590 



Mr. Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Johnston. At the request, I gather, 

 of the witnesses, we're going to call on our next speaker, Thomas 

 E. Sandefur, chairman and CEO of Brown and Williamson Tobacco 

 Company, rather than go down the list. Mr. Sandefur? 



TESTIMONY OF THOMAS E. SANDEFUR, JR. 



Mr. Sandefur. Mr. Chairman, I have a short statement to make. 

 It's been given to the subcommittee and to save time, I'll be more 

 than happy to forgo reading that. It's your pleasure. If you want 

 me to read my statement to you, I'll be happy to. 



Mr. Waxman. If you want. It's going to be in the record, so ■ 



Mr. Sandefur. It's in the record. 



Mr. Waxman [continuing]. So if you want to say something oral- 

 ly, do so. If you don't we'll move on to the next witness. We've got 

 a lot scheduled. 



Mr. Sandefur. Fine. Thank you. 



[The prepared statement of Mr. Sandefur follows:] 



Statement of Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive 

 Officer, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation 



Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I appear today on behalf of 

 Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation in response to the chairman's letter of 

 March 31, 1994, to address auestions concerning nicotine in cigarettes that have 

 been raised in recent weeks by FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler and others. 

 This statement supplements the statement submitted by Brown & Williamson in 

 connection with the subcommittee's hearing on March 25, which is part of the record 

 of that hearing. 



The premise of the questions raised by Commissioner Kessler is that nicotine is 

 "addictive." The term addiction" has been used to describe everything from an en- 

 slavement to hard drugs to an inability to lose weight or watch less television, and 

 Surgeon General Koop himself proclaimed in 1982 that children were "addicted" to 

 video games. In view of the radical differences between tobacco and hard dinigs in 

 their effects on behavior and the symptoms associated with quitting, and in view 

 of the fact that more than half of all Americans alive who have ever smoked have 

 quit^-over 90 percent without professional help — equating cigarettes and hard drugs 

 is nothing more than rhetoric. 



Initially, in his letter of February 25, 1994, Dr. Kessler suggested that cigai-ette 

 manufacturers "commonly add nicotine to cigarettes to deliver specific amounts of 

 nicotine." Brown & Williamson has never done that, as we demonstrated in our sub- 

 mission to this subcommittee in connection with its March 25 hearing. Dr. Kessler 

 mentioned a number of patents in his testimony on March 25, including some that 

 have been secured by Brown & Williamson. I can state categorically that Brown & 

 Williamson does not utilize, and has never utilized, any of tliese patents to control 

 the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. As Brown & Williamson explained, moreover, 

 "the nicotine content of B&W cigarettes is lower than the nicotine content of the 

 tobacco used to produce them." According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 

 the average nicotine delivery dropped from 2 milligrams to 0.9 milligrams between 

 1955 and 1987. 



After the submissions by Brown & Williamson and the other manufacturers, Dr. 

 Kessler, in his testimony on March 25, retreated to the suggestion that the cigarette 

 manufacturers' failure to use the technology supposedly at their disposal to elimi- 

 nate nicotine from cigarettes suggests that they may intend it to satisfy an addic- 

 tion. This, too, is incorrect. 



Without nicotine, you don't have tobacco. Without nicotine, cigarettes simply 

 would not taste like cigarettes. The experience of another manufacturer indicates 

 that consumers will not accept a cigarette without nicotine. Calls for legislation to 

 eliminate nicotine amount to a call to ban cigarettes — not because the substance 

 that allegedly satisfies an "addiction" would be removed, but because the resulting 

 product would taste nothing like a cigarette. We offer a range of products with a 

 range of nicotine deliveries and the consumer makes the choice. 



We also vigorously dispute the suggestion of Dr. Kessler and Dr. Slade that the 

 "tar" and nicotine ratings produced using the FTC test method are meaningless or 

 misleading. The cigarette manufacturers nave never suggested that these ratings re- 



