HOW COULD CIGARETTES BE REGULATED [05/05]

Every since a hand-picked tobacco-stained federal judge in North Carolina confirmed that the Food and Drug Administration had jusisdiction over cigarettes, the industry has been very worried about what kinds of additional regulations are possible.

Indeed, this worry is one of the two major factors behind their despiration to negotiate a deal.

Here are some ideas of what might be possible in the future, all excerpts from a New York Times article entitled: "F.D.A. Taking Cautious Path In Its Regulation of Tobacco":

When a Federal judge in North Carolina declared last week that the Food and Drug Administration could regulate nicotine as a drug, he opened the way for tobacco foes to realize a once-distant dream -- a world where cigarettes could be so radically altered that the whole country, in the words of one addiction expert, "would become detoxified."

Dr. Kessler and other public health advocates envision a day when regulators might take full advantage of the power the judge bestowed upon them, perhaps using it to force a drastic redesign in cigarettes. If the decision stands, as many legal experts predict, the potential for Government intervention would be vast -- and far more damaging to the tobacco industry than the marketing and advertising restrictions the judge struck down.

Over time, for example, the agency could force cigarette makers to submit detailed information, of the sort drug companies must produce, and demand that the ingredients of cigarettes be listed on the packages.

It could order that certain ingredients be removed. High on the list might be ammonia, which the tobacco industry calls an "impact booster" for its ability to enhance the delivery of nicotine to the smoker.

Or it could require the manufacturers to reduce the level of nicotine in cigarettes, in effect weaning the smoking public. Under such a plan, said Neal Benowitz, a tobacco researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, cigarettes would become little more than props, "something to share with friends, or have in your hand or mouth."

The concept that nicotine in cigarettes could be gradually reduced is not new; in 1994, Dr. Benowitz, the San Francisco researcher, advocated it in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine. With Jack E. Henningfield, an addiction expert who helped edit the 1988 Surgeon General's report on nicotine addiction, he suggested that over 10 to 15 years the levels of nicotine in cigarettes could be cut to a point where smoking was no longer addictive.

The idea came from his studies of "chippers" -- people who, in the argot of heroin addiction, can indulge occasionally without becoming addicted. Dr. Benowitz said cigarette chippers typically consumed 5 milligrams of nicotine a day; the average smoker, by contrast, takes in about 4 times that much.

If cigarettes could be altered so that most beginning smokers took in only 5 milligrams of nicotine a day in as many as 30 cigarettes, he reasoned, most people could smoke without becoming addicted.

At the University of Pittsburgh, for instance, a professor of psychiatry, Kenneth Perkins, is examining the threshold at which smokers and non-smokers become sensitive to the mood-altering effects of nicotine. That work could help determine a non-addictive dose for cigarettes.

The industry's own research may also yield clues. The 22 state attorneys general who are suing the cigarette manufacturers for reimbursement of the Medicaid costs of treating the smokers' illnesses requested millions of pages of internal industry documents that could shed light on what happens to smokers when the ingredients in cigarettes are changed.

The negotiations to settle those lawsuits could determine the Food and Drug Administration's future power to control tobacco. After Judge Osteen's ruling, the anti-smoking forces insist they will not accept any settlement that bargains away the agency's right to classify nicotine as a drug.

ACTION ON SMOKING AND HEALTH (ASH) A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Your Tax-Deductible Contributions NOW CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF PUBLIC SERVICE 2013 H Street, NW / Washington, DC 20006 / (202) 659-4310