Smoking & Safety

Even before the U.S. Surgeon General's 1964 report on smoking, medical statisticians had amassed considerable evidence linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, heart disease and other ailments. In the last three years, with Americans puffing away more heavily than ever before (545 billion cigarettes last year v. 511 billion in 1964), researchers have concentrated not only upon proving the lethal effects of cigarettes but also upon trying to devise a safer one.

Last week a Senate Commerce subcommittee opened hearings to investigate the progress of the research. While the Senators heard still more convincing medical reasons why smokers should kick the habit, they also had cause to hope that relatively less hazardous filters may be developed before long.

Double Check. The subcommittee's chief interest was in the Strickman fil ter. Last July New Jersey Chemist Robert L. Strickman claimed to have developed a partly crystalline nontoxic polymer filter that would reduce cigarette "tars" and nicotine by some 70% without destroying tobacco taste. Strickman turned over more than 50% of the rights to his filter to Columbia University--a potential gold mine for the university, which could earn millions a year in fees during the future from tobacco companies.

However, despite all the ballyhoo with which Columbia announced its venture into the cigarette business two months ago, the university last week grew cautious about claiming too much for Strickman's invention. The scientist, who smokes six cigars daily and an occasional cigarette, was bedridden with bleeding ulcers in a Suffern, N.Y., hospital and could not attend the hearings. Instead, Columbia President Grayson Kirk told the subcommittee: "Until a testing program--a very extensive program is completed, and the results prove entirely satisfactory, we will not license any cigarette company anywhere in the world." He also asked the Surgeon General's researchers to run their own separate study on the filter to provide a double check in the public interest.

Though lacking adequate information on the Strickman device, the Senators heard a series of suggestions for making cigarettes less deadly. New York Urologist Dr. Perry Hudson said that tobacco could be treated with a sub stance called Chemosol, which induces more thorough burning and inhibits a tar component suspected of causing cancer. Also, suggested North Carolina Physician Armstead Hudnell, the smoker might do well to punch a small hole in his cigarette just in front of the filter paper to cause air filtration. It might leak smoke, but that could be all for the better.

Depressing Document. Above all, advised Surgeon General William Stewart, smokers should avoid the new extra-long 100 mm. cigarettes. Stewart pointed out that smokers switching to 100s generally do not smoke fewer cigarettes. And they continue to smoke the cigarette down to the butt, where the tar and nicotine danger increases geometrically. But to the tobacco industry, charged Stewart, "the longer smoke clearly means longer profits."

Just before the subcommittee's hearings, the U.S. Public Health Service published a 200-page follow-up to the 1964 Surgeon General's report. Based on a review of more than 2,000 research studies made in the past three years, the report repeats that cigarette tars can cause lung cancer; it depressingly documents further evidence that the weed can bring on peptic ulcers, aortic aneurysm, cancer of the larynx, mouth, pharynx, esophagus and bladder. A two-pack-a-day smoker aged 55 to 64, says the report, has 34 times more chance of dying of lung cancer than a nonsmoker. But an equally grave danger may be coronary heart disease caused by the massive doses of nicotine and carbon monoxide in cigarettes.

Nicotine demonstrably places dangerous strain upon the heart muscles. E. Cuyler Hammond, vice president of the American Cancer Society, told the subcommittee: "Milligram for milligram, nicotine is one of the most powerful and fastest acting of all known poisons." He added unhappily: "I doubt that habitual heavy smokers would be satisfied with cigarettes which contain little or no nicotine."

Smoking Dyspeptic. One habitual smoker who was dissatisfied with al most everything he heard before the subcommittee was Kentucky's Thruston Morton, a Senator with his tobacco-farming constituents' interests at heart. Throughout, he sat with a dyspeptic scowl for the medical experts and a curiously unsympathetic attitude toward the Strickman filter, which, if proved effective, could prove a Golconda for his planters. "O.K.," snapped Morton, "we'll all stop smoking, and you'll upset the economy."

Morton claimed that in 1966 Strick man had taken his filter to Louisville's Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., which tested the device and rejected it because it was too tightly compacted, as any effective filter might be. Indeed, observed Dr. Ernest Wynder of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, filters that significantly cut tars and nicotine "are so tight that when you smoke these cigarettes you develop a hernia."

Still Wynder believes it may be possible to achieve a significant reduction of tars by using selected tobacco strains or reconstituted tobaccos along with filters. Another medical witness, Dr. George E. Moore, director of Public Health Research in New York State, told the subcommittee, "It is possible to make a less hazardous cigarette--very substantially less."

Though he will not discuss his formula, Strickman said from his hospital room that cigarettes with his filter will "draw" perfectly well. "I took a form of the same filter material to Brown & Williamson," he said, "but I never entered their laboratories. They were' not interested. Since then I have made some adjustments to make it draw more easily."

At present, he said, at least six cigarette manufacturers--including Brown & Williamson--are satisfied with the Strickman device in its present state of development. Even B. & W. last week was testing the filter, and Inventor Strickman himself said that one com pany has already delivered a contract bid for its use.

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