The primary ingredient in each of our cigarette brands is tobacco. In fact, our typical American-blended cigarette consists mainly of tobacco and flavors in the "filler" portion, which is the column (or rod) attached to the filter.
Besides tobacco, our cigarettes contain a variety of additional ingredients.
We work with stakeholders - including regulators and public health authorities - on all issues concerning our products. It is our scientific judgment, based on the best data available, that the ingredients used in our cigarettes do not increase the inherent hazards of cigarette smoking.
We have supported tough but reasonable
federal regulation of tobacco products by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for over seven years. The Family Smoking Prevention and Control Act, introduced in February 2007, would include granting the authority for the FDA to require ingredient testing and to remove harmful ingredients that increase the inherent health risks of cigarette smoking and require full disclosure to the FDA of ingredients added to tobacco products.
We believe regulation in this area should not be utilized to prohibit the use of an ingredient, however, simply because it gives the product a unique or distinctive taste, which may "taste better" to some adult smokers.We also believe that this government review should include the same confidential treatment of trade secrets as provided for trade secrets related to other consumer products and that the public disclosure of our brand recipes would compromise our ability to maintain valuable trade secrets for competitive purposes. Our position on this issue is consistent with other consumer product companies and with the decision of a federal appeals court, which stated the following in its opinion: "Because consumers choose brands based on flavor, taste and aroma, and tend to remain loyal to those brands, small fortunes are spent creating flavor formulas for tobacco products. The information needed to copy these formulas is, in turn, worth many millions of dollars. It is no secret that tobacco companies, like other manufacturers of brand name products, employ elaborate procedures to safeguard their ingredient information."
Read the full opinion of the court.
We annually report cigarette ingredient information to the Department of Health and Human Services and to the State of Texas. Some of the information submitted to these governmental agencies on a confidential basis relates to detailed brand recipes which, if disclosed publicly, would compromise our ability to maintain valuable trade secrets for competitive purposes.
