Friday, June 16, 2017

EU Snus Ban Costs More Lives



A new report from the Swedish Snus Commission underscores the accelerating human toll of the European Union’s unconscionable ban on smokeless tobacco: “…among men over the age of 30, 355,000 lives per year could have been saved if the other EU countries had matched Sweden’s tobacco-related mortality rate.”  Sweden is the only EU nation in which sales of snus are legal.

In 2009, epidemiologist Phil Cole and I, analyzing data from the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, reported in the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health that 274,000 smoking-attributable deaths would be avoided if men throughout the EU had the smoking prevalence of men in Sweden (here).  Four years later, I updated that figure to 291,000 (here).       

The Snus Commission report, available here, was produced by a distinguished group of Swedes.  The commission’s chairman is Anders Milton, a physician and former President and Chairman of the Swedish Medical Association, President of the Swedish Confederation of Professional Associations from 1993 to 2001, and President of the Swedish Red Cross from 2002 to 2005.  His collaborators are Christina Bellander, a journalist who previously headed business development at Swedish TV4 and was a Board Member of New Wave Group AB, Mittmedia AB and the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company; Göran Johnsson, a former member of the Social Democratic Party’s Executive Committee, Board Member of Volvo AB and Chairman of Swedish national television broadcaster SVT from 2011 to 2014; and Karl Olov Fagerström, a WHO-recognized nicotine and tobacco researcher who has authored 150 articles in peer reviewed journals.

The casualty list from the indefensible and immoral EU snus ban continues to grow. 



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