THE FILTER-TIP FRAUD
Norr, Roy
The Filter-Tip Fraud by ROY NORR CIGARETTE propagandists—and their allies of the press—profess to see the rosy glow of health returning to the industry's cheeks. Addicts who quit the weed on...
...Address Roy Norr, 993 Park Ave., New York 28, N.Y...
...No reference to filtration as diminishing the risk of smoker's cancer or heart disease...
...It is all quite unnecessary, because of the background built up in the previous campaigns...
...Filter tip sales have had a phenomenal rise, from a two per cent sales volume a few years ago to more than 30 per cent last year...
...With the smoker thus brainwashed, all that was needed in the succeeding campaign was to keep repeating "real filtration" or "effective filtration" to give him the illusion that he would be effectively protected from the lethal products of tobacco smoke...
...Thereupon the Pure Food and Drug Administration clamped down on the manufacturers and forced them to label their products with a statement of the salt percentage claimed...
...It could be said, with greater truth, that the cheek, turned largely to Wall Street, is not really healthily pink, but heavily rouged...
...Filters out so much harmful smoke that it also filters out the worry in every puff...
...The mess is pulverized, mixed with a gluey substance, and rolled out in continuous sheets—to take the place of "golden, sun-ripened tobacco leaves...
...Filter tips are for oldsters and scared smokers...
...and that the death rate from all causes, including coronary thrombosis, is higher among cigarette smokers than among men who never smoked...
...There the main drive is the use of living testimonials —tainted testimonials—on the air, to entice boys and girls into early smoking habits, to teach them to take their smoking "straight," like whiskey on the rocks...
...Louis, notable for his studies of smoking and cancer, has declared: "In my opinion the only good filter is one that won't let any smoke come through...
...Self-filtering action...
...The girl who is handed a lighted cigarette by her escort more often than not is clearly a bobbysoxer...
...Smokers have discovered that they can combine fun with cancer—after all, you can smoke your head off for 15, 20, 30 years before the lethal effects of lung cancer strike you...
...Youth's baseball heroes recite their cigarette commercials as if smoking by the carton helped them hit home-runs...
...that the excess lung cancer risk among cigarette smokers, demonstrated in special study groups, occurs in the total population as well...
...And not every relentless smoker dies of this atrocious disease...
...The magazine advertisements showing an eager crowd shouting its admiration for a new brand display in the forefront a generous sprinkling of boys and girls of pre-high school age...
...All that is glamorous on stage and screen is used by the cigarette advertiser to establish the feeling that smoking means manliness for boys, sophistication for girls...
...Effective filtration...
...Nevertheless, truly merciless and harmful are some of the insidious campaigns now being carried on to bring back the properly scared smoker into the narcotic net...
...Irving S. Wright, a former president of the American Heart Association, cites how a victim of Buerger's disease, in which tobacco is taboo, lured back by the advertising of a popular filter to smoke again, suffered a severe recurrence of the disease...
...Note the gentle way in which a tobacco reporter chronicles the new development: "Cigarette manufacturers have discovered that a darker, heavier-bodied, and stronger leaf is best for filter cigarettes...
...Anything will do—a dab of cotton, a bit of cellulose, a few shreds of mineral matter—just so it combines "filtration" with tasty nicotine and tars too...
...But cigarette advertising directed to the teenage market is another matter...
...It is clear that the filter tip gimmick has proved a definite factor in halting declining sales...
...No other filter tip takes out so much nicotine and tars...
...Here, where the cigarette industry is doing its dismal best to downgrade true filtering action, what you see on television, hear on the radio, and read in the press, in the blitzkrieg conducted by the cigarette huckster, is this: "High filtration to help you keep your smoking moderate...
...But on your television screen, young, smiling flyers are made to drool over the "pickup" and comfort they get from cigarettes...
...No advertising hoax in the unwholesome puffery of cigarette advertising is so laden with evil promise for the health of the nation...
...To make more certain that the scared smoker will remain addicted after he has returned to the fold, manufacturers are using increasing amounts of cheaper, coarser tobaccos for their filter tip brands...
...Also added to the woes of the tobacco grower—and to the smoker's health danger—is "homogenized" tobacco, made of stems, damaged leaves, and other forms of refuse...
...A few years ago food processors jumped into the field with "sodium-low," "salt-free," and similar diets, to take advantage of the medical campaign conducted against high-salt diets in many conditions of heart and vascular disease...
...The survey, conducted by 20,000 voluntary workers, involved interviews with 193,000 individuals...
...Grace M. Roth, of the Mayo Foundation, has reported: "Whether the tobacco is "denicotinized' or whether the tobacco originally is low in nicotine, apparently the content of the nicotine in the cigarette must be decreased more than 60 per cent before the vascular effects of smoking fail to appear or are only slight...
...Alton Ochsner, head of the famous Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, asked as to whether filters help, said, "Yes—to sell cigarettes...
...It made us a nation of sneezers, snifflers, coughers, spitters —and the greatest consumers of tobacco products in the world...
...Real filtration...
...Nothing less can protect the health of America from the great hoax of filter tip advertising...
...Paul Dudley White, President Eisenhower's heart consultant, says unhesitatingly: "Tobacco is a noxious weed and an unnecessary source of irritation to people's stomachs, lungs, blood pressure, and cardiac rhythm...
...It was soon discovered that "sodium-low" did not necessarily mean diets sufficiently low in'salt for therapeutic requirements, that "salt-free" did not always mean free from all salt...
...Not even a mention of nicotine and tars by the big cigarette advertisers...
...What the Big Five in the industry are trying to do is produce not the best, but the worst possible filters, so that "the real tobacco flavor" might come through like thunder...
...Rouged by the huckster who cries "big, BIG pleasure," as the cigarette ads have it, if you smoke 'em kingsize...
...In Sweden tobacco advertising has been completely banned, because of the alarming increase of cigarette smoking among teenagers...
...If 20,000,000 or more smokers are now reaching for the proferred "health protection" of filter tip cigarettes, of king-size filters, of filters that filter the filtering action of long cigarettes, it is also true that mote and more smokers are becoming increasingly conscious of the deadly health risks they may be undertaking...
...Cigarette consumption is approaching the peaks that prevailed five or six years ago, we are told...
...Growers who for years have been encouraged to produce a mild, light-bodied leaf for regular cigarettes have been left holding the bag...
...Evarts A. Graham of St...
...But stranger than fiction of filter tip advertising is the truth about filter tips, from the medical standpoint...
...Tobacco is medically recognized as a vicious drug, but a drug is not a drug if it is not listed in the United States Pharmacoepia, from which listing it disappeared in mysterious circumstances when the Pure Food and Drug Act was about to be enacted...
...Smokers yearning for the assurance that smoking has been made "safe" or "safer" are liable to respond to the slick advertising for these cigarettes...
...To date, eighteen great studies here and abroad all point inexorably to intemperate smoking as a possible, probable, or established factor in the epidemic rise of lung cancer—"the most anguished of all forms of life"— and few heart specialists doubt its association with the terrible toll taken by certain forms of heart disease, the greatest killer of our time...
...The six largest cigarette manufacturers are now beating the drums for fourteen different brands of filter cigarettes...
...It is hard to tell whether 20,000 filters—count 'em—in a single cigarette act as filters, or funnels to let the poisonous vapors come through more easily...
...There is a far more compelling reason that filter tip cigarettes should be properly labeled with reference to their content of nicotine and tars...
...To all of this a new element has recently been added: teenage characters on television and teenagers featured in illustrations for cigarette advertisements...
...The latest phenomenon in the filter tip field bears the slogan, "Your taste can't tell the filter's there...
...No claim of what filters filter out...
...In recognition of its great responsibility to the public interest, the new commercial television system recently set up in England refuses to accept cigarette advertising—a fact first reported in this country in my "Norr Newsletter about Smoking and Health...
...that there is a causal relationship between excessive cigarette smoking and other forms of this dread disease...
...The eminent Dr...
...Army and Navy pilots have recently been warned that carbon monoxide, absorbed from cigarette smoke, is dangerous in altitude and night flying...
...But what the cigarette peddlers never mention is the fact that even if cigarette sales reach the 1952 volume, it is largely because 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 new smokers have been added to the industry's rosters—teenagers mostly, seduced by every device the cigarette pusher can command to take the first steps toward addiction...
...His articles on cigarette smoking have appeared in the Christian Herald and the Reader's Digest...
...On the filter tip front, at least, an excellent precedent exists for a public-spirited campaign in Congress and state legislatures which could entirely reverse the present trend towards filter-faking...
...His "Cancer by the Carton" in the latter publication has been widely circulated...
...Yet salt is neither the poisonous alkaloid that is nicotine nor the equally noxious substance that is tobacco tar...
...What can be done...
...Get 'em young to keep them," an admiring advertising columnist writes about such campaigns...
...Legislative action, therefore, is required to give the Pure Food and Drug Administration authority over cigarettes...
...It's a fascinating story of advertising success...
...Some flavor apparently is lost as the smoke passes through the filter...
...It is now announced that the fourth and final mass study in the survey begun by the American Cancer Society will confirm the association of smoking and lung cancer...
...For the greatest health protection in cigarette history...
...A far cry, one might say, from the days when white-coated phonies touted cigarettes as a gargle for sore throat, good for the digestion, better for the nerves, an energy builder for athletics...
...The weight of evidence," it was stated in a report made this summer by the government's National Cancer Institute, "favors the conclusion ROY NORR has devoted many years to conducting research into medical literature here and abroad...
...Copies of this article may be obtained from the author, at 10 for $1 or 100 for $4...
...Remember the bellowing air commercials...
...Addicts who quit the weed on doctor's orders apparently have returned to their diet of nicotine and tars...
...From the standpoint of effectiveness, Dr...
...The laboratory of the American Medical Association has found more nicotine in some filter tips than in regular cigarettes...
...The trend to big economy-size sales of nicotine and tars has led to an almost lunatic form of advertising...
Vol. 20 • December 1956 • No. 12
