Study: Big Tobacco Avoids Ban

According to a new study released by the Harvard School of Public Health, tobacco companies have circumvented the Federal Drug Administration’s ban on the use of words which misleadingly indicate reduced risk in the marketing of cigarettes.

The study, which appears in the March issue of the journal Tobacco Control, asserts that tobacco companies have continued to implicitly market certain cigarettes as “light” or “mild” by using colored packages recognizable to smokers.

The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act made illegal the common practice among tobacco companies of giving “light” and “ulra-light” designations to cigarettes which allowed air to mix with smoke before being inhaled.

The 2007 Supreme Court case Philip Morris USA, Inc. vs. Williams declared that these cigarettes were no less harmful than their “full-bodied” alternatives because smokers overcompensated by smoking these cigarettes more frequently and more intensely.

HSPH professor Gregory N. Connolly, the director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control and the study’s lead author, called the outlawed practice the “deadliest consumer fraud in United States history.”

Philip Morris issued labels on Marlboro light packages before the law, which would make “light” cigarettes indistinguishable from the rest of the company’s brands, took effect in 2009.

The labels, printed in all capital letters, read “Your Marlboro Lights Pack is changing / But your cigarette stays the same / In the future, ask for ‘Marlboro in the Gold Pack.’”

Phillip Morris and other cigarette manufacturers changed the color-coding of their packages without waiting for the required consent of the Food and Drug Administration.

For example, Marlboro “light” cigarettes were given gold packaging, and “basic ultra-light” cigarettes could be found in blue and “mediums” in red.

Connolly argued that this problem is endemic in the tobacco industry.

He said the FDA currently holds thousands of “substantial equivalency” requests, in which tobacco companies claim that the new color-coding does not constitute a new product, allowing them to be released without premarket testing by the FDA.

However, Connolly stated that these products are already illegally being sold.

“The FDA is sitting on 3,362 applications from tobacco companies for substantial equivalency and not one of them has been reconciled,” Connolly said.

Connolly intends to petition the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office as well as the FDA and members of Congress with his findings.

The legal thrust of Connolly’s petitions will focus on the tobacco company’s violation of the “substantial equivalency” section of FSPTCA.

Connolly said that the publication of his study will lend salience to his petitions. Representatives from Philip Morris declined to comment for this article.