PROHIBITIONIST BILL IGNORES LIFE-SAVING STRATEGY

The News recently published a column calling for Congress to pass the
Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, giving the federal
Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco.
Regulation of tobacco may be reasonable, but this bill is fatally
flawed. It would effectively prevent the nation's 45 million smokers
from learning that smokeless tobacco products are vastly safer
alternatives. That message is absolutely critical to the life-saving
strategy known as "tobacco harm reduction."

Harm reduction was the focus of a recent article in the prestigious
medical journal Lancet, which made a compelling case that tobacco
regulation based on scientific and medical principles:

" . . . should promote complete cessation of nicotine product use as
the preferred option, but also encourage existing smokers who are
unable to stop smoking to adopt a less hazardous source of the drug."

" . . . should therefore apply the levers of affordability,
promotion, and availability in direct inverse relation to the hazard
of the product, thus creating the most favorable market environment
for the least hazardous products . . . "

The Lancet article is based on a new report by Britain's Royal
College of Physicians (which published the first comprehensive study
of smoking and health in 1962, two years before the U.S. Surgeon
General's first report.) One of the college's key conclusions is that
"low nitrosamine smokeless tobacco products may have a positive role
to play in a coordinated and regulated harm reduction strategy which
maximizes public health benefit . . . "

The pending congressional legislation is the polar opposite of such a
rational approach to helping smokers. While the bills recognize that
nicotine is powerfully addictive, they fail to acknowledge that
nicotine causes none of the diseases that kill smokers.

The bills would require the FDA to all but deny smokers information
about smokeless tobacco, an effective nicotine delivery vehicle that
has been proven to be 98 percent safer than cigarettes.

In other words, the bills offer no effective harm reduction options
for smokers, a situation that the Lancet article said is "perverse,
unjust and acts against the rights and best interests of smokers and
the public health."

Congress should rewrite those portions of H.R. 1108 and S. 625 that
impose irrational and dangerous limitations on the communication of
truthful information about smokeless tobacco and its relative risk
vis-a-vis cigarettes. As written, these bills reflect tired myths and
a tobacco prohibitionist bias.

In light of a wealth of published data and the profoundly
illuminating Lancet article, Congress should recognize that tobacco
harm reduction strategies that encourage inveterate smokers to switch
to smokeless tobacco and thereby save their lives are solidly
grounded in medical science and are now supported by the mainstream
medical community.

Brad Rodu is a professor of medicine in the endowed chair in tobacco
harm reduction research, University of Louisville.