Section III 
Recommendations and Findings 
DR. FREEMAN; Good afternoon, I am Dr. Harold Freeman. I am the 
chairman of the President's Cancer Panel. At the request of the Congress 
and the Federal Trade Commission, an ad hoc committee of the President's 
Cancer Panel has met over the last 2 days to consider the Federal Trade 
Commission test method for determining tar, nicotine, and carbon 
monoxide levels in cigarettes. Before 1 get into our statement, 1 would like 
to put the problem of tobacco into perspective. Tobacco use is the number 
one cause of preventable death in America. Cigarette smoking is responsible 
for more than 400,000 premature deaths every year in this country and 
causes one-third of cancer deaths and one-third of heart disease deaths. 
Although smoking is declining among adults in the United States, it is 
discouraging that smoking is not declining among children, and in fact, 
smoking prevalence among adolescents has changed little for more than 
a decade. 
1 have with me Dr. Saul Shiftman of the Department of Psychology, 
University of Pittsburgh; Dr. Diana Petitti, director of the Division of 
Research and Evaluation, Kaiser Permanente; and Dr. William Rickert of 
Labstat, Inc. 
This committee reviewed articles, studies, and other documents and 
heard presentations from a variety of experts, including tobacco industry 
scientists, on the subject of the FTC test method for determining tar, 
nicotine, and carbon monoxide levels in U.S. cigarettes. We have deliberated 
with the goals of answering questions and making recommendations. Our 
deliberations centered around the following three summary questions: 
1. Does the evidence presented clearly demonstrate that 
changes are needed in the current FTC protocol for 
measuring tar, nicotine, and carhon monoxide? If yes, 
what changes are required? 
2. Should constituents other than tar, nicotine, and carhon 
monoxide he added to the protocol? 
3. Does the FTC protocol provide information useful to 
smokers in making decisions ahout their health? 
1. The committee reached the following conclusions with respect to the 
first question. 
A. The smoking of cigarettes with lower machine-measured yields has 
a small effect in reducing the risk of cancer caused by smoking, no 
effect on the risk of cardiovascular diseases, and an uncertain effect 
on the risk of pulmonary disease. A reduction in machine-measured 
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