The United States Department of Justice sued the major cigarette manufacturers in 1999 under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, alleging a decades-long scheme to defraud. The trial ran for nine months. Judge Gladys Kessler's opinion, issued on 17 August 2006, runs to 1,683 pages.
Her findings are the most comprehensive judicial account of this material in existence, and one of them concerns a single word.
Light and low tar cigarettes were introduced from the 1960s and marketed as a reduced-risk alternative. The tar and nicotine figures on which the claims rested were produced by a machine — the FTC method, in which a smoking machine draws a standard puff of standard volume at standard intervals.
Human beings do not smoke like machines. Smokers of light cigarettes compensate: they draw harder, inhale more deeply, hold longer, smoke more cigarettes, and — the detail that makes it definitive — cover the ventilation holes in the filter with their fingers or lips. Those holes are what produce the machine reading. Blocked, the cigarette delivers a dose comparable to a full-strength one.
The industry knew this. Kessler's findings document internal research establishing compensatory smoking, and establishing that light cigarettes delivered essentially the same tar and nicotine to actual smokers.
Two mechanisms make this worse than a false claim about a number.
The first is risk compensation. A person who believes they have reduced a risk adjusts behavior to reabsorb the margin, a pattern documented across seatbelts, protective equipment and driving. Here it was not merely behavioral: the physiological drive to obtain a nicotine dose does the adjusting automatically.
The second is moral licensing, in the sense of chapter 29. Switching to lights is a token of prudence, and a token of prudence discharges the felt obligation to do the difficult thing. Kessler's findings state it directly: the descriptors kept people smoking who would otherwise have quit.
That is the harm. Not that smokers were misinformed about tar, but that a partial measure was made available that felt like action and prevented the action.
Kessler found the companies liable and ordered corrective statements, which — after a further decade of appeals over their wording — began appearing in newspapers and on television in 2017 and on cigarette packs later. The descriptors light, mild and low tar were banned.
Cross-ref: Defense — Reading Risk Labels Adversarially