
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 6, 1994                   TAG: 9404070307
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NICOTINE STUDY

NICOTINE IS addictive. The U.S. surgeon general has proclaimed it. Medical studies have verified it. Everyone who has ever tried to quit smoking knows it.

Only the tobacco industry refuses to admit it.

That cigarette makers would display some ambivalence about the truth is, to say the least, predictable. Still, it was interesting to read well-supported allegations in news reports last week that a tobacco company had forced researchers to withdraw a scientific study in 1983.

The study's results had shown nicotine to be addictive.

The story takes on richer meaning in light of the Food and Drug Administration's current talk about possibly regulating nicotine levels in cigarettes, since it is an addictive drug.

What's strange, though, has been the reaction to the story - the outrage and indignation that Philip Morris Companies would do such a thing as suppress research.

Perhaps it's time for a reality check.

Sure, the industry's claim that nicotine isn't addictive is preposterous. (Industry spokesmen, practiced in creative distortion, insist that more than 40 million Americans have quit smoking. But, even using the tobacco companies' figures, the rate of quitting is 2.5 percent per year - considerably lower than the rate by which heroin addicts are able, on their own, to quit their habit.)

Sure, the 1983 suppression of industry research, which tested addiction in rats, may have "set the field back six years," according to one scientist. (The Philip Morris study, conducted out of Richmond, had been accepted for publication in the journal Psychopharmacology before it was withdrawn. It was five years later that the surgeon general declared nicotine addictive.)

But come off it. These researchers were employees of Philip Morris. Their laboratories were owned by Philip Morris. Their work was Philip Morris'.

So what if there was an ethical obligation to admit the truth and let the research be published?

Who do you think we're talking about here?

These are companies whose products - when used as recommended by the manufacturers - kill some 420,000 Americans every year.

If their policy is something less than full disclosure, that should hardly come as a shocking revelation.

by CNB