Altria, Anticipating FDA Rule, Is Developing Reduced-Nicotine Cigarettes -- Update
November 02 2017 - 6:52PM
Dow Jones News
By Jennifer Maloney
Marlboro maker Altria Group Inc. said it has developed ways of
producing reduced-nicotine cigarettes and aspires to become the
U.S. market leader in noncombustible tobacco products such as
e-cigarettes, ahead of potential federal requirements for tobacco
companies to change their products.
The Food and Drug Administration in July said it hopes to
mandate a reduction of nicotine in cigarettes to nonaddictive
levels and to encourage the development of less harmful products,
an announcement that sent shares of Altria and other tobacco
companies tumbling.
On Thursday, Altria's Chief Executive Marty Barrington told
investors that the Richmond, Va., company for years has been
preparing for "a new axis of competition." He noted that Altria
supported the 2009 legislation that gave the FDA regulatory
authority over tobacco.
"Of course Altria is ready for the introduction of innovative
reduced-risk products," he said. "After all, we helped make it
possible."
Altria has developed technologies to reduce nicotine in
cigarettes should the FDA require it, including tobacco-leaf
treatments and tobacco seed varieties with "substantially reduced
nicotine levels," said the company's general counsel, Murray
Garnick. Altria is producing small amounts of tobacco from those
seeds for product development, he said.
Company executives also said Thursday that they plan to seek FDA
authorization in 2018 and 2019 to market their Copenhagen snuff and
MarkTen e-cigarettes as safer than traditional cigarettes. The
company said it would submit health-claim applications for several
other products over the next four years.
Through a partnership with Philip Morris International Inc.,
Altria hopes to sell a heat-not-burn device called IQOS, with
accompanying Marlboro-branded tobacco sticks, in the U.S. Altria
hopes to market that too as safer than cigarettes, a health claim
currently under consideration by the FDA.
The company said it is broadening its portfolio of vaping
products, developing new ones in-house, seeking acquisition
opportunities and making a minority investment in Avail Vapor LLC,
a chain of vape stores and manufacturer of vaping liquids.
Altria executives said the company has been conducting research
on nicotine reduction since the 2009 passage of the Tobacco Control
Act, which in addition to granting the FDA authority over tobacco
opened the possibility that the agency could mandate nicotine
reduction in cigarettes.
The executives said Altria has studied whether such a
requirement would achieve its intended effect -- prompting smokers
to quit or switch to less risky products -- or whether it would
backfire, causing people to smoke more cigarettes to compensate.
The company didn't disclose its findings.
Research funded by the FDA and National Institutes of Health has
shown that when nicotine was nearly eliminated in cigarettes,
smokers were more likely to quit or seek their nicotine fix from
less harmful alternatives such as e-cigarettes or nicotine gum,
compared with smokers who continued using cigarettes with normal
nicotine levels.
Nicotine itself doesn't cause cancer but does hook people on
cigarettes, which contain other harmful compounds that kill 480,000
people in the U.S. each year.
Mr. Garnick, Altria's general counsel, stressed to investors
that it could take years for the FDA to implement a
reduced-nicotine rule and that the agency may have to respond to
hundreds of thousands of comments as well as legal challenges if
the rule "is not grounded in science and evidence." Any required
reduction in nicotine would have to be technically feasible for
manufacturers, and "sensorily acceptable for consumers," he
added.
Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 02, 2017 18:37 ET (22:37 GMT)
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