‘Light’ cigarettes no safer, says report

Washington, Nov 27: Cigarettes marketed as “light” or “low-tar” by tobacco companies have offered smokers only an illusion of reduced health risks while leaving unabated the death toll caused by the habit, according to a report released on Tuesday by the US National Cancer Institute.

While the design of cigarettes has changed over the past half century as tobacco companies created products billed as packing less cancer-causing tar, there has been no meaningful change in the health risk posed by smoking, the report found. “Epidemiological and other scientific evidence, including patterns of mortality from smoking-caused diseases, does not indicate a benefit to public health from changes in cigarette design and manufacturing over the last 50 years,” the report stated.

Eighty-seven per cent of cigarettes sold in America are low-tar brands, many billed as “light” and “low-tar,” according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The report found that this widespread adoption of cigarettes that produce less tar in machine-measured government tests has not prevented a sustained increase in lung cancer among long-time smokers.

The report was authored by two experts on the health effects of smoking, Dr David Burns of the University of California at San Diego and Dr Neal Benowitz of the University of California at San Francisco. It was released by the National Cancer Institute, part of the US government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). Smoking-related diseases kill an estimated 430,700 Americans annually, according to the American Lung Association. About 26 per cent of men and 22 per cent of women smoke in the United States. Smoking is directly responsible for about nine in 10 cases of lung cancer, and causes most cases of emphysema and chronic bronchitis. Tar is the substance blamed for those diseases.

The report found that tobacco companies have designed cigarettes specifically so FTC tests using machines that puff on them find that they yield less tar when smoked, but also so they still deliver full doses of tar and nicotine to actual smokers. There has been a 60 per cent drop in machine-measured tar yields in US cigarettes over the past 50 years. But people smoking these cigarettes still can be exposed to the same old levels of tar in part because people puff cigarettes differently than machines do, the report found. A cigarette’s design can be manipulated in order to deliver a lower level of tar in machine measurements by increasing the size or number of ventilation holes in the cigarette’s filter, the report said. Thus, these machine tests fail to offer smokers any meaningful information on the amount of tar and nicotine they will consume from a cigarette, the report said.

“Smokers may take larger puffs, inhale more deeply, take more rapid or more frequent puffs, block ventilation holes in the filters with their fingers or lips, or increase the number of cigarettes they smoke per day,” the report stated.

Marketing “light” and “low-tar” cigarettes as lower-risk products is deceptive, the report stated.

“Many smokers switch to lower-yield cigarettes out of concern for their health, believing these cigarettes to be less risky or to be a step toward quitting,” according to the report. “Advertising and marketing of lower-yield cigarettes may promote initiation and impede cessation, more important determinants of smoking-related
diseases.”

— Reuters