Dark clouds hung over smoking as a likely risky activity long before the watershed case control studies on smoking and lung cancer were published in 1950 by Doll and Hill (on British smokers) and Wynder and Graham (on American smokers).
Early last century Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the boy scouts movement wrotewith sexist prescience:
When a lad smokes before he is fully grown up it is almost sure to make his heart feeble, and the heart is the most important organ in a lad’s body.
Popular expressions such as “smoking stunts your growth” derive from that period.
The commonplace of smokers’ cough had always quietly worried people that filling their lungs with smoke some twelve times per cigarette, sometimes up to 60 cigarettes a day, every day of the year for many years might be a problem.
As far back as the 1920s, Lucky Strike advertised that it was “less irritating” to the throat.
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Following a series of widely read articles in the Readers’ Digest on cancer and smoking, filters on cigarettes first began being introduced in the late 1940s and were accompanied by uninhibited claims about risk reduction (“L&M filters are just what the doctor ordered!”). The goal was smoker reassurance. This was the start of a global industry program designed to keep anxious smokers from quitting – and it continues today.
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The most outrageous innovation in tobacco harm-reduction was Kent’s micronite filter, which used deadly blue asbestos (crocidolite) between 1952-56 in the United States (see the Kent micronite filter advertisement below).
Decades of litigation followed, with the most recent in Florida with US$3.5m awarded against the manufacturers. I’ve found evidence that Kent with the micronite filter was sold in Australia in 1961, although we don’t know if it still contained asbestos.
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An unforgettable demonstration of what gets through cigarette filters can be seen here. Mike Atrix, filming in Sydney, compares the brown stains exhaled into a tissue paper from holding the cigarette smoke in his mouth and also after exhaling it after pulling it into his lungs.
Two things are very obvious: the filter on the cigarette allows obvious quantities of particulate matter (“tar”) through and into the lungs, and the lungs retain considerable amounts of these toxic particles when the smoker exhales.
But the mass migration to filtered cigarettes did nothing to prevent a progressive increase in lung cancer risk among male smokers who began smoking during and after the second world war compared to the first world war-era smokers. A critical review of the evidencethat so-called reduced-risk cigarettes lowered tobacco-caused death rates concluded:
that lung cancer risk continued to increase among older smokers from the 1950s to the 1980s, despite the widespread adoption of lower yield cigarettes.
The change to filter tip products did not prevent a progressive increase in lung cancer risk among male smokers who began smoking during and after the second world war compared to the first world war era smokers…
No studies have adequately assessed whether health claims used to market “reduced yield” cigarettes delay cessation among smokers who might otherwise quit, or increase initiation among non-smokers.
There is no convincing evidence that past changes in cigarette design have resulted in an important health benefit to either smokers or the whole population.
Tobacco control policies should not allow changes in cigarette design to subvert or distract from interventions proven to reduce the prevalence, intensity, and duration of smoking.
Between 1968 and 1980, the US National Cancer Institute invested more than $US50m into research on less hazardous cigarettes. But by 2001, it had concluded that there was no evidence that smokers switching to so-called less hazardous cigarettes (lights and milds) had a lower rates of disease or death.