Section II 
representations about the cigarette's healthfulness. The FTC's actions 
resulted in settlements between the FTC and a number of companies that 
provided for the health warnings in advertising, which ultimately became 
required by statute in 1984. 
The FTC does not have the FDA-type of regulatory power over the 
cigarette industry. We have the power to prevent deceptive statements, and 
we have the power to require the disclosure of certain types of information 
when a failure to disclose that information would be unfair. 
DR. HENNINGFIELD: Can you only regulate what appears in a magazine ad? 
How do we get it to the consumers who do not read the magazine ads or for 
the cigarettes that are not advertised? 
MR. PEELER: If you are talking about information about the relationship of 
cigarettes to health, then the advertising and the labeling right now contain 
warnings, and our authority to require additional warnings or descriptions 
would be triggered by what representations are made. 
DR. HENNINGFIELD: So you could not require that a label like the one 
Dr. Harris showed be put on cigarette packages? 
MR. PEELER: Again, what we are here for is to hear the committee's 
recommendations and take those back to the five commissioners who 
run the agency. I think what you ought to be doing is making those 
recommendations that you think are right, and then it will be up to the 
five commissioners to sort through them in terms of what is within the 
FTC's authority and what is not within the FTC's authority. Clearly the 
focus of our concern and the reason that we are here is there has been a 
lot of concern that the current tar and nicotine labeling system is not 
serving its intended purpose, and because we are putting those numbers 
out every year, that is going to be the first thing that we focus on. 
DR. FREEMAN: Yes, you have a comment? 
MS. WILKENFELD: In the seventies and early eighties when the Commission 
published its number, the Office on Smoking and Health made a large chart 
that was available at point of purchase in pharmacies and other places where 
cigarettes were sold so that there was educational information at the point 
of sale. Whether you call that labeling or the Commission would call it 
advertising, I do not know. But the money ran out and that stopped. 
DR. FREEMAN: I would like to just express a personal concern here. I think 
all of us here should be concerned with the effect of a lethal product on the 
American public with respect to morbidity and mortality. On the other 
hand, this meeting has been called by the FTC along with the Congress. My 
concern is that our human concerns do not become engulfed in bureaucratic 
problems. The 40 percent of people in America who are smoking cigarettes 
that you do not oversee still are smoking cigarettes and still have the same 
lethality for those 40 percent. I hope that although we are governed by the 
bureaucracy in a certain way, and you have limits, and we certainly respect 
229 
