Tobacco Firm Snuffed Out Safety Advice ‘Inhale As Little As Possible,’ Is One Tip Revealed In Secret Documents

It might be the most practical health advice ever offered to cigarette smokers: in hale as little as possible.

Unfortunately, this suggestion by two scientists got stamped “Strictly Confidential” by a tobacco company, and didn’t see the light of day for years.

That changed on Friday, as more than 150 tobacco industry documents were introduced in bulk at Minnesota’s $1.77 billion consumer fraud trial against cigarette makers.

Jurors spent hours reading the papers, which included offbeat ideas generated by industry scientists and consultants in response to mounting evidence that cigarettes caused disease.

Two scientists writing a memo for a British affiliate of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. suggested the company should tell smokers to take fewer drags on each cigarette as a way to reduce the risk of lung cancer.

“1.) Reduce the amount smoked, perhaps by confining smoking to certain periods of the day. 2.) Inhale as little as possible,” the scientists said in an undated, confidential British-American Tobacco Co. memo apparently written in the late 1960s.

One author, Dr. F.J.C. Roe, is listed in court papers as a company consultant; the connection to the company of the other scientist, M.C. Pike, is unknown.

But they had another undisclosed tip about smoking, which they considered the most important.

“In smoking cigarettes, throw away a long butt,” they wrote. ” A man who smokes two cigarettes halfway down takes in much less particulate matter than a man who smokes one cigarette down to a short butt length.”

David Bernick, an attorney for Brown & Williamson, said scientists had lots of theories back in the 1960s - and the idea of taking fewer drags and tossing the butt may have been suggested by public health groups.

Without proof that fewer drags produced less risk, “you couldn’t make that claim as a commercial organization without getting into big trouble,” Bernick said.

Yet another idea disclosed in the documents was to create a “safety index” for cigarette brands.

In 1977, S.J. Green, former research director for British-American Tobacco, worked up a complex mathematical equation to compute cigarette safety. In theory, smokers would end up with comparable figures covering “mortality, loss of expectation of life etc.” for cigarette brands.

The equation contained certain assumptions - the word was underlined for emphasis in the memo - that the tobacco industry doesn’t assume even today.

For example, “95 percent of all lung cancer deaths are caused by smoking cigarettes,” the memo said. Other assumptions: Smoking caused 15 percent of heart disease and 20 percent of bronchitis deaths.

In the equation, the letter “L” stood for the “average loss of life expectancy due to diseases.” The letter “C” reflected the proportion of deaths caused by smoking.

“I think it demonstrates clearly that is not a path we should encourage anyone to follow at present,” Green wrote to the chairman of the British tobacco giant.

Besides, Green wrote in another memo a year earlier, nobody believes the industry anyway.

“I doubt if we could truthfully say much that would reassure smokers,” Green said in a memo on the broader subject of future marketing.”I doubt if it would be sensible (on legal grounds alone) to say much.”

Other cigarette makers not only pondered cigarette safety, but tried to develop new, lower-risk products. One such cigarette, developed by Liggett Group in the 1970s but never sold, contained tiny amounts of the element palladium. Such tobacco, when tested on lab animals, produced far fewer tumors - presumably its major selling point.

The news of the discovery was greeted at competitor Lorillard Tobacco Co. with ridicule, a 1978 memo says. “I believe it’s worth nothing,” wrote, A.J. Bass Jr., vice president of sales, to Lorillard’s president. “You just wouldn’t tell the public the ‘rat story.’ … So commercially it would be worthless.”

Safer cigarettes carried an inherent risk anyway.

“In attempting to develop a ‘safe’ cigarette you are, by implication, in danger of being interpreted as accepting that the current product is ‘unsafe’ and this is not a position I think we should take,” wrote a top British-American Tobacco executive in 1986.