THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509020001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
When ABC News apologized for saying Philip Morris ``spiked'' cigarettes by adding extra nicotine, the tobacco company responded with a media offensive. Full-page newspaper and magazine ads containing the correction pictured the company as aggrieved but generous, willing to forgive all critics having a ``sincere interest in the truth'' about the tobacco industry. Is there some glibness mixed with the glee?
The industry is embattled by injury suits and fearful of regulation, and has a natural desire to magnify any factual point in its favor. Philip Morris asserts that ``its finished cigarettes contain less nicotine than is found in the natural tobacco from which they are made.'' But ABC stands by what it calls the ``principal focus'' of its reports - ``whether tobacco companies use the reconstituted tobacco process to control the levels of nicotine in order to keep people smoking.''
On this point, the Food and Drug Administration has said: ``Cigarettes are not simply cut tobacco rolled into a paper tube. Modern cigarettes, as sold in the United States, are painstakingly designed and manufactured to control the amount of nicotine delivered to the smoker.''
That sounds right. As the industry notes, tobacco is a lawful product: Wouldn't it make sense for the industry to make the product as pleasing as possible? If cigarette companies can't or don't control nicotine content, how are they able to print on packages the nicotine yield of the cigarettes within? Who knows? One seldom, if ever, sees any ads about how cigarettes are made.
At this point, one wonders what the ad barrage is all about - beyond, that is, the point that Philip Morris doesn't add nicotine from outside sources to tobacco that has enough nicotine to begin with. Facts are important, of course. A juror's or legislator's belief that a tobacco company was deliberately increasing the amount of an addictive poison in a product could alter consequences. There's no question that Philip Morris scored against ABC News.
But the ads go on to paint the industry as victim of charges deserving far more scrutiny and skepticism than they get. Maybe. But the industry already is a big beneficiary of doubt.
How many other products bearing the surgeon general's warnings that cigarettes cause cancer, emphysema and heart disease have a choice spot at the grocer's checkout counter? The warnings hardly seem to matter. Lonnie Bristow, president of the American Medical Association, says the industry has ``30 years of blowing smoke in the eyes of the American public and the scientific community.'' When seven industry leaders denied in congressional testimony that their products are addictive or cause cancer, nobody laughed.
The industry is favored by addiction to a drug that is regulated if put in a patch to curb the habit, but not regulated in cigarettes that form the habit in the first place. This makes the government complicit in the hooking of new customers.
Facts about methods and motives involved in manufacture of tobacco products are best known to the manufacturers and recorded in files which, if released, would protect the industry against unwarranted suspicion against which Philip Morris, in the name of truth, appeals. Some of the truth about use of tobacco products is written on tombstones, surgical records, nursing-home rolls and in the cost of health care paid by employers and by taxpayers in general.
However pure the motives of tobacco companies, it would be good to discourage millions of teenagers from lighting up and getting hooked. The Clinton administration deserves credit, against the odds, for its efforts to achieve that end. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB