Tobacco Documents Online

Their strategy is to have such a designation accepted by regulatory bodies, thus forcing FDA to regulate Premier, which will in effect mean the removal of Premier from store shelves. Premier looks and smokes like any other cigarette and is meant to be enjoyed as a cigarette. FDA really has no grounds to regulate it as something else. So the larger issue becomes, to what extent will regulatory bodies allow interest groups, even though they may be sincere in their intent to help the public, distort science and fact and suppress a new product? It's the public's Constitutional freedom of choice and the integrity of the free market that's ultimately under attack by the anti- smokers. FDA and state agencies should resist any temptation they might have to give in to prohibitionist forces. * * *

Nevertheless, if smoking prohibitionists have their way, Premier would be banned from the free market and denied to the 50 million Americans who choose to smoke and may want to try Premier. Any new smoking product, even if it's a product that responds to anti-smoking criticism, in their view should be denied free market access. Many of the allegations made by prohibitionist forces are disingenuous. They claim, for example, that Premier artificially adds nicotine to the cigarette. Yet, explicitly clear in the extensive scientific literature on Premier is the fact that the only nicotine in Premier comes from tobacco. Additionally, the amount of nicotine yielded by Premier is less than 97 percent of all the cigarettes on the market on a sales-weighted basis. The recent history of cigarettes over the past 30 years has shown a steady reduction of "tar" and nicotine in response to consumer demand. Premier, yielding negligible amounts of "tar" substances, said by critics to cause disease, represents a logical next step in this trend. In addition, Premier also is responding to the critics of environmental smoke, since it emits almost no smoke from its lit end. But some anti-smoking and health organizations want to turn these technological breakthroughs against Premier. They accuse Premier of being, not a cigarette, but a "drug delivery system." -2-

First Amendment and Premier Anti-smoking critics and health organizations have crossed the boundaries of fairness and are attempting to enter the odious terrains of totalitarian regimes that control personal freedoms. The U.S. anti-smokers are trying to induce the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as well as state agencies to ban a new cigarette, called Premier, simply because they want to legislate and regulate smoking out of existence. Never mind that Premier is a cigarette that actually addresses many of the health controversies associated with smoking, and should, in fact, be a product warmly welcomed by these critics. The anti-smokers' prohibitionist mindsets ironically blind them to the facts -- facts of science, of common sense, and most importantly, facts of the Constitutional rights of individuals in our a free market society. Developed by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Premier reduces the vast majority of the compounds found in the smoke of most cigarettes. The smoke inhaled by Premier smokers is 90 percent water and glycerol, a substance found naturally in food. Premier achieves its far simpler, cleaner smoke by heating, not actually burning, tobacco. An enormous body of scientific research has been carried out on Premier. The methodologies used in the research have been reviewed and endorsed as sound by renowned independent experts.