A study by the joint International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) TobReg group seeks a new strategy to regulate cigarettes based on product performance measures with the goal of moving away from current measures involving the quantity of the smoke generated and the use of Tar, Nicotine and Carbon Monoxide values as measures of human exposure. Instead it recommends establishing median levels for 9 identified toxicants per mg nicotine in existing cigarettes and prohibiting the sale or import of cigarette brands that have yields above these levels (Tobacco Control April 1, 2008). But the authors acknowledge that no science exists to validate their choice of the 9 toxicants identified out of the 4,000 in cigarette smoke and that eliminating these 9 may increase the presence of others that may be more harmful. According to Prof. Michael Siegel of Boston University’s School of Public Health a regulatory approach that acknowledges that it is unclear whether it will make cigarettes safer or more harmful, “is too baffling… to comprehend” and the only way to describe it is “insanity.” Siegel noted that there is no evidence that the approach would even lower actual exposure to the regulated constituents, and it might even raise the risks of smoking by increasing the levels of non-regulated toxicants. He writes that the tobacco control movement is now admitting to “making recommendations that are not based on any science.” “TobReg wants to regulate cigarettes merely for the sake of regulating cigarettes, not because that regulation will make cigarettes safer,” he writes. He concludes that if this scheme is implemented, it would mislead the public about the risks of cigarettes on the market and transfer the “fraud that the cigarette companies have been found guilty of committing (by marketing “light” cigarettes as being safer alternatives) over to the federal government,” (tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com 4/3)

When FDA Commissioner von Eschenbach argued against FDA regulation of the tobacco industry earlier this year, he commented that lowering the nicotine content in cigarettes may be precisely the wrong step to take since doing so would require smokers to smoke more cigarettes to get the same nicotine dose. According to the TMA (www.tma.org), we are now seeing a study from Professor Neal Benowitz of the University of California in San Francisco released in November stating that lowering nicotine content in cigarettes “can make it easier for long-time smokers to cut down on their consumption.” So which is it?

The Center for Disease Control’s recent study indicating that the low hanging fruit of smokers able and willing to quit has been plucked with the result that in recent years the decline in smoking rates has significantly diminished. This suggests to some that an alternative to cigarette smoking be found to reduce the amount of harm caused by tobacco consumption. Many analysts of smokeless tobacco claim that smokeless is 98% (or as much as 99.9%) less harmful than smoking. Many public health advocates argue that any claims about less harmful forms of tobacco will legitimize the existence of tobacco in the market and refuse to support less harmful forms of tobacco use even though they know that many pharmaceutical products designed for cessation purposes use tobacco-based nicotine. Should the public health community support less harmful tobacco products even if such support may run counter to the out and out anti-tobacco stance that many have taken till this date? If public health fails to support less harmful tobacco products, are they really supportive of public health? Where are you?

We understand that in Russia there are significant pricing differences for the same brands. Does anyone have a read on current cigarette brand prices in Russia?