State In Showdown With Tobacco

Last Halloween, 5-year-old Andrew Tolman dressed as a cowboy. Andrew told his father, “All cowboys smoke, right?”

Smoke went through the father’s eyes. The father is Massachusetts state Sen. Warren Tolman. Images of the Marlboro Man and memories of cowboys smoking in movies flashed before him. He was so moved over his son’s automatic association that he began searching for a fresh way to deglamorize cigarettes.

He found it. Friday, Gov. William F. Weld is scheduled to sign a bill that will force cigarette companies to disclose the ingredients of a cigarette on the box. The bill, sponsored by Tolman, was passed unanimously last week by the state senate. The bill would also force a more detailed disclosure of nicotine. Some brands which claim to be lower in tar are higher in nicotine, the poisonous alkaloid that makes addicts out of smokers.

“We know what’s in Snickers, Wheaties and Wonder Bread,” Tolman said from his office Monday. “Cigarettes are the only product where you don’t know what you’re getting. Perhaps if people knew, they would think twice before lighting up.”

The new law would be the nation’s first. You know it is a good law when the tobacco companies have already declared war on it. Tobacco Institute spokesman Thomas Lauria has called it an illegal measure intended to harass the industry.

The tobacco companies ought to consider themselves lucky that they are not being harassed into stating on each box what each chemical does to humans and other animals.

Two years ago, the companies, to avoid heavy regulation, released a list of 600 ingredients in cigarettes. The list is so full of danger that Tolman’s bill not only exposes cigarette companies, but can help the public challenge grocers and drug stores as to how they can sell cigarettes with a clear conscience.

For instance, CVS pharmacies could not forever maintain their walls of cigarettes at the checkout counter if the labels suddenly said “polyoxyethylene-8-stearate: a food emulsifier banned in 1952 for causing bladder stones and tumors.”

Star Market could not justify selling cigarettes with eggs and butter if a cigarette box said “butter yellow: a food dye approved and then disallowed in 1918 for causing liver cancer in animals.”

Grocers and pharmacies may sell Tonka trucks at superstores, but they would not look so wholesome selling cigarettes with tonka bean, a food additive banned in 1954 for masking unpleasant odors and causing liver damage in rats and dogs.

There are so many banned chemicals in cigarettes that the Marlboro Man is smoking Kryptonite. Nordihydroguaniaretic acid was banned from food in 1971 for kidney damage to test animals. Dulcin was banned in 1950 for causing liver cancer in rats. Safrole was banned in 1960 for causing liver cancer in animals.

The tobacco companies use at least 10 dyes which are banned or were delisted by the government for causing heart and organ damage, bladder cancer, intestinal lesions and liver cancer.

If that is not enough, how about dioxin, which cleared out Times Beach, Mo., in 1982? Or lithium chloride, banned after causing several human deaths?

The Marlboro Man does not seem so gutsy when cigarettes can contain calmus, banned in 1968 for causing tumors in the upper intestine in rats.

The tobacco companies are eager to tell you that most of their ingredients officially are Generally Recognized As Safe, or GRAS, as food additives. But that only serves to show how much Dow and Du Pont get on our dinner plate. Coal tar, for example, is GRAS, but it may cause edema, stomach pain, both high and low blood pressure, nausea, overactive thyroid function, sensitivity to light, skin rashes and vomiting.

No amount of strawberry, chocolate and vanilla flavors can mask the fact that most of the GRAS additives can have harmful effects.

One thing is for sure. If the labels come out, you are more likely to see Vydate instead of vitamins and Ferban instead of fiber. Vydate is an insecticide and Ferban is a fungicide.

It may be true that most of us ingest some pesticide every day, but broccoli and corn are not killing at least 434,000 Americans a year.

Who knows, once the herbicides and fungicides in cigarettes are published, it may cause consumers - who currently have no idea what pesticides are indeed used on their broccoli and corn - to question their use in the food chain, period.

If Tolman’s bill survives the legal onslaught that is sure to come, Massachusetts can take a rightful place on a cutting edge of the fight against Big Tobacco. That will not be easy and no one knows that better than Tolman and his son, now six. Tolman said, “When I told my son what we did last week, he just looked at me and said, ‘But they have a lot of money, don’t they?”’