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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