FTC Action Requires Firms To Report Research Fairly In Ads

WASHINGTON—A federal agency that polices the accuracy of U.S. advertising has sent a message to industry that it must report scientific results fairly and completely. Last month the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. reached an agreement on an FTC complaint brought against a 1985 advertisement by Reynolds that discussed the findings from a major National Institutes of Health-funded clinical trial aimed at reducing deaths from coronary heart disease. They government had accused Reynolds of making false and misleading claims about the results of the study. Although Reynolds did not concede any errors in its advertisement, it has agreed in the settlement not to misrepresent in future ads the results of this or any other scientific study that involves the relationship between cigarette smoking and health. The settlement also reaffirms the commission’s right to regulate as commercial speech the type of ads that Reynolds ran in some two dozen major publications, even though the ads do not explicitly mention a Reynolds product. Reynolds had argued that the ads were paid editorials and, therefore, protected by the United States Constitution’s freespeech provision. Fair And Accurate “A company must be careful to use scientific studies in a way that the results are reported fairly, accurately, and completely,” says Judy Wilkerfeld, an FTC lawyer who helped bring the original complaint against Reynolds in 1986. “Although there was nothing factually incorrect in their ad, its implied claim that these results should have caused scientists to reinterpret the evidence about the health effects of smoking was clearly incorrect, and misleading.” The $115 million study, known by the acronym MRFIT (Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial), has generated considerable controversy since its results were published in 1982. The study enlisted 12,000 men with a combination of risk factors—high blood pressure, high serum cholesterol levels, and heavy cigarette smoking. It reported no significant difference between the mortality rates of the group whose risk factors had been treated aggressively and those who received only annual check-ups from their doctor. But those overall results mask dramatic changes within groups. It was these findings, according to the FTC, that Reynolds chose to ignore when its ad declared that the MRFIT researchers had found no evidence that smoking can cause heart disease. For example, the trial showed that mortality rates for heavy smokers who had quit in the first year of the seven-year trial were half of those who continued to smoke. Those results were consistent with previous studies, the FTC noted. Instead, the Reynolds ad assured readers that any connection between cigarettes and heart disease was merely something that many scientists have elected to believe. “It is an opinion, a judgment, but not scientific fact,” stated the ad, which ran under the headline “Of cigarettes and science.” The settlement, which is expected to go into effect next month after a 60-day comment period upholds the long-maintained FTC position that companies must provide consumers with all information that would be relevant to their purchase of a product. But legal experts say its application to the keynolds case also could help scientists who see their work being twisted or misinterpreted by companies trying to peddle a product. “What this says is that the manufacturers and sellers of products that try to take data and convert it to their own purposes will be held to an ob jective standard of accuracy and completeness,” says Matthew Myers, executive director of the Coalition on Smoking or Health, “And it may be a higher standard [than would normally be the casel because of the public health issues involved.” The coalition, made up of the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Society, had urged the FTC to take action against the Reynolds ad. Myers believes that the FTC’s decision to stick with the case has served as a bulwark against similar efforts by other companies. ‘This was an area where the tobacco industry was beginning to expand its message,” he says. “The FTC action has stopped that development, and as a result we haven’t seen them spend their dollars on this type of deceptive advertising.” However, a spokeswoman for Reynolds says that the company has run nothing like the MRFIT ads since 1985 and that it has no plans to develop such ads in the future. She adds, “But I can tell you that, before we do, we’ll check with our lawyers to make sure that we don’t say anything we’re not supposed to.”

FTC Action Requires Firms To Report Research Fairly In Ads

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