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45
TOBACCO OUTLET BUSINESS
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009
the Ugly
I
n a traditional Western, there are
always good guys and bad guys.
Typically, the good guys emerge
victorious—but only after a lot
of shooting and one or more long,
drawn-out battles.
Such is the unfolding story
of white-topped Tobacco Harm
Reduction (THR) versus black-
hatted public health crusaders.
THR has mounting scientific
evidence and forward-thinking
health-experts
that
support
their view that snus, dissolvable
tobacco and e-cigarettes offer
smokers less-harmful alternatives
to cigarettes. Nevertheless, old-
school public health crusaders are
hell-bent on standing on tobacco-
cessation ceremony and continue
to ruthlessly fight against tobacco
in any form. Their ammunition is
misinformation and blatant lies. But
one by one, they are publicly being
shot down with scientific evidence
and truth.
Consider some of the recent
THR chapters put out by experts
wisely in favor of less-harmful
tobacco alternatives:
• A former Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) official is
urging the FDA to endorse THR
strategies.
Henry Miller, a fellow
at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution and a former official at
the National Institutes of Health
and the FDA, suggests that the
FDA encourage smokers who have
failed to quit through nicotine
replacement therapy products to
try reduced harm alternatives such
as snus, dissolvable tobacco and
e-cigarettes. He recently stated that
the FDA is “passing up a historic
opportunity to mitigate the health
effects of cigarette smoking. Miller
also agreed with the advice of health
policy consultant Scott Ballin who
said the time has come for the FDA
to “abandon the rhetoric of the
tobacco wars in order to achieve a
science-based regulatory structure
that will improve the public health.”
•
University
of
Louisville
Professor Brad Rodu calls the U.S.
Department ofHealth andHuman
Services out on its unscientific,
unethical stance on tobacco
and urges it to embrace THR.
This came after an HHS official
delivered a keynote speech entitled,
“Ending the Tobacco Epidemic:
A Federal Plan.” Rodu stated that
in “a relentless and unscientific
bid to ‘end’ the ‘tobacco epidemic,’
federal government officials are
deliberately misapplying causation
from smoking, a legitimate risk
factor for many diseases, to
tobacco in general.” Rodu called
the tobacco prohibition theme
“factually incorrect and dangerously
unethical” in that it treats all tobacco
products as equally hazardous, not
accounting for the fact that smoke-
free products are significantly safer
than cigarettes. He cited a UK
report that the consumption of non-
combustible tobacco is 10 to 1,000
times less hazardous than smoking
and that nicotine on its own is not
especially hazardous. He urged the
HHS to “embrace the compelling
scientific foundation for tobacco
harm reduction and educate the
nation’s 45 million smokers about
its significant health advantages.”
• Dr. Gilbert Ross, the executive
and medical director at the
American Council on Science
and Health, this year penned
the Forbes op-ed “How Health
Regulators are Killing American
Smokers,”
suggesting that skeptics
at the FDA, the American
Cancer Society and the CDC are
“stonewalling” America’s smokers
about harm reduction. He says
that the U.S.’s “tunnel-visioned”
public health regulators are
“killing” smokers with their “willful
resistance” to THR strategies and
their abstinence-only attitude,
which refuses to acknowledge the
documented benefits of smokeless
tobacco products such as snus in
Sweden (a phenomenon referred to
as the “Swedish experience”).
• Eli Lehrer, vice president of
Chicago-based free-market think
tank Heartland Institute wrote in
praise of THR and a different way
of looking at nicotine.
A review of
available scientific evidence shows
that nicotine or tobacco per se does