Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 7 
Smokers can block the vents inadvertently if they do not know where the 
vents are and what they do. If smokers know where the vents are located, 
they can decide to avoid blocking the vents. There are real questions about 
who is most advantaged by laser techniques and invisible perforations. 
Marlboro Lights, Winston Lights, Camel Lights, and Newport Lights 
("lights" in general) are ventilated-filter cigarettes. Much of the focus of 
research has been on the ultralight cigarettes of 5 mg of tar or less. Unlike 
the ultralights, these light cigarettes are best sellers, but like the ultralights, 
they are ventilated-filter cigarettes. Therefore, the principle of informing the 
consumer that these are ventilated cigarettes, discussing how the vents work, 
and warning about blocking the vents with the fingers or lips is relevant to 
lights as well as ultralights. 
Anyone who is skeptical about vent blocking of ultralow-yield cigarettes 
should take the lowest tar challenge: Light a 1-mg tar cigarette, placing your 
lips on the filter as close to the smoker end as possible. Keep your fingers off 
the filter so your fingers do not get in the way (i.e., do not block the vents 
with your fingers) and take a puff. Consider its taste, temperature, and feel. 
Now put your lips at least three-quarters of the way to the tobacco column 
(i.e., block the vents with your lips) and take another puff of similar size. 
(In our butt collection studies [Kozlowski et al., 1988 and 1994], we regularly 
have found lipstick stains beyond the filter vents, on the filter end of the 
cigarette, showing how far the cigarette had been put into the mouth.) 
Compare the second puff to the first. See for yourself how easy it is to block 
the vents and how much difference it makes to real tobacco pleasure by 
doing this. Those onlookers who prefer not to take a puff of cigarette smoke 
can usually see the difference in the smoke that is exhaled by someone else 
because blocked vents produce a "juicy" mouthful of smoke that billows out 
from a noninhaled puff of smoke. With unblocked vents, onlookers will see 
only a little smoke exhaled. 
GRAPHIC In 1982, a study was published on a color-matching technique to 
rNFORMATION provide better information on tar and nicotine yields to smokers 
ON TAR AND (Kozlowski et al., 1982b). The color-matching technique can be 
NICOTINE YIELDS: used to estimate the number of puffs taken on a cigarette, and 
THE COLOR- thus tar and nicotine yields, by comparing the color intensity of 
MATCHING the end of a spent cigarette filter with a color scale. The study 
TECHNIQUE demonstrated a strong relationship between the "darkness" of 
color of the filter and the tar and nicotine yield of the cigarette. Figure 2 
illustrates a modified version of the color-matching scale that the authors 
incorporated on a cigarette package. Three different color papers (meant to 
represent tar stains of low, standard, and high yields) developed by the 
authors from the Fantone by Letraset Color-Matching System are used to 
compare the filter stain colors from spent cigarettes. The low (Pantone 
127U), standard (Pantone 117U), and high (Pantone 139U) colors are 
mounted on the scale at points 2, 5, and 8, respectively. Smokers rated the 
filter stain color on the O-to-lO scale, moving from the lower to the higher 
intensity color blocks. Ihey decided "whether the filter looked lighter. 
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