Charcoal-Burning Cigarette Provides A Taste Of Tobacco

Any way you look at it, the Eclipse is one weird cigarette.

At first glance, it appears ordinary enough. But at its tip is a cylindrical charcoal “heat source” wrapped in a glass-mat insulator and paper.

The Eclipse doesn’t get shorter while being smoked, because most of the tobacco inside doesn’t burn. Instead, the red-hot charcoal heats the adjoining section of the cigarette, vaporizing the glycerin that the manufacturer applied to the tobacco.

The vapor contains nicotine but lower levels of the other thousands of chemicals found in smoke from conventional cigarettes. The tip also contains a tiny amount of powdered tobacco - enough to give smokers the taste of smoking a conventional cigarette in the first couple of puffs.

A layer of paper manufactured from tobacco leaf encircles the heating element and provides a little more flavor during the smoke.

Eclipse is thus the tobacco industry’s version of Olestra, the ersatz fat developed by Procter & Gamble Co. so consumers can enjoy fatty foods without paying a price in extra pounds.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., which manufactures Eclipse, has concluded focus-group testing and is expected to announce this week that it is moving to test-marketing in Chattanooga, Tenn. National marketing could come within a year.

Like the company’s failed low-smoke cigarette brand, Premier, test-marketed in the late 1980s, Eclipse has fueled debate about whether cigarettes can be made safer and about what a cigarette really is.

Anti-tobacco activists contend that Eclipse is not a cigarette at all but a sophisticated nicotine-delivery device that should be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

Gary T. Burger, R.J. Reynolds’s vice president for product development, scoffs at that notion.

“This is not - quote unquote - a nicotine-delivery device,” he said. “This is a cigarette.”

The FDA, however, has suggested that virtually all modern cigarettes are nicotine-delivery devices. The agency has proposed regulating cigarettes and smokeless tobaccos in order to reduce underage smoking.

FDA spokesman Jim O’Hara said, “From what the agency has been told, it appears to be a nicotine-delivery device, but it’s also an unconventional product, and the agency needs data from the company before evaluating what its regulatory status should be.”

This uncertain regulatory environment has focused a great deal of attention on Eclipse, especially for its reputation as a healthier smoke. The FDA has always taken action to regulate any tobacco products that have been marketed with health claims, such as weight control.

The company is promoting Eclipse only as a reduced-smoke cigarette and says it hopes smokers who don’t want to expose friends and relatives to secondhand smoke will take it up.

“I don’t call it safer, because I can’t prove it,” Burger said. Instead, Burger said, the company’s new product “may have reduced potential for risk.”

The fact that Eclipse produces less smoke and less “tar” - a general term for particulates in smoke - than conventional cigarettes does not necessarily make it safe, said Michael Cummings, a tobacco researcher at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo.