SCIENTIST DISSECTS WILY WAYS OF CIGARETTES

The scientist, with the practiced vernacular of a man who has spent his
life in books and sterile laboratories, stood up, adjusted his suit and
told the jury how he spent his morning digging through a wet and dirty
ashtray.

The scientist had returned from his trip outside the King County Courthouse
with a bounty of tobacco remnants and butts, the dirty and the half-smoked,
the crushed and the twisted, the butts marked with a blur of red lipstick.

Using a special viewing machine, set up in the courtroom where Washington
is suing the tobacco industry, Jack Henningfield dissected the cigarettes,
gutting them, poking at their yellow stains, their strange perforations,
and said they illustrate how complex and devious the tobacco industry can
be as it tries, by using "dose control," to trick smokers into remaining
smokers.

Steve Berman, a lawyer for Washington state, called the perforated, or
"light," cigarettes, which include a ring of tiny holes around the filter,
a "drug-delivering device" that are just as dangerous as regular cigarettes.

Henningfield's testimony is part of a lawsuit in which the state accuses
the tobacco industry of conspiring to violate antitrust and
consumer-protection laws. It also accuses Big Tobacco of hiding health
research, not telling people about the manipulation of cigarette nicotine
levels and threatening to retaliate against smaller companies that tried to
sell "safer" cigarettes.

The state is looking for $2.2 billion in state Medicaid and other insurance
costs and penalties for violations of the state Consumer Protection Act,
which could be a $2,000 penalty for each violation, which includes the sale
of every pack of cigarettes in Washington since the 1950s.

More than three dozen other states have lawsuits pending against the
industry. Four states - Florida, Texas, Mississippi and Minnesota - reached
settlements for a combined $36.8 billion. None of the cases has made it to
a jury verdict.

Henningfield is vice president of a consulting firm in Bethesda, Md., and
specializes in nicotine addiction and dependence.

Henningfield said that, of the cigarettes he collected, butts ringed with
lipstick are the best examples of the tobacco industry's nicotine
manipulation.

He said lipstick can show that smokers, smoking normally, plug the special
perforations on cigarettes with their lips, allowing more tar, nicotine and
bad chemicals into their lungs. Cigarette companies, he said, cut
perforations in their butts because it would provide some clean air for the
smoker; the companies sold them as "lights" or "low tar" cigarettes.

But while those cigarettes fared well in laboratory tests when tested with
a smoking machine, Henningfield said, the cigarettes fail in the real world.

"So it defeats the system," he said. But that's the way the industry
intended it, Henningfield said. "This is part of dose control."

Henningfield also gave other examples of what he called Big Tobacco's
manipulation of nicotine:

- -- Cigarettes are dosed with accelerants, which look like tiny rings of
gunpowder around the shaft, so that they burn faster, and apparently, make
people smoke more.

- -- Companies made filters that appeared to have gaps in them that would
allow more air into smokers' lungs and reduce the amount of tar and
nicotine they inhaled. But, outside of a laboratory they also fail,
Henningfield said, because moisture from smokers' lips causes the filter to
expand and fill the gaps, therefore delivering more tar and nicotine.

Beyond that, he said, even if the perforations or the filters worked
properly, smokers compensate for a lack of nicotine by smoking more,
perhaps smoking 1 1/2 packs of "lights" instead of only one of regulars.

This is the second week of testimony. Earlier, Dr. David Burns, a
pulmonary-medicine specialist and professor at the University of
California's medical school at San Diego, testified that the tobacco
industry's private documents show it was aware of the health risks of
smoking even while they insisted publicly there wasn't proof that smoking
caused lung cancer and other maladies.

Settlement talks in New York between tobacco companies and the state are on
hold until late October.

Both sides would prefer to settle.

Washington state Attorney General Christine Gregorie has said a settlement
- - which, like a trial, also would have implications for other states
because those states could sign on to the agreement - would enable states
to bargain for concessions a jury cannot demand, such as limits on
advertising tactics. The tobacco industry wants a settlement because it
would mean they could know for certain what their costs would be. They then
could bargain for things such as immunity from other lawsuits, something a
jury also could not give them.

Matthew Ebnet's phone message number is 206-515-5698. His e-mail address
is: mebnet@seattletimes.com

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski