Smokers face 'low tar' con trick

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Air enters the grooves in the filer and dilutes the ciga smoke. But smokers tend to crush the grooves, stopping th getting in. Result: machine detects 1 milligramme of tar per rette. Smoker breathes up to 7 milligrames of tar per cigarette. NO serious scientific opinion still resists the evidence that tobacco-smoking causes ill health on a colossal scale. Even the tobacco companies implicitly agree, boosting first filter-tipped fags, then 'Low Tar' and now 'Ultra-Low Tar' ciggies.

• The case against tobacco presents the government with a dilemma. They are supposed to have our interests at heart (particularly our health), but they also reap an enormous tax harvest on tobacco sales, which neither Tory nor Labour governments have been keen to lose. In addition, tobacco firms are strong supporters of the Tories.

Question: How can governments solve this dilemma?

Answer: By promoting 'safer' cigarettes - the Low Tar brands.

Supplementary Question: Are Low Tar cigarettes really safer?

Readers can probably guess the answer to this question, but let's look at the evidence.

Firstly, what are the Tar Ratings and how are they arrived at?

• Both in the us and Britain, official bodies the . Hederal Trade Commission (TC, and the Government Chemist) test cigarettes, using a standard smoking machine.

This takes a puff of 35 cubic centimetres of smoke (about a mouthful) in 2 seconds, once a minute. The smoke goes through a filter which collects the tar. When the cigarette has been smoked down to a standard butt, the amount of tar is measured. Nicotine content can also be measured, if desired.

According to the amount of tar collected, cigarette "brands are classified as High, Middle or Low Tar and the brands are ranked in the Tar Tables. Over the last decade or so, tobacco companies have switched from Higher to Lower tar tobacco, a me endependent Bntain Scientific Committee of Smoking and Health (ISCSH). The ISCSH preferred to use the industry's advertising machinery to switch people to 'safer' cigarettes than to try to get people to stop smoking.

The switch to Lower tar would perhaps have cut the health risks if people smoked like machines. Unfortunately, they don't! They take different length puffs, hold the filter further in or out of their mouths, breathe in more or less vigorously. Already, there is evidence that people smoke more of a Lower tar cigarette to compensate for the milder taste and lesser effect. 'safespite the propaganda about cigarettes and the more and • more ludicrous lengths the industry is going to to get its products across, fewer people are still smoking. In Britain, non-smokers are a majority in all social groups, while there is an even higher proportion of non-smokers in the US.

But the tobacco companies are fighting back. Brown & Williamson, British-American Tobacco's subsidiary, have just spent $150 million launching 'Barclay', the '99% Tar Free' cigarette. FTC tests on the famous smoking machine gave. 'Barclay' a rating comfortably at the bottom of the Tar Tables. 'Barclay' features a unique ventilated filter, the ACTRON' filter (see illustration).

The smoker finds that the smoke is diluted with air entering through holes in the filter and passing through grooves to the mouth. Or rather, this is what the smoking machine finds! Because smokers touch the filters with their lips and fingers, the grooves are often inadvertantly squashed or the airholes blocked.

Tests show that in the real smoking situation, smokers may inhale 7 times or more the claimed amount of tar from 'Barclay' As a result, Brown & Williamson have been accused of deliberately using a gimmick to hoodwink government testers and face a court action in the US for making false claims.

In the face of the unreliability SN SMOKER The "Actron" of the government smoking machines, researchers have developed machines which can be programmed to behave more like real smokers. Most tobacco firms now possess these - BAT's one is called the 'Human Smoking Behavioural Recorder' Made in Britain, it costs about £20000. Unfortunately, neither the DHSS or the Government Chemist have got one yet.

Using such modified machines, researchers have shown that a Low Tar cigarette such as John Player King Size Ultra Mild can be converted by the smoker's behaviour Grooves Damaged grooves filter The "Action" filter into a High Tar cigarette.

Meanwhile, BAT's won't say if they are planning to introduce the 'Barclay' into Britain.

Further Health Risks of Smoking: .. Researchers in (Center for Disease and Emory University of Medicine) report from a study of 374 1 moderate smokers have times greater chance of cervical cancer than smoking women, while smokers have a • 13 greater chance. (All information Scientist.)

eccoco 20008 Send letters to Socialist Organiser 28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than 400 words please: longer letters are liable to be cut. Mair smo AAALA Atlanta Control School that, women, getting nonheavy times DEC WHILE much of the Labe left has moved away for calling for 'Britain out of i= EEC' , the policy still has scee last-ditch defenders. latest Socialist Action carries a centre-page feature by doc= Ross.

The point, according 5 John Ross, is that the inex of the EEC is towards a mabtary Euro-power of capizism, 'armed to the teet Thus we should be for Br.tain out of the EEC' are for 'Britain out of NATO Instead of discussing i actual issue of the EEC. Ross is here discussing something else instead to prop up is position, Straight negation I do as our attitude to a militar link-up like NATO — but the EEC, whatever Ross's speculations, is an economic unit. On the development of monopolies, we do not demand their break-up, but we fight for workers' control and socialism. Against new technology likewise, we propose not old technology but workers' control.

On the same principle, our answer to the EEC's (limited, feeble) integration of European capitalism is not to say 'back to the nation state' , but to fight for Europe-wide workers' unity.

Ross's article denounces support for the EEC, but does not even mention the alternative attitude of neither support for the EEC, nor 'Britain out' , but workers' unity. Perhaps he is unfamiliar with this third position? Not at all; and thereby hangs another tale.

A subsidiary article in SA traces the twists and turns of mainstream Labour on the EEC question. It says nothing about the record of the current represented today by Socialist Action. Yet that current has switched its line (each time without political accounting) three times in recent years.

Ernest Mandel, a leading international co-thinke Socialist Action, published the English edition of his book 'Europe versus America?' in 1970. He wrote: The reader should not deduce that it is in the interest of the European working class to put a brake on the interpenetration of European capital... it would anyway be utopian...

Then the IMG (as it then was): switched to. opposing British entry to the EEC. Around 1972 - under the auspices of none other than John Ross - it switched back again. A year or so later, it came over to its present 'Britain out' stance.

Now comes the cruel twist. Having 'theorised' the 'Britain out' stance, the IMG/ Socialist Action is more stuck