Genie (6/1/2011)

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REALLY? People take prescription drugs??? Well duh!

What does that have to do with people getting cancer from cigarettes? Lots of people die every year from lung cancer, heart failure and other ailments because of cigarettes.

Second hand smoke is bad too.

Genie (4/27/2011)

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Abstinence is the best solution, healthwise.

Thus, for at least some people, some of the time, less harmful ways to get nicotine deserve attention from public health authorities. Anecdotal evidence shows that it might work. The country with the lowest smoking-related cancer and cigarette smoking rates for men in the Western world, Sweden, also has the highest rates of smokeless tobacco use. People who use snus, nicotine gum, or lozenges as a replacement for cigarettes, likewise, see many of the same short-term positive health benefits as those who quit tobacco use altogether. (Longer-term trends look promising, too, but, as with any public health issue, the data are incomplete.)

Public health strategies that continue to discourage smoking while accepting and, in certain cases, even promoting the use of other tobacco or nicotine products deserve a try. In fact, Rodu and some others are trying just this in Owensboro, Kentucky. (Results won’t be available for a few years.) Absent significant evidence to the contrary, efforts that ban the use of all tobacco/nicotine products—particularly those that appear less harmful than cigarettes—may well do more harm than good.

Tobacco harm reduction advocates the use of reduced-risk nicotine products, which allows addicted smokers to curtail their smoking without forcing them to eliminate nicotine altogether — an extraordinarily difficult task. Nicotine is the major reason inveterate smokers fail to quit: the craving for nicotine is as strong as that for heroin and cocaine. Yet the spectrum of smoking-related disease is not caused by nicotine, but by the products of tobacco combustion inhaled many times a day for decades. Nicotine is addictive, but it is not itself harmful.

That explains why tobacco harm reduction saves lives. Its goal is to reduce the devastating health risks of tobacco. The success of this policy in Sweden over the past four decades is widely accepted — but not among America’s tunnel-visioned health regulators. Thanks to snus, moist smokeless tobacco in small pouches, Swedish men have the lowest smoking rate and the lowest rate of smoking-related disease and death in Europe.

Yet our public-health officialdom ignores or denies these data, adhering to the mantra “There is no safe alternative to smoking.” They ignore or deny the results demonstrating that snus-type smokeless tobacco is about 99% less harmful than cigarettes. On the other hand, studies of the traditional cessation methods show that these products — patches, gum, inhalers, medications — simply do not work. But that inconvenient fact has not deterred our officialdom from insisting that smokers stick to these useless products. Their abstinence-only attitude refuses to acknowledge the documented benefits of smokeless tobacco as a cessation aid, not to mention the apparent benefits of newer products, such as dissolvable tobacco and “clean nicotine” delivery systems that include electronic cigarettes.

“Some studies have questioned these treatments, but the bulk of clinical trials have unequivocally endorsed them,” said Dr. Michael Fiore, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention and the chairman of the panel that wrote the guidelines. Dr. Fiore, who has reported receiving payments from drug makers, said that “there are millions of smokers out there desperate to quit, and it would be a tragedy if they felt, because of one study, that this option is ineffective.”