Jump to full article: New York Times, 2007-01-19
Author: GARDINER HARRIS
Intro: A Harvard study concluding that cigarette makers have for years deliberately increased nicotine levels in cigarettes to make them more addictive led to renewed calls Thursday for greater federal oversight of the industry.
“Given the harm that tobacco causes, it shouldn’t be a game of cat-and-mouse to figure out what the industry is doing to cigarettes,” said Dr. Josh Sharfstein, commissioner of health for the City of Baltimore.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is now chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, promised to reintroduce within weeks a bill that would allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate cigarettes.
Mr. Kennedy said the Harvard study, which was released this week, “is dramatic new proof that Big Tobacco is addicted to addicting millions of young smokers.” . . .
In August, in a racketeering suit brought by the Justice Department against the tobacco industry, a federal judge found that tobacco companies had for decades “manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction.”
In ordering strict new limitations on tobacco marketing, the judge, Gladys Kessler of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, also said that for decades, tobacco companies had “lied, misrepresented and deceived the American public.”
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