Instead of encouraging smoking cessation and harm reduction, the US Centers for Disease Control has spent more than a decade undermining products other than Big Pharma. That has been and continues to be a mistake. Smoking kills, and anything that helps reduce or eliminate it, from patches to gum, vaping to hypnosis, should be available.
A new study says there’s a good reason Sweden has dramatically lower lung cancer rates than much of Europe; Instead, they use nicotine pouches. Smoking has declined in the U.S., largely thanks to awareness campaigns from nonprofits like us, lawmakers and public health experts debate the safety of nicotine pouches, but for those who already smoke there need to be more ways to inhale fewer carcinogens.
Tobacco companies agree with that. Philip Morris was a leader in promoting vaping instead of cigarettes and was very successful in other countries, but the Obama administration declared war on it.(1)
As smoking continues to decline, and bye-bye (you’re next, alcohol), tobacco companies would like to make money doing less harmful things. The bags are much less harmful. Sure, some epidemiologists will trot out an incomplete correlation, as they do with cigarettes, pipes, and vaccines, but that’s not science, it’s advocacy and, in the case of tobacco, funded by groups that got rich off the Master Deal with tobacco companies decades ago and need a new war to win.
With cigarette sales sagging, U.S. tobacco makers are turning to tobacco-free nicotine pouches, such as Velo and Zyn, which are among the few segments of the industry that are growing. In the waning days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the first government-approved bag, ZYN.
At the same time, it prevents the company from competing with Big Pharma’s patches and gum by saying they can help reduce smoking.
There is already enough data to see how it is used. The Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies examined surveys from the Census Bureau’s Tobacco Use Supplement and combined them with smoking cessation behavior before and after 2019, when Snus received a Modified Risk Tobacco Product designation from the Trump administration, allowing them to find that they reduce the harms caused by smoking.
Absorption remains low at 2.5%, just above chewing tobacco, but in rebuttal to Obama-era claims that any nicotine not manufactured by Johnson&Johnson was a gateway to smoking, acceptance by non-smokers is essentially non-existent.
That means the government can remove the brakes. The CDC doesn’t need to manufacture another epidemic, like they did with vaping and prediabetes; In fact, they can help prevent disease by not looking for new ways to pressure Congress for money.
The biggest users were, however, people who had recently quit smoking. That’s the goal of making America healthier. We don’t need to subsidize organic foods and supplements; We would help many people by making it easier for them to quit smoking. Young people are already unlikely to smoke or drink alcohol, so awareness campaigns are reducing future customers.
Let’s not duplicate the problem of vaping, on which the government declared war and that created a fad among young people. They have even less interest in this than Copenhagen; Progressive social authoritarians no longer need to pretend they are saving lives when in reality this is just another culture war to fight.
NOTE:
(1) The federal government outlawed 10,000 products while ensuring that the only companies that could survive the regulatory hurdles to approval were large conglomerates. They declared it a youth epidemic, if some young person had tried it once a year.
#Snus #works #stop #smoking #reduce #damage
