Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 7 
DR. BOCK: The cost of the machine really is not something to use as a basis 
for this discussion. It is so small compared to the cost of labor that it is 
meaningless. 
DR. FREEMAN: Dr. Hughes? 
DR. HUGHES: We have been talking about these numbers and as scientists 
we like to talk about numbers, and maybe we will get to this with the third 
question. My major concern is conveying how much health benefit people 
get by these lower nicotine, lower tar cigarettes because what 1 saw in the 
1981 Surgeon General's report and what 1 saw Dr. Samet present yesterday 
suggest to me that it is not great, and it is not very large, and 1 think when 
the normal consumer switches to a 1-mg cigarette, they think they are doing 
themselves a great benefit, and my concern is that the magnitude of that 
effect be conveyed to the consumer. 
DR. FREEMAN: Dr. Rickert? 
DR. RICKERT: At the present time, FTC methodology is providing us with 
information on tar and nicotine and CO; when we are talking about lower 
yield cigarettes, we tend to link tar and nicotine explicitly together, and 
while there is an obvious relationship between these variables, there is also 
extreme variation. 
All one has to do is take the 933 brands that were just published recently 
in the FTC report and look at various plots of CO vs. nicotine or tar vs. 
nicotine, and you cannot help but be struck by the fact that there is a wide 
range of variation as far as specific nicotine level. 
For example, if you look at that report and brands delivering .9 mg 
of nicotine, there were 54 brands with varying tar yields. So, 1 think, 
in addition to the issue of tar and nicotine, that the issue of how one 
communicates simultaneously changes in all three variables because you 
can have the situation where it could be high tar-low nicotine or low 
tar-high nicotine, and by constantly linking the two together, 1 think 
one is missing the point about the other two variables. 
DR. FREEMAN: Yes, Dr. Stitzer? 
DR. STITZER: I was going to pick up on Dr. Hughes' point because it is 
an important one, but I think it is very much intertwined with the whole 
discussion about reporting of the machine testing yields. If the smoker 
can visualize the fact that the actual yield from this low-yield cigarette is 
completely overlapping with the yield from this other high-yield cigarette, 
then 1 think that can more easily bring home the other health message, 
which is that switching to these cigarettes may not have any benefit 
whatsoever. I think that there is a dose-response problem there. 
DR. I REEMAN: Dr. Benowitz? 
DR. BENOWITZ: I think that it would be great if we could put something 
in about health risks. 1 think the data seem very clear that smoking any 
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