Wow, these smokers are really adament about fighting to keep their right to smoke. The fight is about truth in advertising. Obviously, if one is already addicted to cigarettes, they believe it is their right to smoke. The concentration should be on the untruthful marketing to young people. When you label something as light, you make a false implication that it is safer than regular cigarettes. Fewer carcinogens do not prevent you from getting cancer. Smoking any kind of cigarette is dangerous and it kills. Yes, we are all going to die, but what quality of life do you want to have? Do you want to have to walk around with an oxygen tank? Or have an artificial voice because of destroying your larynx? Or a hole in your neck because you can no longer breathe through your mouth?...........Wow. How many of these comments are posted by someone who has in investment in the tobacco industry I wonder?
Snuffed Out
Probing the myth that 'light' cigarettes are better for you.
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Ever thought you were doing yourself less harm when smoking a Marlboro Light? Well, you can safely bury that illusion now. Information released during a Senate committee hearing last week bolstered the case that "light" or "ultra light" cigarettes are just as harmful to your health as regular ones—if not worse. And not only that: the big tobacco companies have been aware of this fact for 30 years, according to an internal memo from Philip Morris. Some experts have warned for years that light cigarettes aren't necessarily less dangerous than regular smokes.
Philip Morris spokesman Bill Phelps said the memo released in last week's hearing has been available for several years on tobaccodocuments.org, a Web site created as a result of a settlement between the tobacco industry and several states in 1998. Phelps added that his company "does not imply in its marketing that lower-tar and lower-nicotine products are safer than regular cigarettes. … On our Web site we say: 'There is no safe cigarette.'"
NEWSWEEK's Thijs Niemantsverdriet discussed the memo with Allan M. Brandt, professor of the history of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of "The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America." Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What exactly was revealed last week in the Senate?
Allan M. Brandt: At the hearing, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg released a 1975 internal memo from Philip Morris, hitherto unpublished. It shows that the company knew at that time that the "smoking robot" tests from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), on which the cigarette industry based its statements about tar and nicotine levels, were inaccurate. The FTC admitted this during Tuesday's hearing. So since the mid-1970s tobacco companies have known that people who smoked "light" cigarettes inhaled the same amount of tar and nicotine as regular-cigarette smokers—if not more.
How?
It happens through a process that scientists and addiction experts call compensation. Smokers who use a reduced-tar product, such as light cigarettes, compensate by taking larger puffs, thus drawing more deeply into their lungs the smoke of those products. So it may well be that some of these "light" products are a greater danger than the regular cigarettes. The industry, however, has until today been allowed to market them as less dangerous to public health.
Is this really the first time it's been publicly acknowledged that "light" cigarettes may not be all that light?
No, it's been well known in tobacco control circles for a long time. What Lautenberg's hearings really make clear is that the industry has explicitly understood this for many years and deceptively marketed this product. So smokers who otherwise might have quit thought they were reducing their risks by buying these cigarettes—in vain. The tobacco industry has for at least 40 years worked hard to mislead the American public about the relative safety of their products. Recently they have started to tell the American public that they're acting as a responsible corporate citizen, and yet they persist in this very deceptive marketing practice.
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