132 



Mr. Waxman. Will you tell us what kind of tests you did on acet- 

 aldehyde and what the graph represents? 



Mr. DeNoble. This work was reasonably late in the development 

 of the acetaldehyde self-administration procedures. We dem- 

 onstrated that acetaldehyde, like nicotine, would maintain behavior 

 and would be reinforcing in rats. 



This particular slide looks at the interactions between acetal- 

 dehyde and nicotine. If you give a rat — if you would focus on the 

 second bar where it has 8.0 and below it there is a zero, that is 

 8 micrograms of nicotine. And that will maintain about 100 injec- 

 tions per day. 



If you go now to the fourth bar, again, the zero and the 8, that 

 is 8 micrograms of acetaldehyde. That maintains, it looks like, 

 around 230, I guess, injections a day. If you now put them together 

 as in the first, third, and the fifth bar, they interact, and the ani- 

 mal presses a lot more than it would have pressed for either one 

 alone. 



This was a demonstration that nicotine and aldehyde combina- 

 tions are more reinforcing than either of the drugs alone. They 

 interact behaviorally. 



Mr. Waxman. That is a significant finding, isn't it? It confirmed 

 that if you have cigarettes, not just with the nicotine but the acet- 

 aldehyde, that it is even more addictive than nicotine by itself, and 

 there is this reinforcement. Is that a correct statement? 



Mr. DeNoble. It leads to some interesting speculations about the 

 role of nicotine and aldehyde in cigarette smoke. Importantly, very 

 importantly, all the work that we did, most, if not all of it has been 

 replicated by other researchers around the world, even though we 

 had not published it. 



This work has never been replicated, so I think we have to look 

 at this as really a scientific inquiry. But it does raise some fas- 

 cinating possibilities. 



Mr. Waxman. Well, it means that even for animal tests, we're 

 looking at the addictive nature of nicotine, that nicotine with acet- 

 aldehyde is even more of a reinforcer, more of an addicting sub- 

 stance, is that in combination? 



Mr. DeNoble. In this experiment, that is correct. 



Mr. Waxman. And Philip Morris, rather than encouraging this 

 kind of finding to be made known to the world, what did they do? 



Mr. DeNoble. This was a very high priority project. We were not 

 allowed to even discuss this outside of the research center. We 

 were permitted to give talks on nicotine, but never on acetal- 

 dehyde. 



Mr. Waxman. And this has never been published before? 



Mr. DeNoble. No, sir. Never. 



Mr. Waxman. I want to leave the area of the work that you did, 

 the two of you, on nicotine and acetaldehyde. I want to ask you 

 about the work of other scientists that you may have observed or 

 known about at Philip Morris. I begin with the dangers of exposure 

 to environmental tobacco smoke. 



As you may know, the entire tobacco industry, including Philip 

 Morris, maintains that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke is 

 not a health risk. Dr. DeNoble, while you were at Philip Morris, 

 was anyone conducting research on the effects of exposure to envi- 



