Tobacco firm admits smoking hazards By Judy Siegel JERUSALEM (December 20, 2000) - A senior official of British American Tobacco - which manufactures Kent, Lucky Strike, Hollywood and other brands and constitutes 8 percent of the Israeli cigarette market - yesterday admitted its products "can be seen to be addictive" and are "a cause of certain diseases." However Chris Proctor, a chemist who has been with the company for 17 years and is its head of science and regulation, claimed BAT does not want to increase the number of adult smokers, and wants to reduce the amount of smoking among children and teenagers. "We are a large group of people trying to do a responsible job in an industry sometimes seen as controversial," Proctor said before a session of the Health Ministry-appointed Gillon Committee for the Reduction of Smoking. "Our job, put at its simplest, is to manufacture brands of tobacco products that adults smokers - balancing the pleasures of smoking against the risks - will choose in preference to brands manufactured by competitors." BAT also "accepts that smoking in public can be annoying to smokers and non-smokers alike. We support programs that work to minimize non-smokers' exposure to other people's smoke, while at the same time provide reasonable opportunities for adults to smoke." BAT conducts research on "developing low- and very-low-tar cigarettes acceptable to smokers" and "novel products in which tar might not be produced at all," he said. Commenting on Proctor's testimony before the committee, Clalit Health Services director-general Dr. Yitzhak Peterburg said that "lite" and low-nicotine" cigarette labels on some brands "are meant to mislead the public because these have no value whatsoever in reducing smoking dangers to health. Tobacco companies have already admitted there is no truth to these claims." Peterburg, whose health fund is pursuing a NIS 7.6 billion lawsuit against BAT and other foreign and local tobacco manufacturers and importers, urged the Gillon Committee "not to fall for the companies' claims that they have mended their ways. "They sell exactly the same deadly products that they have sold all these years, products that are addictive to youth and adults and imprison them the same way as heroin and cocaine. They advertise in a way meant precisely to hook young people to take the place of many older smokers who die from smoking," Peterburg said. Clalit experts cited evidence from Dr. Jeffrey Wigand - a former "insider" scientist at Brown & Williams Tobacco Company who endangered himself by providing voluminous evidence against the industry - that tobacco firms instructed employees to avoid producing written documents that would be used against them in court. Peterburg noted that a recent scientific study showed the lives of 33,000 Californians were saved during the past three years due to educational campaigns to stop smoking.