the American domestic market for cigarettes were as follows: Philip Morris, 42.2 percent, RJR Nabisco, 30.6 percent, Brown & Williamson (which is owned by a British company B.A.T.), 11 percent, Lorillard 7.1 percent, American Tobacco 6.7 percent and the Liggett Group 2.4 percent. The industry generated in 1997 over $200 million in revenues and employed (not including tobacco farmers) about 2.6 percent of the total American labor force.
Big Tobacco has used its huge cashflow and market position to defeat or dilute regulatory measures which it has regarded as inimical to its interests. One of its most important victories occurred in 1906 when it succeeded in persuading Congress not to classify tobacco and its ingredients as a drug under the Food and Drug Act, thus ensuring that for nearly a century tobacco products remained outside the jurisdiction of the federal Food and Drug Administration. Until very recently, cigarettes and other tobacco products have been excluded from drug regulation, public health laws and consumer product safety legislation at state and federal levels. According to Gostin et al, "cigarettes have traditionally been one of the most underregulated products in America."
The Threat to Health. As early as 1921, the University of Minnesota Medical School noted a sharp increase in the incidence of lung cancer among men in the United States. Lung cancer cases rose from .6 per 100,000 in 1914 to 1.7 per 100,000 in 1925. In the early 1930s, A. Roffo, director of the Argentine cancer institute, discovered that there was a relation between lung cancer and the coal tars contained in cigarette smoke. Franz Muller of the Cologne Pathological Institute pointed out in 1939 that the incidence of lung cancer in males had increased six fold since 1914. With most such reports confined to medical journals, the 1940s were the heyday of the cigarette. And certainly, as Kluger said, "nobody thought of the lords of tobacco a...