FDA to unveil ingredients in cigarettes

The Food and Drug Administration is working to lift the smokescreen from the ingredients used in cigarettes and other tobacco products.
In June, tobacco companies must tell the FDA their formulas for the first time, as drugmakers have for decades. Manufacturers also will have to turn over studies they have done on the effects of the ingredients.
It's an early step for an agency starting to flex muscles granted to it by a law that took effect in June 2009 that gives it broad power to regulate tobacco beyond the warnings now on packs — short of banning it.
Companies have long acknowledged using cocoa, coffee, menthol and other additives to make tobacco taste better. The new information will help the FDA determine which ingredients might also make tobacco more harmful or addictive. It will use the data to develop standards for tobacco products and could ban some ingredients or combinations.
"Tobacco products today are really the only human-consumed product that we don't know what's in them," said Lawrence Deyton, a physician and the director of the FDA's new Center for Tobacco Products.
Although the FDA must keep much of the data confidential under trade-secret laws, it will publish a list of harmful and potentially harmful ingredients, listed by quantity in each brand, by June 2011.
Some tobacco companies have listed product ingredients online in recent years but not with the specificity they must give the FDA, said Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
For example, Altria Group Inc., the parent company of the nation's largest tobacco maker, Philip Morris USA, has posted general ingredients on its Web site since at least 1999.
Makers say their products contain tobacco, water, sugar and flavorings, along with chemicals such as diammonium phosphate, meant to improve burn rate and taste, and ammonium hydroxide, to improve taste. Studies suggest those chemicals also could make the body more easily absorb nicotine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says about 443,000 people in the U.S. die each year from diseases linked to smoking.