The vast majority of cigarettes are designed by manufacturers to cause and enhance addiction, according to a key figure in the move to force the US tobacco industry to accept that smoking causes cancer.
At the eighth World Conference on Lung Cancer at UCD, in Belfield, Dublin, Mr Clifford Douglas, of Tobacco Control Law and Policy Consulting, Illinois, in the US, said recent studies found up to 92 per cent of smokers were addicted to nicotine in cigarettes. Evidence also shows consumers use these products almost exclusively for pharmacological - drug dependence - purposes.
"Tobacco manufacturers claim publicly that taste provides an independent reason for tobacco use, but they have been unsuccessful in their attempts to sell non-addictive, low-nicotine products that provide `taste'," he said.
In the industry's own research over three decades, which only emerged recently, it is clear that it knew for many years that consumers would not smoke cigarettes that fail to produce the necessary "physiological response" and satisfy the "nicotine need".
Mr Douglas outlined to lung cancer specialists how the tobacco industry employed "a variety of methods to control nicotine delivery with space age precision". These include:
. adjustment of tobacco blends, using high-nicotine tobaccos to raise nicotine concentration in lower-tar cigarettes - leaves higher up in the plant contain higher nicotine;
. adding extraneous nicotine to tobacco stems and to other material which makes up reconstituted tobacco used in all major cigarette brands;
. adding ammonia compounds to increase the delivery of "free nicotine" to smokers;
. using filter and ventilation systems that remove a higher percentage of tar than nicotine;
. genetically engineering tobacco plants to increase nicotine content;
. developing nicotine "analogues" (chemicals which retain nicotine's characteristics among consumers);
. using chemicals to enhance the effects of nicotine on the brain/body.
"The inevitable consequence of the industry's manipulation and control of nicotine is to keep consumers using cigarettes by causing and sustaining their addiction to nicotine," Mr Douglas said.
This deliberate action on the part of cigarette manufacturers is chiefly responsible for the modern epidemic of lung cancer and other diseases caused by tobacco use. The expressed intent has been "to create dependency in hundreds of millions of human beings across the planet".
Moreover, it is being increasingly acknowledged that the pharmacological processes causing addiction to nicotine are similar to those in heroin and cocaine addiction; a conclusion which the industry itself had reached. The indications of nicotine's role were charted since the 1960s though not made public by tobacco industry scientists, he said. A senior official in the British tobacco giant, BAT, noted in 1967 the company was "in the nicotine rather than the tobacco business".
In 1972, a senior scientist with RJ Reynolds, makers of Marlboro, the world's biggest selling consumer brand, had documented: "Without nicotine, there would be no smoking." But rather than consider its health effects, he had gone on to expound on the amazing science behind the modern cigarette. At that time, the company also documented that nicotine "is a potent drug. . .a habit-forming alkaloid".
Not only was the addictive nature of nicotine suppressed, but major cigarette manufacturers had conducted extensive research to understand precisely how it affects the brain, central nervous system and other parts of the body.
Notwithstanding the proposed settlement by tobacco companies in the US in suits brought by health authorities and individual states, Mr Douglas was of the view that "the industry's intransigence is unswerving" and he deeply questioned its ability to be truthful. "Cigarette companies will never say `you were right all along and we will co-operate'." The industry should be required to phase out the addictive element of cigarettes, which would be a tangible means for smokers to give up more effectively - despite the desire of most smokers to quit smoking, fewer than 3 per cent succeed annually. The tobacco industry needed to be forced to render its product less hazardous and less addictive.
Historians, he predicted, would come in time to view the world's cigarette-caused lung cancer epidemic as "a tragic oddity of the 20th century".
