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Just Say Nicotine (Maintenance)
by Jerome Beck

Revisiting "Safer Cigarettes" To reduce the risks for those who continue to smoke, an obvious research strategy is to identify those constituents that are most harmful and strive to eliminate or reduce them as much as possible without seriously compromising user acceptability of the product. Since nicotine is so clearly the major source of satisfaction and addiction to tobacco, a fruitful area for further research entails the development of cigarettes with sufficient nicotine to satisfy smokers without recourse to compensatory behaviors such as deeper inhalation. Such low tar, yet sufficiently high nicotine cigarettes would arguably decrease exposure to the more harmful constituents among the 4000 chemical compounds identified in tobacco smoke.⁽¹⁴⁾

Throughout the 1960s and '70s, the tobacco industry devoted considerable time and expense to researching "safer cigarette" technologies. Nevertheless, what tobacco companies have ended up offering their customers over the past four decades has been a steady stream of gimmicks, each representing a victory of hype over health. Foremost among these were filter-tipped cigarettes in the 1950s, and low tar and nicotine cigarettes from the late 1960s onward, each marketed as healthier alternatives to conventional cigarettes. In both instances, the new products served as a financial godsend for the tobacco industry while providing only illusory health benefits to their users.⁽¹⁵⁾ From the 1960s onward, low tar and low nicotine or "light" cigarettes have been even more widely sold to the public as a reduced harm option for health-conscious smokers reluctant to quit. Low tar and nicotine cigarettes could theoretically reduce health risks from smoking if smokers did not act in various ways to increase their nicotine dose. However, smokers of such brands have been shown to engage in a variety of conscious and subconscious com-pensatory behaviors to ensure that their intake of nicotine at intervals throughout the day remains comparable to what they previously were receiving from conventional cigarettes. Unfortunately, such efforts to obtain desired doses of nicotine from low tar and nicotine brands are accompanied by substantially increased intake of tars as well, thus negating any potential health benefits.⁽¹⁰⁾ Lacking this knowledge, many health professionals during the 1970s actively encouraged smokers to switch from conventional cigarettes to the supposedly "safer" low tar and nicotine brands. As a result, it is not surprising that low tar and nicotine cigarette brands managed to capture a majority of the market by 1981

Nevertheless, the tobacco industry did devote considerable time and resources towards developing a truly "safer cigarette." As such, the ongoing release to the public of previously hidden research documents (as a result of the Minnesota settlement and other public health victories), provides a unique scientific opportunity. Insights gleaned from conducting a type of "secondary analysis" with these documents could potentially inform current and future tobacco-related research in this area.