fire-safe cigarettes & nicotine
Topics: Safety
27 Mar 1994
From: ervan
One of the pieces on 60 Minutes tonight was about fires caused by cigarettes
(and the people at the Consumer Product Safety Commisssion salivating at the
prospect of regulating them). The study group they interviewed said that
fire safe cigarettes were technically possible (based on low porosity paper
and certain tobacco packing densities). The debate was over how (and not
should) to force tobacco companies to switch.
My first reaction is the same as in the case of second hand smoke, why not
allow smokeless cigarettes? But no, we have the FDA looking out for us,
making the same mistake repeatadly, denying useful products because they are
not perfect. Smokeless cigarettes that could save lives of non-smokers are
denied because nicotine is a drug, duh. Useful drugs are prevented from
making it to the market or allowed to enter later, causing needless deaths
in the interim, because there may be some risk.
The interesting question is why don't the tobacco companies switch on their
own? The official theory is that people don't like fire-safe cigarettes
because of the way they draw. If that's true, we can put kill switches in
cars to kill the engines when they go over 55 at the same time we mandate
fire-safe cigarettes. A more intriguing theory was that the tobacco
companies cannot advertise a fire-safe cigarette because that would be
admitting the previous ones are not fire-safe and thus open them to
liability. Here is a case where liability in the interest of safety, but
premised on the notion of no individual responsibility, has made us far less
safe. Anyone who falls asleep with a burning object in their hand is
responsible, not the paper manufacturer, not the lighter manufacturer, not
the oil company that distilled the butane, and not the tobacco company that
rolled it up. Ignoring personal responsibility (even for 'noble' causes)
does not work to make us safer.
---------
On a related note, I see that David Kessler, head of the FDA, is trying to
prove that tobacco companies are adding nicotine to cigarettes. If they
were, then cigarettes would be legally a drug and Kessler could have them
banned (or at least relegated to prescription only). That the law works
this way is silly but that's not the point. First, nicotine levels have
been dropping so the claim is baseless. But the question is: so what if
tobacco companies were adding nicotine? That would a *good* thing, for lots
of reasons:
1) Smokers smoke for nicotine. More (artificial) nicotine means less tar
and less lung cancer.
2) Similarly, it means less second hand smoke.
3) It would free tobacco companies to create interesting new kinds of
cigarettes instead of being tied to tobacco. ;-)
Consider alcohol. Kessler's thinking is tantamount to saying that people
drink as many ounces of whiskey as they would beer and if we ban whiskey
drinking will decrease 80 proof / 5% = 8 fold among liquor drinkers
(actually there is tendancy to drink a little more with hard liquor because
of delayed effects but this is not much of an issue with smoking where the
effects are very quick). As a separate flaw, the reasoning he starts out
with is that distilling wine creates a fundamentally different product than
wine itself (in fairness to the man, the law only works to his advantage if
he adopts such a cockeyed view).
On the matter of a wholesale ban, George Will (who is consistently opposed
to drug legalization) said today that banning cigarettes would create a
black market nightmare. There may be hope yet...
---Ervan
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