The case study of Project MIX revealed that tobacco industry scientific research on the use of cigarette additives cannot be taken at face value. The results of this study demonstrated that toxins in cigarette smoke increase substantially when additives are put in cigarettes, including the level of total particulate matter (TPM). It was found that in particular, regulatory authorities, including the FDA and similar agencies elsewhere, could use the Project MIX data in order to eliminate the use of these 333 additives, including menthol, from cigarettes.
The use of cigarette additives has been an important concern of the WHO, FDA, and similar national regulatory bodies around the world. Philip Morris has used the published Project MIX papers in order to assert the safety of individual additives and other cigarette companies have done similar studies that reached similar conclusions. The researchers for this study used documents which were made public as a result of litigation against the tobacco industry in order to investigate the origins and design of Project MIX and to conduct their own analyses of the results to assess the reliability of the conclusions in the papers published in Food and Chemical Toxicology.
These researchers discovered that in the original Project MIX analysis, the published papers obscured findings of toxicity by adjusting the data by total particulate matter (TPM) concentration. It was also found that Food and Chemical Toxicology, the journal in which the four Project MIX papers were published, had an editor and 11 of its International Editorial Board with documented links to the tobacco industry. The process of publication has been described as “an inside job.” These findings show that the tobacco industry scientific research on the use of cigarette additives cannot be trusted. The results have demonstrated that toxins in cigarette smoke increase substantially when additives are put in cigarettes.
Photographer: zole4
