Those who support tobacco harm reduction as an effective option for reducing the terrible toll of smoking on Americans health face an uphill battle, as media coverage continues to promote misleading claims about the safety and effectiveness of harm reduction products. And so we were dismayed to read an extremely one-sided USA Today article on an upcoming FDA meeting that will discuss the safety of tobacco lozenges and strips, known as dissolvables.
Harm Reduction
If we frequently promote useful smoking cessation aids such as smokeless tobacco and electronic cigarettes, it s because there are promising signs that these methods deliver a much higher quit rate than the methods that are conventionally promoted which have frustratingly low rates of success.
Researchers from the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard School of Public Health are suggesting that electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) adversely affect users airways, thus raising concern about the safety of these products.
Yet they ignored the relative dangers of actual smoking.
The new paper, published in the journal Chest, provided 30 "healthy" smokers with e-cigarettes, the electronic devices that deliver a dose of nicotine in a vaporized liquid, thereby eliminating the dangerous combustion products of cigarette smoke. After five minutes of using an e-cigarette, the participants lungs showed signs of airway constriction and inflammation, researchers found.
Beyond being banned from smoking in public places or inside the workplace, more and more smokers are finding that their habit may bar them from being hired in the first place. There is an increasing trend among employers to refuse to hire smokers or anyone who tests positive for nicotine, which may include even those who use smokeless tobacco or nicotine patches while in the process of quitting.
Because of the fresh start afforded by the new year, it s a good bet that more than a few of the 70 percent of American smokers who would like to quit will give it a go. However, according to a recent CDC study, only one in 10 of those would-be quitters will actually succeed.
Nearly 70 percent of adult smokers want to quit, and 52 percent have attempted to do so in the past year, according to data collected by the CDC as part of the 2001 to 2010 National Health Interview Surveys. But what ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross found most shocking about the survey results, which were published in the CDC s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was that fewer than half the smokers who visited a health professional in the past year had been advised to quit.
A new study has found more evidence to link cigarette smoking to one type of skin cancer, supporting earlier studies that have observed significant associations between the two. This study, published in Cancer Causes Control, found a significantly increased risk of squamous cell carcinoma among female smokers.
In a two-part series for his blog, Tobacco Analysis, ACSH advisor Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, details the most serious barrier yet to tobacco harm reduction. Dr. Siegel explains how the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommendations to the FDA, which pertain to the marketing of modified risk tobacco products (MRTPs), will, if implemented, present a blockade to the development and approval of such products. It would, in fact, be a death blow to tobacco harm reduction and to our nation s 45 million addicted smokers.
We were disappointed to learn that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has taken an unfavorable stance toward modified risk tobacco products (MRTPs), advising the FDA to set high hurdles for the manufacturers of such products before they can market them as less harmful alternatives to cigarettes. The IOM report released yesterday concluded that MRTPs, which include a variety of smokeless tobacco products and clean nicotine delivery systems (such as e-cigarettes), should not be marketed as less harmful until researchers manage to accumulate a wide range of favorable evidence regarding their composition, efficacy, addictive
The results of a survey on substance use among U.S. teenagers were released yesterday. The survey, conducted by the University of Michigan for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, found that smoking and alcohol consumption are historically low among this demographic but marijuana use is more common than it has been in three decades. The national survey included 47,000 eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders and revealed that, while less than 12 percent of them reported smoking cigarettes within the past month, nearly 26 percent said they had smoked pot within the past year.
The good news is that, in many states across the country, fewer teenagers are smoking cigarettes but the bad news is that many of them have begun to smoke flavored cigars instead. While flavored cigarettes were prohibited by the FDA in 2009, flavored cigars, including Black & Mild cigarillos, are exempt from the ban.
The executive arm of the European Union, the European Commission is, once again, considering an end to its ban on the export of Swedish snus to other EU countries. The Commission, which has considered lifting the ban several times before, has frequently been made aware of the comparatively low smoking and cancer rates in Sweden, the only EU country where snus (smokeless tobacco contained in small sachets) is legally available. However, the EU Commission may soon respond to the demands of its citizens: The results of a large survey reveaI strong support for lifting the ban on snus.