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various tobacco -derived components and additives including 

 sugars, as well as its paper, filter, and tipping paper are 

 precisely designed to work as a unit to produce controlled doses 

 of an acidic, nicotine -laden smoke for inhalation into the lungs. 

 The cigarette is engineered to deliver carefully controlled doses 

 of nicotine to the smoker's brain. 



The FTC Method Test and Sales Weighted Nicotine Deliveries 



In the mid-1960s, the Federal Trade Commission began to test 

 cigarettes offered for sale in the United States with machine- 

 based measurements. The test parameters, codified in 1969, were 

 derived from some first used in the 1930s by workers at the 

 American Tobacco Company (Slade, 1993). In the standard test, a 

 35 ml puff is taken over 2 seconds once a minute until the 

 cigarette is reduced to a certain specified butt length. The 

 results are expressed (in milligrams) as the amounts of nicotine, 

 particulate matter minus nicotine and water ("tar"), and 

 (recently) carbon monoxide that appear in the mainstream smoke 

 generated by the series of 35 ml puffs.^ 



The test has been done consistently on all cigarette brands 

 in wide distribution since 1968, initially by the FTC and 

 recently through, the Tobacco Institute., These results, combined 

 with brand specific sales data for each year, have permitted the 



^ The test results are not enforceable standards. That is, 

 there is no requirement that cigarettes brands actually provide 

 the tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide deliveries measured in the 

 samples of the products tested. 



