Smokeless Nicotine Products Could Reduce The Colossal Health Burden Of Smoking

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Main Category: Smoking / Quit Smoking
Article Date: 05 Oct 2007 - 0:00 PDT

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More studies should be carried out to decide whether it might be possible to swap smoking tobacco with medicinal nicotine and smokeless tobacco, and thus reduce the enormous burden of bad health and premature deaths that smoking causes, especially amongst the poor. You can read about this in a Viewpoint article published in The Lancet, this week's edition.

Professor John Britton, Division of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Nottingham, UK and Dr Richard Edwards, Department of Public Health, University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand, explained that "meeting the challenges of implementing effective tobacco control and nicotine harm reduction policies, both nationally and internationally, needs the creation of dedicated, autonomous, and fully resourced national (and where appropriate international) nicotine and tobacco product regulatory authorities."

The article is based on a report published by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) on October 5th, 2007, and also coincides with the raising of the legal age for purchasing tobacco in the UK from 16 to 18 years.

The writers explain that during the last century 100 million people died prematurely as a result of smoking. They say the estimate for this century is around one billion people. The majority of smoking related deaths that will take place during the next two decade will be of people who smoke today. Unless a smoker gives up now, they stress, he/she runs a 50% chance of dying prematurely.

The writers compare smoking with smokeless tobacco, as well as safer nicotine substitutes. They reveal the paradox of Swedish snus, which is 90% less harmful than smoked tobacco, but is banned in several European countries.

"Some argue that health professionals should not condone any use of nicotine, and also that encouraging use of alternative nicotine products, particularly smokeless tobacco, would invite abuse of the market by their commercial producers. Others argue that if smokeless tobacco products are an effective and less hazardous substitute for smoking it would be in the public interest to harness that potential benefit, particularly if the Swedish pattern of predominant gateway progression from smoking to smokeless tobacco use could be realized in other countries," the authors write.

The authors believe that it is perverse and unjust that there are virtually no effective harm reduction options available for smokers - this situation is unjust and acts against the rights and best interests of smoking people and public health.

"The consequence of failing to intensify tobacco control efforts, and to address the current imbalance in nicotine product regulation, will be the unnecessary perpetuation of current smoking by millions of people, especially in disadvantaged communities, and a continued epidemic of avoidable death and disability. Specifically, cigarettes and other smoked tobacco products will continue to be freely available with few restrictions on their safety or content...most of the millions of smokers alive today will therefore continue to smoke tobacco, and half will die as a result," they conclude.

http://www.thelancet.com

Written by: Christian Nordqvist
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