Premier was an American brand of smokeless cigarettes which was owned and manufactured by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR). Premier was released in the United States in 1988. It was the first commercial heated tobacco product. However, it was difficult to use and tasted unpleasant; as a result, it was unpopular with consumers. A commercial failure, the brand was a significant financial loss for RJR and was quickly taken off the market.

Design and development

The cigarettes looked like conventional cigarettes, but featured a hard casing and contained only a small amount of processed tobacco along with flavor beads. Lighting a carbon tip on the end of the cigarette would heat the tobacco and the flavor beads, allowing the inhalation of a nicotine aerosol with minimal smoke and no tar. Developed as a reaction to a growing anti-smoking sentiment, Premier cigarettes were designed to reduce or eliminate unhealthy side effects associated with smoking, both to the smoker and to the people around the smoker. RJR hoped that smokers concerned about these health effects would switch to Premier instead of quitting smoking. Research conducted in the United States found that less than 5% of smokers enjoyed the taste. Research in Japan was even less promising: reportedly, researchers were explicitly told, "This tastes like shit." Lighting the cigarettes with sulfur matches caused a reaction between the sulfur and the carbon tip that resulted in an odor that RJR's own chief executive officer F. Ross Johnson described as "like a fart." Finally, they were frustratingly difficult for smokers to draw on.

While RJR itself questioned whether the device functioned adequately as a nicotine delivery device, activists derided it for its potential for use in delivery of street drugs such as crack cocaine. The American Medical Association and other organizations recommended that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should restrict it or classify it as a drug.

In 1989, after spending an estimated $300 to $325 million to develop and deploy Premier, R. J. Reynolds pulled the device from the market after only months. Total losses from the failure are estimated at $800 million to $1 billion.

R.J. Reynolds reintroduced the concept behind the Premier cigarette as the Eclipse brand in the 1990s.

Tylee Wilson

Tylee Wilson was the CEO of RJR Nabisco, the then parent company of RJR. Controversy arose when J. Paul Sticht, then the chairman of the board of directors, noticed a new Reynolds building in Winston-Salem. His driver told him, "That's where they're going to work on that smokeless cigarette."

See also

  • Tobacco smoking

References

  • RJR's Secret Project Spa - initial development concept of a safer cigarette
  • Search For a Safe Cigarette: A History