Defendants Falsely Marketed and Promoted Low Tar/Light Cigarettes as Less Harmful than Full-Flavor Cigarettes in Order to Keep People Smoking and Sustain Corporate Revenues

Defendants Falsely Marketed and Promoted Low Tar/Light Cigarettes as Less Harmful than Full-Flavor Cigarettes in Order to Keep People Smoking and Sustain Corporate Revenues

¶2023. For several decades, Defendants have marketed and promoted their low tar brands as being less harmful than conventional cigarettes. That claim is false, as these Findings of Fact demonstrate. By making these false claims, Defendants have given smokers an acceptable alternative to quitting smoking, as well as an excuse for not quitting.

¶2024. Defendants used a combination of techniques to market and promote their low tar brands. Defendants' marketing has emphasized claims of low tar and nicotine delivery accompanied by statements that smoking these brands would reduce exposure to the "controversial" elements of cigarette smoke (i.e., tar). Since the 1970s, Defendants also have used so-called brand descriptors such as "light" and "ultra light" to communicate reassuring messages that these are healthier cigarettes and to suggest that smoking low tar cigarettes is an acceptable alternative to quitting. In addition to appealing advertising and easily-remembered brand descriptors, Defendants have used sophisticated marketing imagery such as lighter color cigarette packaging and white tipping paper to reinforce the same message that these brands were low in tar and therefore less harmful. See Section V(E)(5), infra (Defendants' deceptive marketing of low tar cigarettes).

¶2025. Even as they engaged in a campaign to market and promote filtered and low tar cigarettes as less harmful than conventional ones, Defendants either lacked evidence to substantiate their claims or knew them to be false. Indeed, internal industry documents reveal Defendants' awareness by the late 1960s/early 1970s that, because low tar cigarettes do not actually deliver the low levels of tar and nicotine which are advertised, they are unlikely to provide any clear health benefit to human smokers, as opposed to the FTC smoking machine, when compared to regular, full flavor cigarettes.

¶2026. As Defendants have long been aware, nicotine delivered by cigarettes is addictive (see Section V(B)(3), supra (addiction)). Defendants' internal documents demonstrate their understanding that, in order to obtain an amount of nicotine sufficient to satisfy their addiction, smokers of low tar cigarettes modify their smoking behavior, or "compensate," for the reduced nicotine yields by taking more frequent puffs, inhaling smoke more deeply, holding smoke in their lungs longer, covering cigarette ventilation holes with fingers or lips, and/or smoking more cigarettes. See Section V(E)(2)(b), infra (smoker compensation). As a result of this nicotine-driven smoker behavior, smokers of light cigarettes boost their intake of tar, thus negating what Defendants have long promoted as the primary health-related benefit of light cigarettes: lower tar intake.

¶2027. Defendants did not disclose the full extent and depth of their knowledge and understanding of smoker compensation to the public health community or to government regulators.

¶2028. Defendants' conduct relating to low tar cigarettes was intended to further their overarching economic goal: to keep smokers smoking; to stop smokers from quitting; to encourage people, especially young people, to start smoking; and to maintain or increase corporate profits.