Tobacco Documents Online

f THE NEW YORK TIMES March 13, 1967 RESEARCH URGED ON SAFE TOBACCO State Health Chief Calls for Wider Effort to Remove Perils From Smoking By DAVID BIRD New York State's Health Commissioner called yesterday for stepped up research to make the cigarette habit "safe if we have to have i.t; and I believe we do." The Commissioner, Dr. Hollis S. Ingraham, pointed to the state's iresearch efforts in the laboratory with animals and at a specihi 17-acre tobacco field near Hamburg, N. Y., a village asar Buffalo, to find ways of growing less dangerous tobacco. However, he said, no one has found the answer. He called for more Federal funds for reseaa+ch and also for more help from cigarehbe oompanies, which he d had cooperated to "1 very ~imited extent." He said more research should be pressed "to look for the paa- ticular agents that are noxious and try to 'find ways of geting -t'tsem out of tobacco or try to find ways of growing tobacco or otherwise detoxifying it and making the habit safe." Dr. Ingraham called cigarettes the "most serious known lethal agent today." "There is no other agent,,, he a+dded, "whether it is bullets or germs or viruses that is killing anything like as many Ameri- cans as the cigarette is." But, he noted, the attempts to bring this message hacne have been markedly unsuocessfull One of the problems, he said, is that the effects of smoking are long ' delayed and it is difficult' to reach young people when they i form the smoking habit. "If you tell a teen-ager not I to smoke because he'll have em- i physema or heart trouble at 50 i he doesn't care," Dr. Ingraham said. "He thinks that any old duffer should be pushed out of the picture by then, anyway." Dr. Ingraham appeared yes- terday on the WNBC-TV Direct' Line program. He expanded on his remarks in an interview later. Comments on Ads Asked to oomnient on dndus- try assertions that cigarette ad- vertising has been altered to appeal only to adults, Dr. In- graham said: "Yes, but they're very attrac- tive adults ... and very young. There are very few old geezers." Dr. Ingraham said one reason that ant'dcigarehte campaigns had had little effect was that smoking is "an addiction and we haven't been very successful so far in treating any addic- tions.,• He noted that while cigarette smoking, while more deadly, "does not destroy the psyche so it doesn't have the deadening ef- fect of'alcohol" or opium. "But it is nevertheless an addioting~ habit," he said. Dr. Ingraham said he would) not favor legislation to outlaw smoking, because it would be impossible to ban something that ds used by half the ooun- try's adults. I ~. -- -_ - - -- -