Source: NPR.org, INFORUM
The Food and Drug Administration has gathered a group of scientists and other experts to study flavored melt-in-your-mouth tobacco products.
The panel, meeting this week, will hear from two camps of stop-smoking advocates: those who worry that dissolvables are a gateway to smoking and others who say they help people kick the habit.
The government regulates dissolvables like other smokeless products such as chew and snuff and the warning labels are similar.
Companies can’t market dissolvables as a stop-smoking aid. Some health officials and a group of U.S. senators have called them “nicotine candy” and want the FDA to tighten the rules.
Kenneth Warner, a health economist at the University of Michigan, says the FDA is hearing from both sides of a long-running debate.
“The one extreme are the folks who believe that no product containing nicotine or tobacco should be permitted on the market unless it has undergone review,” Warner says. “The other extreme is to say that any product that superficially appears to be significantly less risky than cigarette smoking should be permitted on the market to allow consumers to have a less hazardous option.”
What SheSays: Dissolvables shouldn’t be the product that gets you into your tobacco habit.
But if you are seriously addicted to cigarettes and dissolvables are the only thing to get you to the next step of quitting, they might be an option.
Bottom line, dissolvables aren’t a healthy choice, but if they’re a substitute for something more damaging, the product could be beneficial to many smokers.