attempts to ban ‘light” cigarettes from the marketplace, by simply eliminated the objectionable wording and substituting an easily-decoded color scheme. In a brochure prepared for cigarette retailers marked “For trade use only: not to be shown or distributed to customers,” tobacco giant Philip Morris wrote that “some cigarettes and smokeless packaging is changing, but the product remains the same.”

Research done at Harvard demonstrates "the continued attempts of the industry to avoid reasonable regulation of tobacco products,” said Hillel Alpert, co-author of a new study on light cigarettes, in a prepared statement. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA) of 2009 highlights the banning of light cigarettes as a critical mission, since cigarettes marketed in this way are in fact no safer than regular cigarettes. What makes a cigarette Light or Ultra-light is a series of tiny holes drilled through the filter (See earlier post). This “filter ventilation” was calibrated to the descriptors: Ultra-lights had more holes drilled in the filter than Lights. Studies have demonstrated conclusively that such filter schemes do not make smoking safer or cut down on related diseases. A 2001 report from the National Cancer Institute documented how smokers were compensating for the ventilation holes by smoking more cigarettes, smoking them more intensely, or by blocking the filter holes with fingers or lips.

In a study for Tobacco Control, Gregory Connolly and Hillel Alpert of the Harvard School of Public Health documented the process. In 2010, Philip Morris sent manuals to retailers detailing how they were to deal with the new sales situation. Philip Morris made clear that “current pack descriptors such as light, ultra-light and mild will be removed from all packages.” All well and good. However, the Philip Morris material also specified how a series of new package names were to be doled out. Marlboro Light became Marlboro Gold. Marlboro Mild morphed into Marlboro Blue. And Marlboro Ultra-light reemerged as Marlboro Silver.

When the researchers commissioned a large public survey to document the state of affairs one year after the official “light” ban, they found that “88%-91% of smokers found it either ‘somewhat easy’ or ‘very easy’ to identify their usual brand of cigarettes by the banned descriptor names, Lights, Mediums or Ultra-Lights.” Sales figures for these brands in the first two quarters of 2010 were essentially unchanged, the authors report. They conclude that “the majority of smokers of brands in all categories correctly identified their brands’ pack color.”

The lesson here may well be that countries like Australia and the UK are on the right track: Plain packaging may be best. If lawmakers allow “misleading numbers, the use of colors, imagery, brand extensions, and other devices that contribute to deception” in place of words, nothing has really changed. “The findings of the present research strongly suggest that tobacco manufacturers have evaded one of the most important provisions of the FSPTCA for protecting the public health from the leading cause of preventable death and disease,” the authors conclude.

In a press release, co-author Gregory Connolly, director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at Harvard, explained that the industry “was found guilty by a federal court in 2006 for deceptively promoting ‘light’ cigarettes as safer after countless smokers who switched to lights died prematurely, thinking they had reduced their health risks.”

Connolly G.N. & Alpert H.R. (2013). Has the tobacco industry evaded the FDA's ban on 'Light' cigarette descriptors?, Tobacco Control, PMID: 23485704

Photo Credit:http://www.mydiscountcigarette.net

The Death of “Low Tar” Cigarettes… Or Maybe Not.

Is this the best the FDA can do?

Lots of cigarette news lately. To begin with, cigarette manufacturers will no longer be able to market specific brands as “low tar” or “light.” And while David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), called for the regulation of nicotine levels in cigarettes, cancer researchers were backpedaling away from some questionable numbers about cancer risk from smokeless tobacco offered up by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Meanwhile, the American Medical Association (AMA) called on the FDA to ban so-called e-cigarettes.

Covering nicotine news is inherently confusing, ambiguous, and tentative, since the product in question is a legal drug responsible for an immense amount of tax revenues. It is also addictive. The relatively inelastic nature of demand for nicotine products makes governments reluctant to, er, snuff out the tax bonanza in its entirety.

Nonetheless, Congress gave the FDA broad new regulatory power over cigarettes a year ago with the passage of the Tobacco Control Act of 2009.  Last week, various provisions of the bill became effective, including provisions that “prohibit the advertising or labeling of tobacco products with the descriptors ‘light,’ ‘mild,’ or ‘low’ or similar descriptors” without specific permission from the FDA.  (See earlier post). In addition, health warning labels will be strengthened on smokeless tobacco packaging.

“As FDA continues implementation of the Tobacco Control act, we are committed to assuring that the actions we are taking are grounded in science and are open and transparent with participation by various stakeholders,” according to a press release from the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products.

The problem, as a glance at the photograph above aptly demonstrates, is that the America tobacco industry is already a jump ahead of the FDA’s measured approach. The industry plans to “let the colors speak to smokers in the same way the soon-to-be banned words ‘mild,’ ‘light,’ and ‘ultralight’ did,” Stephen Smith wrote last year in the Boston Globe.

Thus Pall Mall Lights become Pall Mall Blues. Whereas Salem Lights will forever after be known as Salem Gold Box. And so on. “These tricks are now well-established,” tobacco control specialist Stanton Glantz of the University of California told the Boston Globe. “The real question for the FDA is, are they going to let them get away with these shenanigans?”

The FDA is changing colors on the packages, and roughing up the warning labels, and starting to zero in on menthol, but one of the things it won't be doing is lowering the nicotine levels in cigarettes. Former FDA chairman David Kessler, for one, insists that this is the only substantive change likely to make a difference in addiction rates. In an AP report by Michael Felberbaum, Kessler said: “The tobacco industry knew 40 years ago that there was a threshold below which people would quit. Reducing the level of nicotine in cigarettes will change smoking as we know it. It is the ultimate harm reduction strategy.”

Meanwhile, on another contested front, (see earlier post) the Partnership at Drugfree.org reported that the AMA called on the FDA to regulate electronic cigarettes, which to date the agency has declined to do.  “Very little data exists on the safety of e-cigarettes,” said AMA board member Edward Langston. “Because e-cigarettes have not been thoroughly tested, one cannot conclude that they are less harmful or less dangerous than conventional cigarettes.” E-cigarettes also come in different candy and fruit flavors, the AMA pointed out during the process of adopting the policy at its annual meeting in Chicago.

And finally, a Wall Street Journal report by Carl Bialik in April caused a good deal of embarrassment at the American Cancer Society, which conceded that it had stopped using its long-cited figure of a 50-fold increase in the risk of oral cancer among users of smokeless tobacco. The National Cancer Institute has also cited the 50-times risk figure in its literature. As it turned out, the original survey had been about dry snuff, a form of tobacco rarely used in America today. Other scientists have concluded that the increased risk of oral cancer from smokeless tobacco is on the order of a factor of 10, not 50.

Photo credit: http://www.google.com/