I would like to make a point about your proposal to measure content. 
I have heard that a number of times today, and we have to remember that 
people do not eat cigarettes; they smoke cigarettes. And there is no 
indication that people obtain the amount of nicotine that is contained 
in a cigarette. 
DR. HENNINGFIELD: On content, I think that the most important thing 
is bioavailability tests. Again, that is the gold standard: what people are 
likely to get and generally under maximum conditions. The importance 
of content, though, is that content limits the amount of nicotine that you 
can get. If it is not there, you cannot get it. 
DR. DEBETHIZY: I think the important thing is the FTC method is set up to 
provide relative ranking, so that consumers can get an idea of what different 
cigarettes will yield. It was not intended to measure uptake. 
Now, if you want to measure uptake and evaluate the FTC method, 
that is a different activity, and I think that we need to make sure that we 
distinguish those two activities. One is to provide a relative ranking. The 
FTC method has done an excellent job of that over the years. 
DR. HENNINGFIELD: I am not addressing the method, but I think it is pretti- 
clear that it has not done a good job of telling people what they will have in 
their bloodstream. And that is what I am addressing: that what people get 
in their bloodstream does not bear much relation to the FTC yields. So, I am 
not sure how much use that has been. 
DR. HARRIS: I see the dispute as distinguishing between an ordinal ranking 
and a cardinal ranking. An ordinal ranking merely says one brand, to some 
degree, delivers more or less nicotine than another; whereas, a cardinal 
ranking would say, this brand delivers one-fifth as much or five times as 
much. 
And what I understand the dispute to be about is that the FTC ranking 
actually may preserve an ordinal ranking in the roughest sense, but it does 
not preserve the cardinal ranking. From what I can gather, a 10-percent 
increase in FTC nicotine corresponds with, at most, about a 2-percent 
increase in blood nicotine, roughly speaking, and that that is where the 
problem lies. 
DR. HENNINGFIELD: It is not even that good, because if the slope were 
constant, you could maybe say there is an ordinal ranking. That still may 
not tell you if it is meaningful if it was so trivial. But what Dr. Benowitz 
showed was if there is a break. 
In other words, at the ultralow end, those cigarettes are in a slightly 
different category. From the data I have seen, it is not even a meaningful 
ordinal ranking. It is a pretty flat ranking. The slope is, I would contend 
until proven otherwise, biologically trivial. 
