Medicine: The Dangerous Last Puff

Ever since statistics began to point to some connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, the world’s tobacco industries have been devising ways to cut down the effects of tars and nicotine. Last week the Swedish tobacco monopoly settled on a fractions-of-an-inch policy: the last puffs do more harm than the first. Testing 19 local and 18 foreign brands, the Swedish Institute for People’s Health found that king-sized cigarettes give the smoker more tars and nicotine if smoked to the same stub as a regular, much less than a regular if smoked only for 1⅞ inches, the usual length of a smoke for regulars. Convinced that the trouble comes in the last few puffs,* the tobacco monopoly took ads to warn, “Don’t get too close,” printed two thin rings on its king sizes at 1⅞ inches to show where the cigarette should be stubbed out. But Swedish smokers cynically saw the campaign as a means of selling more cigarettes, puffed right on past the new warning rings.

* Researcher Ernest L. Wynder, working at Manhattan’s Sloan-Kettering Institute, has reported that 60% of the tars are in the last half of the cigarette (TIME, April 27).