Philip Morris

Secret Philip Morris Files Show What the Tobacco Giant Knew About Addiction

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It’s not all about nicotine.

cigarette

As anyone who’s tried to quit smoking cigarettes knows, smoking is not just about the nicotine. Far from being strictly chemical, addiction is also social, emotional, and psychological. It’s something to do on your walk to work, a way to take some alone time during a stressful work day, and an excuse to step outside the bar to light up and chat with your friends. Now, a study in the journal PLOS Medicine shows just how well scientists and executives at Philip Morris understood this over the years — and used their understanding to keep people hooked.

In the paper, published Tuesday by researchers from the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, an analysis of formerly secret documents dated from the Nineties to 2006 from tobacco giant Philip Morris reveals the discrepancy between the company’s public and private stances on addiction. While Philip Morris publicly acknowledged nicotine’s addictiveness in 2000, the study’s authors suggest that the company scapegoated the chemical as the solitary driver of addiction. By placing the blame on nicotine, company scientists drew attention away from a potential public health focus on biological, social, psychological, and environmental factors that could help people quit smoking.

Mann dreht Zigarette von Hand
Nicotine is an addictive chemical, but behavioral and environmental factors play major roles in smoking addiction. By citing nicotine as the primary driver of addiction, tobacco scientists were free to privately exploit these other factors.

After decades of industry-backed science in which Big Tobacco showed that smoking was non-addictive, it was seen as a huge step for public health when Philip Morris finally admitted the truth. But the study’s authors say this move may have just opened the door for the tobacco giant to sell tobacco-free nicotine products, sold under the assumption that nicotine was the main driver of addiction. This chemical explanation for addiction, we now know, vastly undersells the other aspects of addiction.

“Despite [Philip Morris’s] apparent change-of-heart, this analysis suggests that the company’s current public framing of addiction is — at least as of 2006 — as opportunistic as its initial denial of nicotine’s addictiveness,” the authors write. “In reducing addiction treatment to exchanging ‘dirty’ nicotine (i.e., from a cigarette) with ‘clean’ (i.e., noncombustible), [Philip Morris International removes] the need for comprehensive public health interventions in favor of increasing the number of ‘choices’ available to individuals, thereby replacing the known harm of cigarettes with the unknown harms of new nicotine products.”

While the study’s authors had access to an unprecedented quantity of documents as a result of the numerous legal settlements against the tobacco industry, they acknowledge that some gaps in their understanding still exist since they couldn’t review all documents from Philip Morris. Nonetheless, the picture they paint is revealing.

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For addiction researchers, public health researchers, and smokers, it’s clear that smoking is about so much more than the nicotine. But this analysis suggests that a major tobacco company attempted to steer the focus toward only nicotine, decreasing the effectiveness of interventions that could help people quit. So while we might no longer believe studies that say smoking is good for you, it seems that the tobacco industry has continued to steer thinking on addiction into the twenty-first century.

Non-Smokers, Former Smokers are Using Heatsticks

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Nearly half of IQOS users in Italy are non-smokers, study claims

Late last week, a scientific advisory committee dealt a blow to tobacco giant Philip Morris International’s (PMI) bid to claim its heat-not-burn tobacco product IQOS is safer than cigarettes, by recommending that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reject the company’s application for “reduced risk” status.

Despite assurances from PMI officials that IQOS would only be marketed to active smokers, several members of the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC) expressed concerns that the device would prove attractive to non-smokers, especially non-smoking teens.

Now data from a small study examining IQOS use and product awareness in Italy appears to confirm those fears.

Three years after IQOS was launched in the country, about one-fifth of the 3,086 Italians taking part in a nationally-representative survey had heard of it. Just 1.4% saying they had tried it and 2.3% saying they intended to try it.

But those who had tried it or intended to try it were almost as likely to be nonsmokers and former smokers as active smokers.

The study was published in the journal Tobacco Control.

IQOS is currently under review by the FDA for sale in the U.S. It is sold in 30 other countries, including 19 European nations.

“Our data indicate that 739,000 Italians have already tried IQOS, including 329.000 never smokers,” wrote researcher Xiaoqui Liu, of the Institute for Pharmacological Research ‘Mario Negri’ in Milan, and colleagues. “Moreover, another 1,205,000 Italian adults, including 619,000 non-smokers expressed their intention to try IQOS in the future.”

IQOS is the only heat-not-burn tobacco product sold in Italy.

The research suggests that the absolute number of never smokers who have already tried IQOS in Italy is comparable to that of current smokers.

“Among Italian adults with an intention to try IQOS, the number of non-smokers even exceeds that of current smokers. Therefore, these findings suggest that IQOS may create new nicotine addicted generations,” the researchers wrote.

In response to request for comment, a PMI spokesperson pointed to study limitations acknowledged by the researchers, including the relatively small survey sample size and the fact that the information on use and awareness of the device was self reported.

“Based on extensive U.S.-based perception and behavior models submitted as part of our applications, we believe the likelihood of unintended use of IQOS is low,” an emailed statement said. “In addition, real-world data from countries where IQOS is currently available show little to no interest in the product by never and former tobacco users.”

Tobacco researcher John W. Ayers, PhD, of San Diego State University, told MedPage Today that the jury is still out on how heat-not-burn products like IQOS will be used by consumers, since they have only been on the market for a few years.

“It’s not clear if heat-not-burn tobacco will appeal to a new generation of never smokers or if it will cause more of the public to start using traditional cigarettes,” he said. “But this study suggests we should be prepared to mitigate these potential effects.”

Tobacco Giant’s New Year’s Resolution: ‘Give Up Cigarettes’

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“Incredulous” may best describe reactions from anti-smoking groups to an advertising campaign launched this week by tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) vowing to stop selling cigarettes.

The full page ads, which first ran Tuesday in several British newspapers, included the tag line “Our New Year’s Resolution, We’re Trying to Give Up Cigarettes.”

“Philip Morris is known for cigarettes. Every year, many smokers give them up. Now it’s our turn,” the copy read, adding that, “Our ambition is to stop selling cigarettes in the UK. It won’t be easy.”

American Lung Association (ALA) president and CEO Harold P. Wimmer issued a terse response in a statement issued Thursday: “Stop selling cigarettes today.”

“This is another PR stunt from a company that has used countless PR stunts to addict and kill millions of people over the last 60 years,” ALA assistant vice president of national advocacy Erika Sward told MedPage Today.

“We have no reason to believe that they have turned over a new leaf in 2018. The bottom line is they can put their money where their mouth is and stop selling cigarettes today.”

In response to MedPage Today‘s request for comment, a spokesperson for PMI noted that the U.K. initiative “demonstrates the global commitment of our company to have cigarettes replaced by science-based, smoke-free alternatives as quickly as possible, to the benefit of smokers, public health and society at large.”

“Providing less harmful alternatives to smokers who would otherwise not quit is a common-sense approach to public health, embraced by a growing number of experts and health authorities worldwide,” the statement read.

“Today, science and technology allow us to provide smokers with better alternatives to cigarettes. Smoke-free products like e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products do not generate the vast majority of chemicals found in cigarette smoke, and therefore have clear potential to be less harmful options for the millions of men and women who would otherwise continue smoking.”

The anti-tobacco groups Truth Initiative and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids were highly critical of the launch early last year by PMI of a website touting the company’s commitment to a “smoke-free future.”

“As long as Philip Morris continues to do everything it can to fight proven policies and programs that reduce smoking and continues to aggressively market cigarettes around the world, often in ways that appeal to children, their claims do not deserve to be taken seriously,” a joint statement from the groups read.

In an email exchange with MedPage Today, Truth Initiative CEO and President Robin Koval agreed that if the tobacco giant was serious about its stated goal to abandon combustible cigarettes, “they would stop selling cigarettes immediately.”

 “The recent ad run by Philip Morris International (PMI) in the U.K. that they’re “trying to give up cigarettes,” feels more like an April Fool’s joke than a New Year’s resolution,” Koval noted.

Philip Morris reports spending billions of dollars developing nicotine delivery products designed to give smokers what it calls safer alternatives to traditional combustible cigarettes.

The company’s heat-not-burn, heat stick product IQOS has been wildly popular in Japan since its launch in late 2014, and the product is now sold in limited markets in more than two dozen countries. It’s currently under consideration by the FDA for U.S. marketing.

The Toxic Effects of Cigarette Additives. Philip Morris’ Project Mix Reconsidered: An Analysis of Documents Released through Litigation

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In 2009, the promulgation of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tobacco regulation focused attention on cigarette flavor additives. The tobacco industry had prepared for this eventuality by initiating a research program focusing on additive toxicity. The objective of this study was to analyze Philip Morris’ Project MIX as a case study of tobacco industry scientific research being positioned strategically to prevent anticipated tobacco control regulations.

Methods and Findings

We analyzed previously secret tobacco industry documents to identify internal strategies for research on cigarette additives and reanalyzed tobacco industry peer-reviewed published results of this research. We focused on the key group of studies conducted by Phillip Morris in a coordinated effort known as “Project MIX.” Documents showed that Project MIX subsumed the study of various combinations of 333 cigarette additives. In addition to multiple internal reports, this work also led to four peer-reviewed publications (published in 2001). These papers concluded that there was no evidence of substantial toxicity attributable to the cigarette additives studied. Internal documents revealed post hoc changes in analytical protocols after initial statistical findings indicated an additive-associated increase in cigarette toxicity as well as increased total particulate matter (TPM) concentrations in additive-modified cigarette smoke. By expressing the data adjusted by TPM concentration, the published papers obscured this underlying toxicity and particulate increase. The animal toxicology results were based on a small number of rats in each experiment, raising the possibility that the failure to detect statistically significant changes in the end points was due to underpowering the experiments rather than lack of a real effect.

Conclusion

The case study of Project MIX shows tobacco industry scientific research on the use of cigarette additives cannot be taken at face value. The results demonstrate that toxins in cigarette smoke increase substantially when additives are put in cigarettes, including the level of TPM. In particular, regulatory authorities, including the FDA and similar agencies elsewhere, could use the Project MIX data to eliminate the use of these 333 additives (including menthol) from cigarettes.

source:PLOS