Entries Tagged 'Tobacco Harm Reduction' ↓

Tommieboy, you raise a good point and one which goes to the heart of this issue.

How do you produce a less harmful cigarette and who stands in the way?

The answer; almost everybody. The lawyers will have a field day and the cigarette companies know it. The Federal government has no clue how to go about this and the public health community derides anything to do with cigarettes.

Not particularly helpful to our cigarette smokers, who would benefit from having a choice.

The technology exists today to produce a less harmful cigarette. Let’s be clear - I didn’t say safe - I said, less harmful.

This is the very essence of PREPs (Potentailly Reduced Exposure Products.)

Whether you agree with government intervention or not - the Federal government is the only one capable of establishing the framework.

Perhaps this could be done under FDA.

Logically if FDA requires benchmarking of tar, nicotine, CO and other smoke constituents then the next future step could be reductions in specified smokes contituents. Unless the FDA (or similar) mandates it then the arguments for not doing it will continue.

In this context the public health community should do the public health of smokers a favor and back off - permitting development and sale of PREP-like products. Would cigarettes be instantly safer? No! Would it be the first step - absolutely. Is this worth doing? Yes.

Now that Swedish Match joined USSTC in supporting the Philip Morris push for FDA Regulation, followed then by North Atlantic Trading and Dosal, the odds of approval in the Senate, after almost certain approval in the House, appear to have gone up, especially since NACS, with its 50 State set of supporters, has also joined the bandwagon by not opposing the bill. Swedish has argued that an Obama-Clinton-McCain world might even lead to including cigars and other tobacco products so it is better to grab the best that can be had especially given Waxman’s concession on allowing a smokeless sampling amendment.

Yet the harm reduction elements of the bill, making it difficult if not impossible to deliver such products, coupled with compelling smokeless to adopt the same warnings as cigarettes, when everyone now knows that smokeless is less harmful, has caused a rift in the tobacco control community with those seeking less harmful products, less supportive, than those who represent the California extremist wing who support it.

Politics sure does make “strange bedfellows.” On which side of the fence do you stand?

Smoking may be declining in the US but there are still around 60 million smokers here and in terms of harm reduction they are increasingly sidelined. This assumes that they choose not to migrate to smokeless - and not everyone will.

That leaves the cigarette business in a bit of a quandry - and the public health community too - strange bed fellows to say the least.

I don’t buy it that smokers will migrate en-masse to smokeless. It may have worked in Sweden but I content it won’t work (completely) here.

This leaves US cigarette smokers without harm reduction choices at present. Is this the way to treat your customers?

There’s real progress to be had for harm reduction in getting this news out to the general public.

There are advantages in harm reduction by smokers migrating to smokeless products. However, it would also be helpful if the relative harm for the various type of smokeless tobacco were made public. They are not all equal - but it seems quite clear that snus is the least harmful. If this is correct - we should say so.

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)

The following information was delivered to my email the other day! Tell me what your thoughts are? Is it Possible to smoke harm free? I find this extremely interesting. What are your thoughts?

Millions of consumers who smoke cigarettes are looking for acceptable alternatives to satisfy their cravings for nicotine - anyplace and anytime. Whether consumers want to avoid the harmful byproducts of smoking tobacco or consumers want to enjoy the sensation of smoking in a public place, bar or restaurant, the Ruyan Electronic Cigarette not only simulates the experience of ordinary cigarette smoking, it also delivers nicotine to the system to satisfy the craving.

The Ruyan Electronic Cigarette Offers Significant Benefits to Users:

• Free of tar and the dangers associated with the many chemicals commonly produced by a lit, ordinary cigarette
• It does not require heat or ignition by flame
• One 16 mg cartridge is equivalent on average to 20 - 30 cigarettes
• Does not produce second-hand smoke
• Not regulated by the FDA
• It can be used in most “No-Smoking” areas and poses no fire danger

In honor of March Madness,  Michael Siegel is running his own tournament, complete with regions and brackets, to determine the anti-smoking organization champion for most ridiculous secondhand smoke health claim. Check out is his link listed in the blogroll, The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary. Then come back to the tobaccotoday.info blog and tell fellow tobacco bloggers who you think is the anti-smoking organization champion for the most ridiculous secondhand smoke health claim!

NOW CHECK THIS OUT! In a recent edition of the Buffalo News Brad Rodu challenges the current FDA proposal as ignoring a life-saving strategy!

In an op-ed in Buffalo News, Dr. Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine with an endowed chair in tobacco harm reduction research at the University of Louisville, said the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which aims to give the Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco products, is “fatally flawed” because it would “effectively prevent the nation’s 45 million smokers from learning that smokeless tobacco products are vastly safer alternatives.”   

The message about smokeless tobacco products is “critical to the life-saving strategy known as ‘tobacco harm reduction,’” Dr. Rodu said.  He cited a recent article in the medical journal Lancet, which said tobacco product regulation “should promote complete cessation of nicotine product use as the preferred option, but also encourage existing smokers who are unable to stop smoking to adopt a less hazardous source of the drug,” and “should therefore apply the levers of affordability, promotion, and availability in direct inverse relation to the hazard of the product, thus creating the most favorable market environment for the least hazardous products.”   The Royal College of Physicians, whose report was the basis of the Lancet article, said that “low nitrosamine smokeless tobacco products may have a positive role to play in a coordinated and regulated harm reduction strategy which maximizes public health benefit,” Dr. Rodu noted.  The pending FDA legislation is the opposite of such a rational approach to helping smokers, and the bills fail to acknowledge that nicotine itself does not cause the diseases that kill smokers, he said.  ”Congress should rewrite those portions of H.R. 1108 and S. 625 that impose irrational and dangerous limitations on the communication of truthful information about smokeless tobacco and its relative risk vis-a-vis cigarettes,” Dr. Rodu said (Buffalo News 11/12).

IS BRAD RIGHT OR WRONG? DO YOU KNOW OF ANYONE THAT HAS USED MOIST TOBACCO TO KICK THE SMOKING HABIT? DO YOU THINK CONGRESS WILL GET THE RIGHT MESSAGE? WHAT IS THAT MESSAGE? IS THERE ANYTHING WE CAN DO? IS THERE ANYTHING WE SHOULD DO? ANY THOUGHTS ON HOW PM WILL APPROACH THIS NOW THAT THEY ARE TESTING MOIST TOBACCO? DO YOU BELIEVE AS BRAD MENTIONS THAT NICOTINE IS NOT THE EVIL? SO MANY THOUGHTS I HAVE BUT WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS ISSUE?