Big Tobacco Easily Evades “Light” Cigarette Ban

Color coding allows smokers to easily identify their former brands. The tobacco industry has once again made a mockery of the Food and Drug Administration’s attempts to ban ‘light” cigarettes from the marketplace, by simply eliminated the objectionable wording and substituting an easily-decoded color scheme. In a brochure prepared for cigarette retailers marked “For trade use only: not to be shown or distributed to customers,” tobacco giant Philip Morris wrote that “some cigarettes and smokeless packaging is changing, but the product remains the same.” Research done at Harvard demonstrates "the continued attempts of the industry to avoid reasonable regulation of tobacco products,” said Hillel Alpert, co-author of a new study on light cigarettes, in a prepared statement. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA) of 2009 highlights the banning of light cigarettes as a critical mission, since cigarettes marketed in this way are in fact no safer than regular cigarettes. What makes a cigarette Light or Ultra-light is a series of tiny holes drilled through the filter (See earlier post). This “filter ventilation” was calibrated to the descriptors: Ultra-lights had more holes drilled in the filter than Lights. Studies have demonstrated conclusively that such filter schemes do not make smoking safer or cut down on related diseases. A 2001 report from the National Cancer Institute documented how smokers were compensating for the ventilation ho...
Source: Addiction Inbox - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs