Historical perspective: the low tar lie
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
There's an old adage which says, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." There is no product to which this adage applies more than to cigarettes. Although the public may believe that the major change in terms of cigarette design over the past 40 years has been the reduction of risk posed by low tar filter cigarettes, cigarettes today are just as deadly as they were back in the 1950s, and perhaps even more so.1 Why is there this disparity between consumer belief and harsh reality?
When the first scientific studies were published in the early
1950s linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer, the tobacco industry
introduced and widely promoted filtered cigarettes. In fact cigarette
ads at that time blatantly stated that filtered cigarettes were in fact
safe.2 Filters, they claimed, greatly reduced the toxins
that made non-filtered cigarettes so harmful. In their effort to
convince the public
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