Tobacco.org

• Vt. suit against tobacco company resumes today 

After a two-month break, trial resumes today in a lawsuit in which the state of Vermont charges that R.J. Reynolds claimed a new cigarette was safer for smokers without scientific data to back the claim.

Vermont, which is suing the tobacco company for itself and 35 other states, has taken aim at Reynolds' marketing statements that say its Eclipse cigarettes, which heat rather than burn tobacco, are safer than regular cigarettes.

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• Tobacco case set to resume Monday  

The trial on claims by the state of Vermont that R.J. Reynolds Co. misled consumers about the health risks of smoking a new kind of cigarette resumes Monday at Chittenden Superior Court in Burlington after a two-month hiatus.

The state, which is arguing the case on behalf of 36 states, contends that Reynolds has marketed Eclipse, a cigarette that heats rather than burns tobacco, as safer than conventional cigarettes despite having no scientific evidence to back its advertising claims.

Judge Dennis Pearson presided over 20 days of testimony in the case in October and, in a ruling late last month, said he will allow Reynolds five more days to wrap up its defense against the state's claims.

Based on recent court filings, Reynolds lawyers intend to focus part of this week's testimony on an 11-year-old statement by the Attorney General's Office that criticized the company for not doing more to promote Premier, another "safer" cigarette it had developed.

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• Tobacco 'orbs' melt in mouth 

The release this January of the first dissolvable tobacco product by a major company has some public health officials concerned.

"This is a wake-up call for the public health community," says Gregory Connolly of Harvard School of Public Health. "It's a total sea change."

For smokers who can't light up in the office or at a restaurant, a new aspirin-sized tablet, called "Camel Orb," will let tobacco melt in their mouth. The dissolvable product -- arriving January in stores in Portland, Ore., Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis -- is the first such product by a major tobacco company and is part of a booming market in smokeless alternatives to cigarettes as smoke-free laws sweep the nation.

"It's meeting the needs of smokers," says Rob Dunham, of R.J. Reynolds, maker of Orb and Camel cigarettes. With lozenge-like Orb, he says there's no smoke, no spit, no litter. . . .

"These products are designed to enhance social acceptability of tobacco," says Connolly. "They've left the realm of traditional tobacco products" and are more akin to food. He says they may pose fewer health risks than cigarettes because they are smokeless, but he says they're dangerous because they keep people addicted. Also, he says, they're attractive to kids, because they're easy to hide.

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LETTER: Tobacco research has its place 

Re: "Universities fail the test," by Les Hagen, Letters, Dec. 11.

Les Hagen has followed a common approach of narrow-minded special interest groups, creating a "report card" to measure how much others obey their demands. In this case, they demand that universities prohibit research that is funded by tobacco companies, and thereby abandon their most cherished ethic, academic freedom. What Hagen does not tell us is that this is done to protect his extremist political agenda from competing ideas.

Hagen's complaints about the industry are outdated, as are his anti-tobacco tactics. Most of the new and promising ideas for substantially reducing the health effects from smoking and nicotine use are coming from the industry itself.

As a recipient of one of the research grants Hagen condemns, I work to tell smokers who are not quitting that they can still reduce their risks by 99 per cent by switching to smokeless tobacco or other low-risk sources of nicotine (see TobaccoHarmReduction.org for details).

This is perhaps the greatest untapped public health measure available in our society. . . .

Those of us in public health want to help people. But anti-tobacco extremists would rather just punish smokers with high taxes and other regulations, as well as by letting them die.

By trying to persuade or blackmail universities into cutting off research they do not approve of, Hagen and his friends hope to keep smokers from learning there are low-risk alternatives.

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More letters 

LETTER: SHATENSTEIN: Smokeless not an option 

It is staggering to hear Carl V. Phillips speak of the "most cherished ethic" of universities. Prof. Phillips is funded by the U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company, the leading smokeless firm in a tobacco industry bereft of ethics. How can a researcher supported by a business that profits from the suffering and death of its customers ever dare to criticize Les Hagen, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, a group dedicated to alleviating the immeasurable harm caused by tobacco use?

In a hypothetical world where all smokers would give up cigarettes and switch to smokeless products, there is no doubt they would suffer less disease and fewer premature deaths. But we do not live in that hypothetical world.

How can anyone encourage the uptake of an addictive product whose use leads to grossly higher incidence of pancreatic and throat and mouth cancers?

Even if smokeless products are safer on paper, Big Tobacco fools smokers into resisting the temptation to quit by assuring them they'll have something to chew on "for those times when you can't light up."

It's easy for Phillips to try to marginalize Hagen and ASH by speaking of extremism, but what is more radical, what is more on the margins of society, then to work for or be supported by an industry that knowingly sickens and kills its customers?

If Phillips really cared about the "hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in North America," he wouldn't be so interested in getting smokers to trade one poison for another -- a safer poison, but poison nonetheless. He would be out there working with ASH, not mocking its efforts.

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RODU: Dissolvables: Saving the lives of cigarette smokers  

I am a professor of medicine, and I hold an endowed chair in tobacco harm reduction research, at the University of Louisville. I read with interest your commentary on Camel dissolvables. Unfortunately, your commentary contains statements that are false and misleading.

You characterized Camel dissolvables as "...still addictive and risky like cigarettes..." This is patently untrue. Scientific research has established that smokeless tobacco products are at least 98% safer than smoking. You have repeated the misinformation from government agencies and by anti-tobacco extremists about the relative safety of smokeless products. . . .

The 100,000 Oregonians who will die from smoking-related illness in the next 20 years are not children today; they are adults, 35 years and older. Preventing youth access to tobacco is vitally important, but that effort should never be used as a smokescreen to condemn smoking parents and grandparents to premature death.

If any other consumer product was as dangerous as cigarettes, The Oregonian would demand safer alternatives, and it would be scandalous if consumers were denied them. American smokers are literally dying for ways to step away from the fire, and they deserve accurate information about -- and access to -- effective, safer smokeless substitutes.

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• Safer cigarette smoke just as harmful to embryos 

Smoke from so-called harm-reduction cigarettes is just as dangerous to developing embryos as smoke from standard cigarettes, and may be even more toxic, new experiments with mouse embryo stem cells show.

The smoke issuing from the ends of these cigarettes is more harmful than the fumes inhaled through a filter, Dr. Prue Talbot of the University of California, Riverside and her colleagues report in the journal Human Reproduction.

There has been very little research on the chemicals remaining in cigarettes treated to remove certain toxic and cancer-causing substances and even less on how smoke from these cigarettes might affect developing embryos, Talbot told Reuters Health. "The caveat is there are many things in smoke besides the known carcinogens -- smoke has somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 chemicals in it," she said.

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• Possibility grows for FDA regulation  

Even if Altria Group Inc.'s research efforts on that front are successful, the parent company of cigarette-maker Philip Morris USA and cigar-maker John Middleton Inc. will need an independent stamp of approval to make any health claims about new products.

That is where the Food and Drug Administration could come into play.

Public-health groups believe 2009 could finally be the year when Congress grants the FDA authority to regulate the tobacco industry.

"We're optimistic that Congress will take up the FDA bill early in the next year," said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. FDA legislation passed the House by a wide margin this summer, but it was held up in the Senate, where it faced more opposition.

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• Special report: Philip Morris research requires constant tests, tweaks  

Philip Morris wants smokers to try new things -- but they're a tough group to convince.

Just this year, Philip Morris pulled the silvery packs of its Marlboro UltraSmooth cigarettes from store shelves in Atlanta, Salt Lake City and Tampa, Fla., after a three-year effort to test a complicated new filter.

It gave up a few years back on an electric smoking device, called Accord, that it test-marketed here.

Now the tobacco giant's main active test-marketing effort is on smokeless tobacco -- products you put in your mouth instead of lighting up -- in what health advocates fear is an effort to recruit a new generation of nicotine addicts.

While researchers at Philip Morris's Center for Research & Technology in downtown Richmond still are working hard on re-engineering cigarettes, the toxic chemistry of burning tobacco isn't the only hurdle they face.

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New site's role broadens  

Inside Philip Morris USA's Research & Technology Center in downtown Richmond, the company is doing more than just scientific research.

More than a year after the center opened in the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park, the scope of the work done there has broadened to reflect the company's growing portfolio of tobacco products and an emphasis on consumer research.

"Over the last few years we have evolved," said Jack Nelson, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Altria Group Inc., the Henrico County-based parent company of Philip Morris USA. "As your business evolves, you want your research and development activities to evolve."

Nelson has an office at the downtown center in addition to Altria's West Broad Street headquarters.

While the company continues to work on product development, Altria Group Inc. also is cutting costs, which is likely to affect the resources it devotes to research.

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• Program for young scientists is retired  

Philip Morris USA pulled research even closer to its vest this year, quietly canceling a multimillion-dollar grant program for young scientists.

Over the past eight years, the Philip Morris External Research Program financed 470 research proposals, providing fellowships of $40,000 a year to recently minted Ph.D.s and medical doctors. It spent about $200 million.

"We felt that a significant scientific body of knowledge had been created," said Bill Phelps, a company spokesman.

"The nature of our current research efforts is more focused than some of the research was under the External Research Program," Phelps said. "It is important to keep in mind that we now have the ability to do some of this kind of research internally at our new Center for Research and Technology."

But the company still is involved in university research, including a $20 million grant to the University of Virginia last year and $30 million the year before to Duke University.

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• Special Reports - Tobacco Industry: The Search for Tobacco's Future 

Cigarettes have come a long way from being a bit of paper rolled around chopped tobacco leaf. Here's a look at what's inside -- and at what Philip Morris USA researchers are focused on as they delve deep into the science of smoking at their secretive new research and development center in Richmond.

Patent work sets Philip Morris apart 

Philip Morris is far and away the leader among cigarette companies when it comes to research and development. In the past two years, the company has applied for more than 70 patents, a Richmond Times-Dispatch review found.

Reynolds American, the No. 2 cigarette-maker, applied for two over that time -- one for a device that positions cigarettes coming off a forming machine so name brands can be printed on them, and the other for a method of wrapping cut tobacco with strips that are made from sheets of a tobacco, glycerin and wood-pulp mixture.

Other cigarette-makers haven't bothered at all, except for a handful of patent applications filed by Japan Tobacco, mainly involving packaging.

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• SPECIAL REPORT: Searching for tobacco's future 

There's the flare of the flame, the hiss of charring tobacco and the first slightly dizzying thrill of nicotine in the throat.

And there's half of the cigarette's formaldehyde and one of its cancer-causing tars.

Getting the right mix of addictive nicotine and toxic smoke compounds to keep smokers taking that first puff, and all the others, is at the core of a secretive, multimillion-dollar research effort largely done in Richmond.

At Philip Morris USA's downtown Center for Research and Technology that opened last year -- the city's single biggest corporate investment -- researchers are seeking a future for an industry branded by U.S. and U.N. agencies as the world's deadliest public-health menace.

The researchers are doing groundbreaking work by looking at the glowing tip of a cigarette. They're looking at whether they can tweak the ingredients of smoke with tiny bits of fiber, plastics, metal and gels inside cigarettes and filters. And they're looking at ways of getting people nicotine without burning tobacco.

"I think Philip Morris is likely the smartest tobacco company, and they take, for an American business, a very long-term perspective," said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

Research and development is key to Philip Morris' strategy, said Jack Nelson, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Altria Group, Philip Morris' corporate parent.

Philip Morris doesn't expect its research to produce a safer cigarette anytime soon, or to lead the company away from the steadily shrinking market for tobacco. But its research effort makes clear that the country's biggest cigarette-maker intends to be in the tobacco business -- making cigarettes, cigars and smokeless tobacco -- for the long haul.

"Our research is about finding products our adult consumers might choose," Nelson said.

It is an effort Philip Morris rarely discusses, but financial analysts estimate the company spends more than $100 million a year on it.

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This is not about industry concern for public health but rather hard-nosed business: How does an industry continue to operate when its products are now recognized as inherently harmful?
Kelley Lee, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine of the University of London, on Philip Morris' $100M search for a safer -- but still addictive -- product.