Every year, the tobacco companies and their sworn enemies at the Department of Health and Human Services join in a ritual dance. The tobacco companies turn over to H.H.S.’s Office on Smoking and Health a list of the hundreds of secret ingredients they add to cigarettes. Federal officials obligingly lock It in a safe, away from the prying eyes of consumers and health scientists. Required by a watered-down 1984 law, the exercise is what passes for public disclosure of the secret and potentially dangerous ingredients added to cigarettes. In fact, the list is “page after page of effectively useless Information,” complained Senator Edward Kennedy at a hearing last year of his Committee on Labor and Human Resources.
The list does not specify which additives are used in particular brands. Were they allowed to read it, smokers would still not know what ingredients are added to Winstons or Virginia Slims. Nor would scientists be able to determine if certain additives, alone or in combination, increase the already considerable risks of smoking. As things stand, however, this vagueness is beside the point. The list is off-limits to public scrutiny and there are criminal penalties for disclosing it.
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