The Misleading And Harmful Public Message About Smokeless Tobacco is a report published on Biomed Central, the report is well worth reading if you are a smokeless tobacco user, selected paragraphs include :-

The use of Western smokeless tobacco (ST) products is associated with a very small risk of life-threatening disease (with estimates in the range of a few percent of the risk from smoking, or even less). This means that smokers can realize substantial health benefits by switching to ST, an obvious substitute. But consumers and policy makers have little chance of learning that ST is much less dangerous than smoking because popular information provided by experts and advocates overstates the health risks from ST relative to cigarettes.

The negative health consequences of smoking cigarettes are well known. What is less well known is that not all tobacco products create similar levels of risk. In particular, use of Western smokeless tobacco (ST) is substantially less harmful than smoking cigarettes. This should not be surprising, given that ST use does not expose the body to the harmful combustion products and assault on the lungs that result from smoking. But even many health experts do not realize there is a major difference, perhaps because of repeated messages about “tobacco” (usually referring just to cigarettes), which imply that all products made from this plant have the same health implications.

Health advocates, particularly those in public service, have an affirmative ethical duty to tell the truth. It is difficult to justify keeping the truth from people, even when knowing it might be harmful; it is clearly unjustified when it would be beneficial.

Read the report and draw your own conclusions.

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Snuff, smokeless tobacco & The EU is a title we’ve created for a report by ASH Snuff EU Smokeless Tobacco in 2003.

This was a response to the positive information coming out of Sweden, (and other countries) who have a higher than normal percentage of their population using smokeless tobacco products such as SNUS as a alternative to cigarettes.

The report is well worth a read, quotes from the article include :-

Purpose of tobacco control.
The ultimate purpose of tobacco control campaigning and organisations should be clearly stated: in our view it is to reduce the burden of disease and death, mostly from cancer, cardio-vascular disease and lung disease, arising from tobacco use. The aim is not in itself to campaign against tobacco. Because of the dominance of the cigarette market, in most situations those two strategies coincide. However, there may be some situations where they conflict – where this is the case, we give priority to reducing disease. Such a case arises where two conditions are met:

a) Where the use of a tobacco product is substantially less hazardous than cigarettes;
b) Where that tobacco product may substitute for cigarette use or facilitate increased smoking cessation at individual and population level.

Smokeless tobacco also produces no environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and therefore eliminates an important source of disease in non-smokers and children. These are very substantial benefits in reduced risk to anyone that switches from smoking to smokeless tobacco and we believe the pubic health community has a moral obligation to explore this strategy. It is likewise ethically wrong to actively deny users the option to reduce their risk in this way.

This report is interesting when read in conjunction with other health reports that we’ll be adding to this section shortly.

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