Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 7 
DR. COHEN: I appreciate your position, though I think we are talking about 
different issues here. I am talking about the utility of this information 
presented in this form as numbers. I am not talking about the utility of 
providing information about tar. 
MS. WILKENFELD: 1 do want to add one thing to the mix to make it more 
complicated. You said they had to tell you the name of the cigarette they 
were smoking. And in order to get the actual tar number, they would have 
had to report specifically about the category, for example, Marlboro and 
Marlboro Lights. So, they may have reported correctly. 
DR. KOZLOWSKI: I have found out that a lot of people in the United States 
who do not smoke somehow have the impression that tar and nicotine 
ratings are printed on the packs of cigarettes. They are in some places, for 
example, in Canada, but not in the United States. I think the one notable 
exception is the ultralow-tar cigarettes. You know, when you test Carlton 
as low as 1 mg tar, they are right on the pack. 
If it is not on packs, if a brand is not advertised, or a person does not see 
an ad, how in the world would they know what the tar and nicotine yields 
were? 
DR. COHEN: I think there is a fundamental problem. I do not think the scale 
has integrity. We had a scale that goes from 1 to 27. People don't care about j| 
tar; they don't know what it is. They care about harmfulness; they care about || 
smoking risk. r 
If you don't present information to people along a dimension that they 
care about, they are not going to pay as much attention to it. And if you 
don't present information to people in a way so that they know how to 
use it, where the numbers have some meaningful quality, they will not pay 
attention to it. Then people are not going to be able to do as much with it. 
1 think there is a fundamental problem with providing information. 
It may be the wrong information presented the wrong way. Other than 
that, it is OK. 
REFERENCE 
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cigarette 
smoking among adults — United States, 1992, and 
changes in the definition of current cigarette 
smoking. MMWR. Murbiclity and Mortality Weekly 
Report 4:i(\9): M2-.i46, 1994. 
i:i4 
