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"Pack of Lies"
Have you ever seen a magician perform? Have you ever wondered how he can accomplish those seemingly magic feats? A magician diverts your attention from his trickery by using speech and quick hand gestures to create intricate illusions. The tobacco industry, using similar techniques, operates much like a magician. It uses deceptive advertising, facts, and wording to divert attention from the truth of its major product, cigarettes. The analogy between the tobacco industry and a magician stops here. In this paper, the secrets of the tobacco industry will be told.
The first illusion about cigarettes to dispel is the common perception. When it comes to defining cigarettes, the tobacco industry, David Kessler (head of the Federal Food and Drug Administration(FDA)), and Webster's Third New International Dictionary all respond differently. Webster's defines a cigarette as a tube of finely cut tobacco enclosed in paper designed for smoking and usually narrower and shorter than a cigar. This definition is inadequate, as you will later discover, cigarettes are much more complicated than tobacco rolled in paper.
The tobacco industry defines cigarettes cigarettes quite differently, this quote is taken from an internal document of a tobacco company:
Think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a day's supply of nicotine...Think of the cigarette as a dispenser for a dose unit of nicotine...Think of a puff of smoke as the vehicle for nicotine...Smoke is beyond question the most optimized vehicle of nicotine and the cigarette the most optimized dispenser of smoke. [22]
Nicotine is a drug which is found naturally in tobacco; it has been proven in science labs to be extremely addictive.
David Kessler states, "cigarettes are a complex nicotine delivery system.[18]" Complex because both the tobacco industry and consumers can manipulate the amount of nicotine a cigarette delivers.
Webster's definition is outdated and misleading. Cigarettes are no longer made of only tobacco leaves. In order to save money, tobacco companies now use what is called filler or reconstituted tobacco in cigarettes. Filler is tobacco stems, scraps, and dust that was previously unusable. Filler allowed the tobacco industry to utilize more of the tobacco plant and thus save money. This shift appears to be strictly economical, but around the same time tobacco companies started to use filler, nicotine levels in cigarettes started to be manipulated and controlled.[18]
Webster's definition never mentions the fact that cigarettes contain nicotine. This omission implies that nicotine naturally occurs in the tobacco used in cigarettes and is not a main constituent of cigarettes or concern for the tobacco industry. This is not the case. The tobacco industry clearly believes that nicotine levels in cigarettes are extremely important. The tobacco industry states this themselves:
Maintaining the nicotine content at a sufficiently high level to provide the desired physiological activity, taste, and odor...can thus be seen to be a significant problem in the tobacco art.[1]
Industry patents show that the industry recognized nicotine as the active ingredient in tobacco. These patents are not simply showing what procedures exist; these patents show intent of the tobacco industry to develop methods to manipulate the levels of nicotine that cigarettes deliver. There are eight patents to increase the nicotine in the cigarette rod, five patents to increase the nicotine content by adding nicotine to the filters, wrappers and other parts of the cigarette, three patents use advanced technology manipulate levels of nicotine in cigarettes, eight patents on extraction of nicotine from tobacco, and nine patents to develop new chemical variants of nicotine.
The following is a list of descriptions from a few of these patents and what the industry can do:
1)manipulate nicotine levels:
...the process is useful for transferring ...nicotine ...to a nicotine deficient tobacco, tobacco filler materials... [2]
...processed tobaccos can be manufactured under conditions suitable to provide products having various nicotine levels. [3]
2)manipulate the rate at which the nicotine is delivered from the cigarette:
This invention permits the release into tobacco smoke, in controlled amounts, of desirable flavorants, as well as the release, in controlled amounts and when desired, of nicotine into tobacco smoke. [1]
It is a further object of this invention to provide a cigarette which delivers a larger amount of nicotine in the first few puffs of the cigarette than in the last few puffs. [4]
The tobacco industry "side steps" the fact that they are marketing a powerful drug. The use "buzzwords" such as "strength," "desire," or "pleasurable" cushion the fact that nicotine is an addictive drug. Smokers do not "desire" the "rich aroma" of the cigarettes. They "desire" nicotine. In the following descriptions given by the tobacco industry, note the language they use:
It has been generally recognized that the perception of the "strength" of the cigarette is directly related to the amount of nicotine contained in the cigarette smoke during each puff(emphasis mine). [4]
Small doses of nicotine provide the user with certain pleasurable effects resulting in the desire for additional doses(emphasis mine). [5]
Top tobacco company officials have actually stated that they do not believe nicotine to be addictive.[6][7] Manipulating the levels of nicotine in cigarettes, however, is a clear indicator of the tobacco industries knowledge of nicotine as an addictive drug. Yet they insist that nicotine is a flavorant, but the cigarette industry's own patents reveal that increasing the levels of nicotine produces an unacceptably harsh and irritating product, and that the industry has taken special steps to mask the flavor of cigarettes[8]. An RJ Reynolds book on flavoring tobacco listing close to a thousand flavorants added to cigarettes fails to mention nicotine once.[9] If the nicotine is in fact really just a flavorant as the tobacco industry insists, then "why not use a substitute ingredient with comparable flavor, but without the addictive potential," David Kessler asks. "For example, it has been repeatedly shown that substitute ingredients, such as hot pepper (capsaicin)[10] and citric acid[11], have the similar irritating effects."
Cigarette consumers are not able to reduce their exposure to nicotine even if they choose "low"-nicotine cigarettes. The nicotine yield of a cigarette that appears on a cigarette box has been determined by the "FTC method" for the past 25 years. The "FTC method" uses a machine that tests cigarettes involving a two-second, 35ml puff each minute, until a predetermined butt length is reached[19].
This way of testing the levels of nicotine in cigarettes is obsolete because a human has different smoking habits than a machine. It is the way in which the cigarette is smoked that is the most important determinant of how much nicotine is yielded. Humans can and do compensate when smoking low-yield cigarettes, by altering puff volume, puff duration, inhalation frequency, depth of inhalation, and the number of cigarettes smoked [12][13][14][15].
Beyond those factors controlled by the smoker, the tobacco industry also has a few tricks up its sleeve. The low-yield cigarettes are the result of manipulations of cigarettes made by the cigarette industry to lower the levels of nicotine that appear during FTC testing. Manipulations such as ventilation holes, how fast the cigarette paper burns, and the length of the filter paper overwrap all affect the readouts of the test.[23]
When testing the yield of nicotine by machine, the cigarettes ventilation and burning characteristics determine whether the cigarette will be labeled high or low yield.[19] The addition of small laser generated ventilation holes in the filter dilutes the cigarette smoke and gives a lower reading in the machine. While smoking one of these "low-yield" cigarettes, a smoker blocks these holes with his lips and/or fingers resulting in a larger nicotine yield.[24]
The burning rate of the cigarette also affects the machine readout. Since the machine takes a puff once a minute, the faster a cigarette burns, the lower the number of puffs, thereby producing a lower reading of nicotine yield. The tobacco industry accomplishes this by making the cigarette paper more porous. Humans can adjust to this increased rate of burning. As a matter of fact, a smoker takes a puff an average of every 34 seconds, almost double the rate of the testing machine.[16]
Perhaps the most surprising fact of all is that the cigarettes advertised with the lowest yield had the highest concentration of nicotine and the highest nicotine to tar ratio. This is startling because it has been stated that nicotine and tar travel in smoke together[18]. This deviation of nicotine levels raises the question as to how this can occur.
The tobacco companies are magicians, creating illusions about cigarettes. They make nicotine yields partially disappear, use wording to divert the public's attention from nicotine to "pleasure", and doctor the levels of nicotine in cigarettes. The battle for the truth about cigarettes is still ongoing; the facts presented here are only the beginning. Recent developments in the legislation are putting more and more pressure on the industry to dispel the mystery surrounding cigarettes. One day we shall know all the magicians' secrets.
