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Tobacco industry researchers have had a long-standing interest in the
addictive properties of nicotine, a US Congressional committee alleged last
week.

Tobacco companies say they do not manipulate nicotine levels in cigarettes
to keep smokers addicted, and are interested in nicotine only as a flavouring.
In hearings before the House subcommittee on health and environment last
week, Thomas Sandefur, chairman of the British-owned company Brown &
Wil-liamson, continued to maintain that position. ‘Consumers tell us, when
we ask them why they didn’t smoke the denicotinised brands, that they didn’t
taste very good,’ he said.

The subcommittee listed 26 papers written by researchers working for
Brown & Williamson or its parent company, British American Tobacco –
now BAT Industries. The papers’ titles include ‘A Tentative Hypothesis on
Nicotine Addiction,’ and ‘Nicotine in Smoke and Human Physiological Response’.
The research topics include how nicotine is absorbed into the bloodstream
and how it changes brain wave patterns.

‘What all this shows is that Brown & Williamson has had an intense
interest for decades in the pharmacological effects of nicotine,’ said Henry
Waxman, a Democrat from California who chairs the subcommittee. ‘What does
taste have to do with brain wave alpha rhythms?’

One study, called ‘Project Wheat,’ examined the motivation for smoking.
It postulated an ‘inner need’ among smokers, and found that the ‘inner need’
was best met by smoke with a relatively high nicotine content. The study,
carried out in 1976, concluded there might be a market for a cigarette that
was low in tar, but high in nicotine. Waxman said Brown & Williamson
introduced its Barclay cigarette, a low-tar brand that an independent researcher
found had high levels of nicotine, only a few years later. Normally, as
tar levels fall, so do nicotine levels. Sandefur said he was not familiar
with ‘Project Wheat’, or with most of the research the Congressmen asked
about, and was not around when Barclay was introduced.

He did, however, criticise David Kessler, head of the Food and Drug
Administration, who had earlier told the subcommittee that Brown & Williamson
had bred a high-nicotine strain of tobacco and used it in low-tar brands.
Sandefur said although the plant had a high nicotine level – about 6 per
cent compared with about 2.5 per cent for most domestic varieties – it was
no higher than some types of commonly used Oriental tobacco.