Next, Electronic Smoking
A BatteryPowered Holder
By Glenn Collins
New York Times Service

NEW YORKPhilip Morris Cos. is planning to test a small electronic
cigarette holder that eliminates smoke and ashes from the ends of cigarettes.

The batterypowered "smoking system" is the first of its kind, and it cost
$200 million and took years of research to develop, the company said.

The device is a beepersized 4ounce (125gram) box containing a specially
designed cigarette and an electronically controlled lighter that runs on
rechargeable batteries.

The tobacco burns only when puffed. Smokers could take a puff from a
cigarette in its holder, put it down and take another puff an hour later.

But smokers must lift the device to their lips for each puff; as if smoking
a kazoo. That does not exactly match the "cool" image of an old movie idol
such as Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Critics say the device demonstrates the lengths to which the tobacco
industry will go to make a dangerous addiction more socially acceptable.
Richard A. Daynard, chairman of an antitobacco group, the Tobacco Products
Liability Project at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston,
disrnissed it as "clearly another nicotine delivery device."

He added: "Who would use an expensive and cumbersome thing like this if
they weren't hooked?

"There is something grim and desperate about it. This is hardly the
Marlboro Man, getting on his horse and checking the battery."

He added that children might be able to use the device to conceal smoking
from parents. (Philip Morris said a microchip in the device was equipped
with the equivalent of the television Vchip a locking device for use by
parents.)

But the' new product, tentatively called the Accord, could find a big
market among the "many smokers who voluntarily restrict their smoking at
home or in a car or because their spouse doesn't like it, " said John R.
Nelson, senior vice president of business development for Philip Morris
USA, the company's U.S. subsidiary. "We think our product would appeal to
them."

Over the next month, the Accord will be made available to smokers in
controlled tests in the United States and Japan. It will not be
commercially available in test markets for at least a year.

The device was designed to eliminate the betweenpuffs burning of
cigarettes that accounts for 90 percent of secondhand smoke.

But smokers still would inhale at least the same 3 milligrams of tar and
0.2 milligram of nicotine that is in conventional socalled ultralight
cigarettes.

Users also still would exhale smoke. Philip Morris, the world's No. I
cigarette maker, said the product was not meant to evade smoking laws.

Accord cigarettes are 62 millimeters long, compared with 85 millimeters for
a conventional cigarette, and are expected to cost the same as premium
cigarettes $2.50 to $2.75 a pack in the United States.