The Threat to Health. Within five years after cigarettes had been sold nationally, the University of Minnesota Medical School noted as early as 1921 a sharp increase in the incidence of lung cancer among men in the United States (Sobel, 1978, p. 162). In the mid-1950s, Reader's Digest published accounts of research which established a link between long-term cigarette smoking and cancer, including experiments at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute in 1953, which found that tumors developed in mouse skin exposed for long periods to cigarette smoke. On January 11, 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry published his report on Smoking and Health which concluded that cigarette smoking was "a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action" (Sobel, 1978, p. 190). By 1960, 58 percent of adult men and 36 percent of adult women in the United St

In 1996, Castleman, citing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, estimated that cigarette smoking caused 420,000 deaths a year in the United States, including 90 percent of 130,000 lung cancer cases, cost the average heavy smoker (two packs a day or more) an estimated eight years of life and accounted for one in five deaths, 17 times more than resulted from homicide and 50 times more than were related to the use of illegal drugs (1996, p. 68). He estimated that the medical treatment of smoking-related illnesses cost taxpayers about $50 billion a year. In his recently completed study, Kluger disputes the latter figure. He points out that, because of early deaths due to smoking, substantial savings are achieved through the reduction of benefits which would have otherwise have been paid to smokers and that actually the taxes generated by cigarette sales exceed the annual medical costs (1996, p. 29).

Collins, G. (1996, May 16). 2 tobacco giants seek laws to curb teen-age smoking. New York Times, p. A8.

Demands for Regulation and the Industry Response.

Hilts, P. J. (1994, June 18). Quest for safe cigarette never reached goal. New York Times, pp. A1, A22.

Carey, J. (1995, July 31). The FDA's antismoking crusade has the GOP fuming. Business Week, 40.

Castleman, M. (1996, May/June). A life in smoke. Mother Jones, 68-71.

Hanauer, Slade, Barnes, Bero and Glantz say that the industry "has actively sought over the years to develop a 'safe' cigarette, and it has directed much of its research toward that goal" (1995, p. 234). Much of the work was performed by the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva for B.A.T. under secret code names like projects Hippo, Ariel and Rio during the 1950s and 1960s and on a smaller scale into the 1980s. The aim was to develop a cigarette with the addictive properties of nicotine but without the toxicity of the conventional cigarette. These projects were a