Star Scientific Inc. wants to be the first company seeking approval from federal regulators to sell so-called “modified-risk” tobacco products with reduced toxins. The Petersburg-based company, which makes smokeless tobacco products, said yesterday that it plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration next year for approval to market its products as potentially less risky to consumers’ health.

Sharing a ride with a smoker will give you a much heftier dose of nicotine than having a meal in a restaurant that allows smoking or hanging out at a smoky bar, according to new research.

Philip Morris USA plans to make a bigger push into the still-uncertain market for snus, a Swedish-style oral tobacco, expanding an experiment it is now running in three cities. The nation’s No. 1 cigarette-maker will market snus, using its flagship Marlboro brand name, more broadly this fall, said Michael E. Szymanczyk, chairman and chief executive of Philip Morris’ parent, Henrico County-based Altria Group.

The federal government’s new authority to regulate tobacco products is facing its first major legal challenge. Several tobacco companies filed a lawsuit yesterday claiming that a host of new advertising restrictions—including a requirement that tobacco products must have larger, graphic warning labels covering half of the packaging—violates constitutional rights of commercial free speech.

requiring all tobacco products, including cigars, be stored behind sales counters;
banning the terms “lights” or “mild” for newly introduced cigarettes and in advertising, beginning next year;
eventually requiring larger, stronger graphic warning labels for cigarettes;
requiring stronger warnings for smokeless tobacco;
requiring tobacco companies to report all ingredients used; and

No. 1—biggest U.S. cigarette company and smokeless tobacco company
50.2% share of U.S. cigarette market
56.1% share of moist snuff market
29.8% share of U.S. cigar market
$9.9 billion in cigarette sales
$671 million in smokeless tobacco sales
$233 million in cigar sales
75 billion cigarettes sold, including 63.7 billion Marlboros

Every six weeks or so, the guy from Philip Morris, as his customers still think of him, swings by for a chat. But this summer, salespeople like Winfred Hayes are changing hats. He now works for Philip Morris USA’s parent, Altria Group.

A California jury decided yesterday that cigarette maker Philip Morris USA should pay $13.8 million in punitive damages to the daughter of a longtime smoker who died of lung cancer. The Los Angeles County Superior Court jury voted 9-3 in favor of Jodie Bullock, who is now the plaintiff in the case filed by her mother eight years ago. Betty Bullock of Newport Beach, who smoked Philip Morris-made Marlboro and Benson & Hedges cigarettes for 45 years, died of lung cancer in February 2003.

Something unusual is cropping up alongside the tomatoes, eggplant and okra in Scott Byars’ vegetable garden—the elephantine leaves of 30 tobacco plants. Driven largely by ever-rising tobacco prices, he’s among a growing number of smokers who have turned to their green thumbs to cultivate tobacco plants to blend their own cigarettes, cigars and chew.

Smokers still huddle outside the doors of more than half of America’s hospitals—and 65 percent of Virginia’s—a new study found. But the study, published this week in the medical journal Tobacco Control, says more hospitals are moving to having a completely smoke-free campus. In central Virginia, HCA’s Chippenham and Johnston-Willis campuses went tobacco-free—even banning smokeless tobacco—last year, said Karen Nelson, executive director for marketing.

As chief public-health officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Lawrence Deyton is credited with improving the agency’s tobacco-cessation programs for veterans. Now, Deyton will lead the Food and Drug Administration’s newly created Center for Tobacco Products, which is tasked with regulating the $80 billion U.S. tobacco industry.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulation could be a boon for Big Tobacco, according to economists, analysts and some public-health advocates. The first federal effort to regulate a habit that has roughly one-eighth of all Americans puffing on cigarettes made in Richmond, and that generates tens of billions of dollars a year across the South, came with hope of attacking one of the nation’s top public-health problems.

Philip Morris USA has started test-marketing roll-your-own cigarette tobacco, its first venture into that market. This summer, the nation’s No. 1 cigarette-maker started selling pouches and canisters of L&M brand tobacco in Maine and Michigan, spokesman Bill Phelps said. “It’s a very small market, but it’s growing fast,“ he said.

As of this morning, Philip Morris USA’s Richmond manufacturing plant is the only site where the company makes cigarettes.

Big changes are coming to the tobacco industry, and we’ve ramped up our coverage in the Richmond Times-Dispatch to keep you informed. Tobacco has long been a focus of our coverage—the business has been a key component of Virginia’s economy since soon after its founding at Jamestown. Now more than ever, Richmond is at the heart of the industry.