Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 7 
that — we do have a Congress that can rule one way or another. I think we 
should speak to the general problem while we are giving you direction. 
MR. PEELER: 1 would certainly agree with that. 
DR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Dr. Cohen? 
DR. COHEN: Consumers want information that they can use to make 
meaningful decisions. Assume the consumer wants to make the meaningful 
decision as to whether switching to a particular kind of cigarette, say a 1- to 
5-mg tar cigarette, would lead to a significant reduction in health risks. Can 
this panel, given the state of the art, attempt to provide information that 
would be helpful to the consumer as to the relative risk of smoking different 
kinds of cigarettes? If the answer is no, then it is no, but I think that is more 
important information than the information currently available through tar 
numbers because tar numbers do not tell consumers information that is 
meaningful. 
DR. FREEMAN: Dr. Benowitz? 
DR. BENOWITZ: If you tell people that if they take in less tar, there is a small 
benefit, it is not one that should be denied, but I think it is misleading. I do 
not think we can tell people that you are going to reduce your hazard; you are 
going to live longer if you shift to low-yield cigarettes. So, we are caught in 
a bind. We want to encourage people to minimize the risk, but we cannot 
really tell them it is going to make a huge difference. 
DR. COHEN: I think frankly that this is a subject that ought to command 
the attention of the panel because consumers, like it or not, are using these 
numbers as if they had absolute significance as numbers. The numbers mean 
almost nothing. The panel has to address the question of is there a way of 
informing consumers as to the relative risk, and perhaps the answer is to let 
us inform them that there is not a lot of gain; doing that, frankly, would be 
very useful and maybe more useful than telling them exactly what the tar 
differences are. 
DR. FREEMAN: Dr. Rickert? 
DR. RICKERT: I think the committee has thought about that to a large 
extent, and I think there is a consensus that what is really needed is a rather 
large public health education campaign to try to communicate that very 
information to consumers. 
You are also asking for information about risk, and generally this comes 
from epidemiological studies, which by their very nature are extremely 
long and do not provide information that we can use immediately. The 
information that we have today has been gleaned over a number of years 
with respect to relative risk, and as we have seen, there is not much change. 
Now, if one is going to ask what is the effect with today's cigarettes, then 
we are talking about a period of time that will be measured in tens of years. 
2'M) 
