The past 20 years have seen a flurry of new smoking cessation interventions from media campaigns to high taxes to nicotine patches and other pharmaceutical interventions. One would hope that with so many technological and policy advances, smoking cessation rates would be steadily increasing. Not so, suggests a recent study in the journal Tobacco Control. In fact, over the past two decades, there has been no increasing trend in smoking cessation rates in the American population, despite so many new efforts.
Harm Reduction
The good news is that cigarette sales are declining, and the better news is that some of that success may be attributed to a rise in the popularity of smokeless tobacco products. At least that s the hope of Altria Group Inc, a giant tobacco company that has recently cranked up its production of smokeless tobacco products in the U.S. As tobacco-related diseases take their toll on smokers, some have decided to make the switch from cigarettes to other cleaner nicotine delivery systems. And since these smokeless tobacco products are much less harmful than cigarettes, Dr. Whelan is excited to hear that their sales are increasing.
ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross is off to Vancouver, where he'll speak at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on Saturday, February 18. He'll discuss the importance of using tobacco harm reduction methods to save smokers’ lives. By encouraging smokers to switch from cigarettes to much less harmful sources of nicotine, such as certain forms of smokeless tobacco or electronic cigarettes, we can help greatly reduce the over 400,000 tobacco-related deaths that occur each year in the U.S.
The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) was among the first organizations in the United States to formally endorse tobacco harm reduction (THR) as a way to get smokers to be less risky with their behavior, and when smoking cessation was not successful.
Smokers using a nicotine patch to help them quit are more likely to be successful if, after a relapse, they continue to use the patch, reports an Australian study just published in the journal Addiction. However, as another study recently documented, success comes to only a small portion of those using a nicotine patch.
A new report provides further evidence that even when presented with a clear and graphic illustration of the damage that smoking is doing to their health, smokers still have a hard time kicking the habit.
Unfortunately, harm reduction approaches have yet to be widely accepted for those addicted to cigarettes. A new study by the American Cancer Society illustrates the depth of this addiction and the difficulty some smokers face even when a diagnosis of cancer makes it imperative that they quit. One woman, a smoker whose cancerous lung was removed, explained in an MSNBC interview the draw of cigarettes despite the litany of cessation methods she tried.
As media reports continue to promote misguided claims about the risk of smokeless tobacco products compared to cigarettes, it s clear that the word still isn t out that certain types of smokeless tobacco carry both a significantly lower risk than smoking and can help smokers quit. Case in point: A recent editorial in The Baltimore Sun argues there should be a tax on other forms of tobacco similar to the high tax that is currently placed on cigarettes.
On Thursday, Dr. Ross met with the FDA’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC) to discuss the importance of smokeless tobacco and other reduced risk nicotine delivery systems to curbing the country’s smoking-related mortality rate. Historically, the FDA has had a hostile stance toward tobacco harm reduction, but Dr. Ross hopes to change that, encouraging them to acknowledge the scientific evidence that shows tobacco harm reduction can help people stop smoking and can save smokers’ lives.
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.
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.