Editor,—Lisa Bero’s review of the above report1 is generous, but contains, apart from a number of minor inaccuracies, two specific points which we think should be challenged.

(1) “More documentation of the futile search for a ‘safer’ cigarette”. The reviewer makes much of the fact that “internal tobacco company research . . . had already demonstrated by the early 1980s that the production of a safer cigarette was not feasible for a variety of practical and legal reasons.” However this view was never apparent to the trust and only came into the public domain in the mid-1990s, when the trust’s programme was terminating, with the delving into the Brown and Williamson papers.2 She also discounts the points that (a) the search for a “safer” cigarette (after the collapse of tobacco substitutes) by “product modification” required properly funded and planned studies to monitor the …