Medicine: Filtered for Safety

When heavy cigarette smoking was first indicted as the major cause of the radical increase in lung cancer, scarcely more than 1% of cigarettes had filter tips. Today at least 40% have them, and tobacco experts expect the figure soon to hit 75%. But do the filters help? Up to now. the cynical answer has been that they help to sell cigarettes, and nothing more. Last week a congressional committee* opened an investigation of cigarette filters, for which the public pays a premium of $500,000 a day. Weight of the evidence: there is hope in improved filters.

Men who smoke less than a pack a day run a markedly reduced risk of lung cancer (compared with the much higher risk for those who smoke two packs or more). So, Dr. Ernest L. Wynder of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute told the committee, a filter that stops 40% or more of tar from a regular cigarette made of good tobacco "will be a partial answer." But during the five-year boom in filters, no such tip has been marketed. Testified Dr. Wynder: "Some companies have taken advantage of the public's desire for filtered cigarettes and its equal wish for good tobacco flavor by marketing increasingly ineffective filters."

Added-"Easy Draw." Wynder's and other laboratory studies have shown that most filter-tip brands are as bad as. in many cases actually worse than, old-fashioned untipped cigarettes of regular length, because 1) the filters catch only a minimum of tar. and 2) to get the flavor through the filter, the manufacturers have taken to using stronger tobacco, which produces more tar.

As Congressmen examined researchers on both sides of the smoking-and-lung-cancer controversy, they won from Scientist Clarence Cook Little of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee the surprising admission that he knew nothing about filters one way or the other. He had. he confessed, never received any reports on filters from the industry which pays his salary, had never been shown filter experiments on trips to cigarette factories.

With a nationwide ad blast in the newspapers. P. Lorillard Co. last week announced that it had improved the filter in its Kent cigarettes to give "significantly less tars and nicotine . . . plus easy draw." Though Lorillard did not mention the word "health" in its ads. or Dr. Wynder's specifications, it appeared to meet those specifications. A Kent regular, it claimed, passes 17 milligrams of tar and 1.36 milligrams of nicotine through its filter; the king size passes 21 milligrams of tar. 1.7 milligrams of nicotine (an independent laboratory got slightly higher readings for the tar. lower for nicotine). This put Kent regulars 36% to 44% lower in tar yield than unfiltered regulars, and Kent kings 14% to 40% lower than competing filter kings.

Wanted: Rules. Dr. Wynder pointed out, however, that a 40% filter would be effective only "provided that the smoker does not decide to smoke twice as many cigarettes, and provided, too, that the tobacco selection, cut or packing, is not altered to yield increasingly more tar ... Regulations must be passed that establish criteria for the amount of tar which may pass through a given filter, and require the manufacturer to state the effectiveness of the filter."