Quit or die. That’s the message cigarette smokers get from the public health community. But in fact, smokers who have trouble quitting have some rarely mentioned alternatives to total abstinence from tobacco: it’s a method of intervention called “tobacco harm reduction.”
Some 450,000 Americans die prematurely each year because they smoke. Yet if cigarette smokers would just switch to safer products, we could cut the yearly number of tobacco-related deaths to 10,000 or less.
Tobacco harm reduction converts smokers to these safer products — reduced-risk nicotine products — thus curtailing their smoking without forcing them to give up the nicotine they crave. And this is key. Nicotine, while highly addictive, is not in itself harmful. Cigarette-related diseases are caused by the inhalation of smoke — specifically, the products of combustion. The nicotine in cigarettes is not what causes cigarette-related diseases.
Given that, there are a number of harm reduction options:
Products called snus and pellets allow nicotine to be absorbed through the mouth. When the nicotine has been absorbed, the user simply discards the small, teabag-like sachet of snus; the pellets dissolve without any residue. Neither of these options involves the dipping and spitting associated with chewing tobacco — which, unfortunately, is still what most people think of when they hear the words “smokeless tobacco.”
Although there is a prevailing belief that oral uses of tobacco cause mouth and throat cancer, there is very little evidence to support such a claim. Whatever health risks might be posed are truly minimal compared to cigarette smoking.
Observations in Sweden, for instance, confirm the relative health benefits of snus. There is a major disparity in smoking rates between Swedish men and women. For the last 50 years, lung cancer mortality among Swedish women has been among the highest in Europe; not surprisingly, many Swedish women smoke cigarettes. Conversely, most Swedish men who use tobacco use snus, causing them to have the lowest rate of lung cancer among men in the European Union.
Let them smoke Carbon!
450,000 presumed dead and not one single certified death certificate that states, as cause of death, smoking killed someone. Fabricated and created numbers help people write articles.
Well, it doesn’t take a genius to look at smoking as the activity that led to death. My father, a 3-pack a day man, died of lung failure. But I guess because it didn’t say “smoking” was the cause of death, that it had no bearing, huh? I’d say “zero certified death certificates saying smoking is the cause of death” means zero deaths from smoking is indeed a fabricated number.
Nicotine can hardly be called harmless since it is a psychoactive drug which means it alters brain chemistry.
But it is true that nicotine is not the bad guy when it comes to the harmful heath effects of smoking.
It is tobacco and the harmful effects of tobacco combustion that deliver the tar and many of the other harmful and carcinogenic ingredients in cigarettes.
Because cigarettes are a legal product and nicotine does not alter your level of consciousness or make you high, does that mean it is harmless?
There are many legally available products that do not alter your consciousness and have been proven to be harmful in the long run – including certain products that have come to be known as “food”.
The key to understanding and dealing with drug addiction lies not in substituting other less harmful ways to get drugs (although that does work well for some and is a legitimate harm reduction strategy). The answer is in identifying WHY people use them in the first place.
Addressing social issues in a society (poverty, violence, poor education, unemployment) would go a long way to removing the reasons why people feel the need to use in the first place.
AND just in case you are wondering, the smoking facts indicate that smoking rates are highest among the population with the lowest level of education, income, and employment.