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From Midwest Today , December 1999
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently recommended that
Congress require warning labels on cigars. One of the warnings
suggested by the FTC nicely illustrates the artful evasiveness
of public-health officials who seek to shape people's behavior
rather than inform them: "Cigars are not a safe alternative
to cigarettes."
This admonition sidesteps the question of just how risky cigars
are. Public-health officials prefer to avoid that question, because
the evidence clearly shows that the typical cigar smoker faces
hazards far less serious than the typical cigarette smoker does.
In their campaign to scare people away from cigars, tobacco's
opponents have repeatedly obscured that fact.
In February 1998, Donald Shopland of the National Cancer Institute
told USA Today, "You're smoking a whole pack of cigarettes"
when you smoke a cigar. A television ad sponsored by the California
Department of Health Services 
introduced
a couple of months later went even further, likening one cigar
to three-and-a-half packs of cigarettes.
But is that really true?
The NCI reported that, overall, daily cigar smokers get oral and
esophageal cancers almost as often as cigarette smokers. But they
face much lower risks of lung cancer, coronary heart disease and
chronic obstructive lung disease -- the three main smoking-related
causes of death. Cigar smokers who inhale deeply face measurably
higher risks of heart disease and emphysema (though still not
as high as those faced by cigarette smokers).
The upshot can be seen in mortality figures. In a 1985 American
Cancer Society study cited by the NCI, men who smoked a cigar
or two a day were only 2% more likely to die during a 12-year
period than nonsmokers, a difference that was not statistically
significant. By contrast, the mortality rate was 69% higher for
men who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day.
"As many as three-quarters of cigar smokers smoke only occasionally,"
the NCI noted and "the majority of cigar smokers do not inhale."
Since the available data apply only to people who smoke at least
one cigar a day, "the health risks of occasional cigar smokers...are
not known."
In other words, it has not been determined whether smoking cigars
in moderation -- with moderation defined by the way most cigar
smokers actually be-have -- poses a measurable health risk. Yet
this point was lost on most news organizations. The headline in
the San Francisco Chronicle read, "Cancer Insti-tute's
Warning on Cigars: Just As Bad
As Cigarettes." An Associated Press story said the NCI report
was "intended to equate dangers posed by the two products."
The UPI declared, "New findings give more weight to warnings
that cigars can be at least as hazardous as cigarettes."
Still, the clear difference in risk between cigars and cigarettes
was confirmed once again in a study published by The New England
Journal of Medicine in June 1999. This time, reporters paid
closer attention, probably because even the researchers themselves
emphasized that cigars are not nearly as hazardous as cigarettes.
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