Entries Tagged 'Tobacco Harm Reduction' ↓

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?