Smokeless Tobacco
Jason Kuznicki on May 30th 2006
Philip Alcabes has an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post today on harm-reduction strategies and tobacco use:
“Tobacco: deadly in any form or disguise” is the slogan of the World Health Organization’s World No Tobacco Day tomorrow. The claim is false: Tobacco is not deadly; the harm is in the smoke. A policy that confuses innocuous tobacco with harmful smoke is responsible for millions of avoidable deaths each year worldwide.
Cigarette smoke is a deadly delivery device for a benign but habit-forming product: nicotine. Nicotine isn’t especially dangerous — about like caffeine. Good policy toward tobacco use would reduce the grave harm of smoking by replacing cigarettes with non-smoked forms of nicotine for the addicts. They might use nicotine safely forever, if harmless delivery systems were widely available.
Instead, nicotine abstinence is the policymakers’ only approach to tobacco. Like other abstinence campaigns (alcohol prohibition, sexual abstinence before marriage, just saying “no” to drugs), this one is both moralistic and ineffective.
The human cost of the nicotine-abstinence policy is doleful. More than 430,000 U.S. deaths each year — one out of every five — can be attributed to smoking. This is 10 times our death rate from car crashes, 30 times the rate from AIDS — an unprecedented toll that is a testament to the inadequacy of 40 years of quit-smoking policy.
Permanent nicotine maintenance? Wouldn’t that represent a moral failure? On this presumption the public money moves, and where it goes determines our society’s relationship to nicotine. Alternative delivery systems do exist, although these aren’t always, ahem, culturally palatable. And while smokeless tobacco contains carcinogens, it is far less likely to cause cancer than cigarettes. Even smoking pipe tobacco — an entirely agreeable bad habit, by the way — would be less dangerous and represent an improvement. Gradual harm reduction, however, doesn’t get government money. Wars do. Go figure.
Filed in The Bistro, The Bureau
I’m a graduate student doing cancer research, and I recognize the dangers of tobacco (including smokeless tobacco) - and I share your sentiment on pipe tobacco. In life, there are guilty pleasures. He who is fully informed of and accepts certain risks in the pursuit of moderate indulgence is truly free.
“Nicotine isn’t especially dangerous — about like caffeine.”
This is completely and utterly false and responsible! Just google the words nicotine & LD50–the results are too numerous to link, so here’s just the first one that comes up, from Malaysia’s National Poison Center’s bulletin:
http://www.prn2.usm.my/mainsite/bulletin/1995/prn2.html
Sample quote: “Nicotine is one of the most lethal poisons known.”
The dangers of nicotine absorption to humans, whether adult, child, or fetus, are well-established. Some links will also point out that cigarette smoke at least burns up most of the nicotine you might get. Consider then that smokeless delivery systems deliver the full dose. There’s so much toxic nicotine left in the spit from a tobacco user that the link above warns:
“Ingestion of 1 cigarette (or 3 butts) or drinking saliva expectorated by tobacco chewer (which is often collected in a can) should be considered potentially toxic for children.”
ONE CIGARETTE!!
Making false and irresponsible statements like claiming nicotine is as safe as caffeine in the Washington Post–even in the op-ed section–is shocking, and I hope other people will do as I intend, and write a letter demanding a correction.
That last post should have read “irresponsible” in the second line, obviously.
I’ll turn down the volume a little to point out that I am in full agreement with the libertarian ideals behind Jason’s post–my ONLY objection was to the unfounded statement that nicotine is as safe as caffeine. People should be able to risk themselves in whatever way they like, as long as they then refuse to partake in public health assistance programs, AND as long as they are well-informed about the dangers. The columnist is making an argument analogous to arguments for legalizing drug use (because the illegality of some drugs is their biggest risk). The jury still appears to be out on the exact relative safety of smoked and smokeless tobaccos.
Some point to research that says users of spit tobacco are 4 times as likely as non-users to develop oral cancer. Others point to evidence that says smokeless users are 90-98% less likely to develop any sort of cancer.
I’d say those relative numbers can support the columnists case.
My earlier comment was to address what I thought was a dangerously false claim of COMPLETE safety of nicotine in any form other than smoke; a claim made by no one else anywhere that I could find on either side of the smokeless tobacco issue. Besides the tissue damage known to be caused by chew or spit tobacco, nicotine addiction itself can have troublesome lifelong effects.
Any minors reading this article for straight-talk on smokeless tobacco should do more thorough research, and seriously re-think using any kind of tobacco at all. I may support an adult’s right to risk his or her own health, but kids owe it to themselves to become adults before making dangerous decisions like that.
ive been chewing tabacco since i was 9 and im perfectly fine!