IF YOU think smoking low-tar cigarettes reduces the chances of getting lung cancer, you鈥檇 be wrong. Low-tar cigarettes are just as dangerous, according to a massive study in the US. Filtered cigarettes, however, are more safe than unfiltered ones.
For six years starting in 1982, a team studied 364,239 men and 576, 535 women over 30 who smoked, comparing the types of cigarettes they smoked with the likelihood of developing lung cancer (British Medical Journal, vol 328, p 72).
The differences found between smokers on low and medium-tar cigarettes were so small that the lead author of the paper, Jeffrey Harris of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, wants this distinction dropped because he believes it is useless. 鈥淲e should rethink how cigarettes are rated,鈥 he says. 鈥淔iltered versus non-filtered may be more meaningful.鈥 Europe has already banned the descriptions 鈥渓ight鈥, 鈥渕ild鈥 and 鈥渓ow鈥.
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鈥淧eople who assumed that low-tar meant 鈥榮afer鈥 have made a mistake,鈥 says Harris. In fact, other studies suggest low-tar brands may be even worse than stronger brands, because smokers inhale more deeply, triggering new types of adenocarcinomas buried in the remoter reaches of the lungs.
The industry says that it introduced 鈥渓ighter鈥 brands in good faith based on the science available at the time, and after persuasion from governments in the 1970s. 鈥淲e acted in conjunction with governments and delivered the low-tar brands,鈥 says Tim Lord, chief executive of the UK Tobacco Manufacturers鈥 Association. 鈥淭he government defined the tobacco and nicotine ratings, and we never claimed, or advertised, that low-tar cigarettes were safer. The only safe cigarette is no cigarette.鈥
But anti-smoking campaigners say the perception that lighter brands were safer encouraged smokers to carry on instead of quitting. 鈥淚f smokers had realised, they would have been more likely to quit altogether,鈥 claims Amanda Sanford of the UK anti-smoking group ASH.
Harris鈥檚 team also found that all filtered cigarettes with low to medium tar are safer than high-tar cigarettes with no filters at all. People who smoked the unfiltered cigarettes were 44 per cent more likely to develop lung cancer. The study did not look at roll-up cigarettes, but Harris thinks that they are probably just as dangerous as other unfiltered products.
Persuading smokers to switch to filtered cigarettes could save millions of lives in countries where unfiltered ones are still popular, Harris says. While few people in the US or the UK smoke unfiltered cigarettes, a survey in 1996 showed that they accounted for nearly a fifth of sales in places such as eastern Europe, China and France.