The Truth Initiative is a
billion-dollar foundation devoted to tobacco prohibition. Launched as the American Legacy Foundation
with cash from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (here), the
group changed its name in 2015. The
Initiative recently issued a “fact sheet” on smokeless tobacco that is grossly
inaccurate and misleading.
On one hand, it suggests that
smokeless is safer: “Switching completely from smoking cigarettes to using the
least harmful forms of smokeless tobacco (e.g., Swedish snus) may result in
lower health risks to individuals,”…cancer risks are “lower for smokeless
tobacco users than for smokers,” and “…smokeless tobacco use, while harmful, is
less harmful than cigarette smoking. The
least harmful smokeless tobacco products are low-nitrosamine Swedish snus…”
The last statement is
blantantly wrong. As I explained in a
recent post (here), it is
impossible to differentiate risks among Swedish and American smokeless products. There is no basis for the claim that “Harms
from smokeless tobacco products vary by product type.”
The Initiative departs from
mainstream science with an additional assertion: “Smokeless tobacco use causes
precancerous oral lesions, oral, esophageal, and pancreatic cancer.” Their source for that hyperbolic statement is
the same as a recent FDA campaign: embarrassingly weak and misleading
information from Paolo Boffetta and colleagues at the International Agency for
Research on Cancer, debunked here. While actual risk estimates for these
diseases would leave the media and consumers totally unimpressed, the
Initiative omits them all, much as other anti-tobacco agencies routinely do.
Imprecision, hyperbole and
cherrypicked data are the hallmarks of the well-funded and often taxpayer-supported
tobacco prohibition movement. In the
absence of truth and transparency, public health only suffers.