Lying About Snus and E-Cigarettes Is Like Blocking Access to Clean Heroin Needles
From: Reason
Two public health researchers condemn the “information quarantine” surrounding safer nicotine products.
In a blistering indictment of lying in the name of “public health,” two prominent tobacco researchers slam medical organizations and government agencies for suppressing information about the huge difference in risk between cigarettes and other nicotine products. Writing in The International Journal of Drug Policy, Lynn Kozlowski, a public health professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and David Sweanor, an adjunct law professor at the University of Ottawa, argue that a quasi-official “information quarantine” surrounding smokeless tobacco and e-cigarettes endangers people’s lives based on implausible utilitarian concerns coupled with “emotionally charged moral reactions” of “disgust and contempt.”
Back in 2003, Kozlowski and another co-author looked at what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) were saying about smokeless tobacco, which is at least 50 percent and may be more than 90 percent less hazardous than cigarettes (depending on the diseases considered and the type of smokeless tobacco, with low-nitrosamine, Swedish-style snus the least dangerous). The CDC and SAMHSA, ostensibly devoted to educating the public about health issues, not only overlooked the huge difference in risk; they falsely claimed smokeless tobacco is just as dangerous as cigarettes.
