Tobacco Documents Online

0 Copyright 1996 U.S. News & World Report U.S. News & World Report December 30, 1996 / January 6,1997 SECTION: OUTLOOK 1997; 20 Silver Bullets; Pg. 66 LENGTH: 667 words HEADLINE: How to reduce deaths from tobacco? Duh. Take the toxic stuff out of cigarettes BYLINE: By Timothy Noah BODY: When the Food and Drug Administration this summer announced that it was claiming jurisdiction over the regulation of tobacco products, the tobacco industry hit the roof. It argued in court that the move was illegal, poured millions of dollars into the coffers of pro-tobacco politicians and lobbied Congress to block the move. • To the casual bystander, the industry's panic might have seemed wildly disproportionate to the reasonable-sounding restrictions laid down by the FDA. They include a ban on vending machines that are accessible to kids and limits on advertising in publications popular with the young. Philip Morris, after all, had already consented to many of the youth-marketing restrictions--provided the FDA didn't do the regulating. But what the industry was really worried about was what the FDA might someday do with its new power: namely, tell tobacco companies that they must start producing safer cigarettes. By law, the FDA may already be required to certify FDA-regulated cigarettes as safe--a test that present-day cigarettes surely fail. From a public-health perspective, in any case, that kind of mandate would make sense. Tobacco products kill more than 400,000 people each year. That's more than the combined deaths due to AIDS, car accidents, alcohol, homicide, illegal drugs, suicide and fires. Assuming the FDA will be permitted by Congress and the courts to keep its jurisdiction over tobacco, it seems likely that the agency will eventually tell tobacco companies what they may (and may not) put in those cigarettes. When that day comes, the FDA commissioner may want to talk to John Slade. ~ Slade is an associate professor of medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and chairman of the nicotine-dependence committee of the American

• Society of Addiction Medicine. For the past several years, he has been spending much of his time trying to help regulators figure out how to force tobacco companies to make safer cigarettes. Someday, he hopes, the industry will sell methadonelike products that satisfy cigarette smokers' nicotine craving without killing quite so many of them. 7 The obvious way to do that is to force manufacturers to reduce the amount of harmful substances in their products. The chief known culprit is soot. (Slade prefers this term to "tar," which technically includes some ingredients, like glycerin, that don't seem especially harmful.) "You could set ceilings for permissible levels of toxins;" Slade says. In the case of soot, the ideal level would be zero. A less draconian (and probably less effective) alternative would be the "market approach" now in vogue with regulators. Government, Slade says, could impose heavier taxes on sootier cigarettes than on less sooty cigarettes. A tax might also be used to discourage high levels of certain chemicals Slade and other experts view as worrisome, such as carbon monoxide, benzene and formaldehyde. Making safer cigarettes is obviously not as good as getting smokers to kick the habit altogether. But banning cigarettes-or banning nicotine--would just create a black market for addicts. Part of what makes Slade's methadone-style solution appealing is that it is a nightmare for tobacco companies. But antismoking activists aren't thrilled with it, either. They point out that filter tips, low-tar cigarettes and other gimmicks dreamed up by tobacco companies in the past have done little to curb cigarettes' lethality. Slade concedes the point. Tobacco companies have never had much incentive to develop products that have low toxicity because smokers prefer the taste of sooty cigarettes. But the companies would if government were to demand fewer toxins. Auto companies came up with new technologies for cleaner-running cars only after the government set tight auto emissions standards. If General Motors can build electric cars, Philip Morris ought to be able to come up with a decent-tasting, nonlethal cigarette. GRAPHIC: Picture, More deaths than from AIDS, car crashes, alcohol, homicide, drugs, suicide ... (Ron Haviv--SABA) LANGUAGE: ENGLISH LOAD-DATE: December 27,1996 N O ~ O ~ W 01 V N ' V N

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