The 15 percent of American adults who still smoke cigarettes despite the well-known damage to their lungs, throats and lifespans are, it’s fairly safe to assume, the stubbornest brand loyalists alive. And yet Philip Morris International (PMI), the maker of Marlboro, claims it’s their new corporate mission to stop making cigarettes.
The Big Tobacco stronghold, driven by its CEO and in concert with its domestic partner, wants to put a stop on the lung snack as we know it and switch permanently to less harmful heated-tobacco devices and e-cigarettes.
Or so they say.
“If every Philip Morris smoker around the world switched from conventional Marlboros to these, that’s our end goal,” PMI’s press officer Corey Henry told incredulous TWS. “If fifty years from now we’re not selling a single cigarette,” mission accomplished.
But because the population grows at a higher rate than smokers can kick their nasty habit, cigarette sales will never stop turning a dependable profit. At what point did the Marlboro Man, the most successful ad of all time but a distant memory for today’s technocrat, canter off a cliff?
“I don’t think ‘disruptive’ or ‘transformative’ are the sort of words people would ordinarily associate with a tobacco company off the top of their head,” Henry said. For most people, in fact, it’s probably “evil” that comes to mind. No one trusts Big Tobacco with a master plan that sounds too good, or too risky, to be true. Nor should they—instead, watch closely for follow-through.
And here we are. On Monday, Philip Morris filed an application with the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products—thus kicking off the approval process for “modified risk” labeling to market the iQOS, a tobacco-heating electronic smoking alternative and first in the family of PMI’s reduced-risk cigarette stand-ins. The regulatory process, approved by Congress in 2009, could take years and require costly additional research, all in order to make good on a newfound corporate commitment to public health.
iQOS, meanwhile, is all the rage in Japan. “What we’ve seen in Japan so far is a natural cannibalization, where a Japanese Marlboro smoker switches over to iQOS,” enough that Japanese retailers routinely run out, Henry said. And shareholders’ favorite part: “Increasingly we’re seeing people move from Camel, Lucky Strike, conventional cigarettes to this.” (Neither Camel nor Lucky Strike are Philip Morris brands.)
Damon Jacobs, a psychologist and harm-reduction advocate, looks forward to iQOS’s American debut from a clinical perspective. The more options addicts have other than abstinence-only, the more likely they are to drop the deadly habit. “If the only thing you can offer someone [struggling to quit smoking] is all-or-nothing abstinence, they’re unlikely to want to go with that option. Or they might try and fail.”
The greatest amount of good comes, believe it or not, when we let the addict choose his own adventure. “If we give consumers the information we have, and if the FDA approves it, there will be a strong argument for people to consider this as an option,” he said. “I hope this is a major step that helps people.”
iQOS may certainly save lives—and, if it does, it will make money. Jacobs led an information-based campaign in 2012 to publicize an HIV prevention treatment that the FDA had approved but the medical community remained reluctant to embrace. Like doctors who refused to prescribe HIV prevention pills, doctors who ignore the documented benefits of smoking alternatives—like e-cigarettes and, before long, iQOS—too often do more harm than good.
And from Jacobs’ perspective, educating the public about a public health campaign from Big Tobacco shouldn’t be any harder than guiding the gay community to trust Big Pharma on HIV prevention. “You can feel anything you want, you can think anything you want,” he said. “You can hate Philip Morris for the past, but if there is a way to reduce harm, then there is a way to reduce harm.” If the corporate overlords profit on the consumers’ longevity, everybody wins. “Their interest in you is purely financial, so what?”
PMI’s new, far less fatal tobacco experience is actually an old technique expensively repackaged. Henry described the billion-dollar lab where the new dream product was engineered as a “gleaming cube” on a pristine Swiss lake. Many a Bond villain would feel right at home. iQOS, pronounced eye-kohs, heats concentrated tobacco instead of burning loosely packed bits of leaves with their attendant chemicals.
Any old sahib’s hookah heats condensed tobacco instead of burning it. The resulting rich steamy vapor is tainted however by carbon monoxide from burning bits of charcoal. With iQOS, as with previous failed attempts at heat-not-burn technologies, there is no combustion—no fire, no burn, and, as a result, next to no carbon monoxide or tar.
PMI scientist Moira Gilchrist described the iQOS’s fine-tuned innerworkings. A “heater blade” spears a small cylindrical cartridge of condensed tobacco, a folded-up leathery paper of pulverized leaves and glycerin. “The beauty about the technology is the blade,” Gilchrist said. “There is not just a heater, but it’s also a temperature sensor.” Maintaining an even heat, she said, prevents burning.
So mankind has finally evolved past fire. And smoking, one of the very few low-tech activities we have left, will give way to puffing on an iQOS “HeatStick” holder, like a Samsung stylus the width and length of a cigarillo. The tobacco plug, called the HeatStick, is essentially a doll-sized cigarette that clicks into the tip of the holder where it’s heated to create a rich steam, and a “smoker” would go through a pack of HeatSticks just as he would have a pack of cigarettes. But after six minutes, or fourteen puffs, once the tobacco plug is kicked, the holder has to go back into its charging chamber—altogether about the size of a Blackberry circa 2006, or a pack of cigarettes. The device itself costs $90, and a pack of HeatSticks is roughly the cost of a pack cigarettes.
There’s no more second cigarette in the brave new world. iQOS has to recharge between uses, but one regular HeatStick (there’s also a “light” variety, naturally) hits as hard as smoking two Marlboro Reds at once. It takes some getting use to, I’m told. Even heavy smokers who make the switch in the nine countries where iQOS is already available tend to work their way up from a less intense HeatStick.
Other forthcoming reduced risk products may better suit the true habitualist, the smoker who sensibly appreciates his cigarettes as the one fact of life least changed in the last fifty years. This smoker might prefer the yet-unnamed “Platform 2.” A cigarette lighter ignites its carbon tip to heat an inner tobacco concentrate. No further assembly, no lithium ion battery required.
The great benefit to the consumer—ashlessness and diminished stink notwithstanding—is a relatively minimal health risk. With the chemicals produced by burning tobacco out of the equation, puffing your way through a pack or two of tobacco plugs a day won’t expedite your death at anywhere near the same rate as sucking down half so many Marlboros.
It’s too soon of course for a long term study of the iQOS consumer’s longevity. Will switching every Marlboro smoker, and some Camel smokers, over to PMI’s product line curb the fall-off of smokers’ quitting and extend the lifecycle of the profitable consumer? So goes PMI’s gamble.
The lesson here is one we already knew: Big Tobacco doesn’t care whether you live or die—as long as they make money. And, it stands to reason, the fewer consumers Philip Morris products kill, the more money they’ll make. The risk, billions sunk in a failed venture, can’t touch the potential rewards of reintroducing the smoking world to a sustainable nicotine habit. Your move, R.J. Reynolds.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the iQOS generates no carbon monoxide at all and mistakenly referred to the less intense brand of HeatStick as “lights.”
