The U.S. desperately needs tobacco harm reduction, starting with reducing the harm from the pronouncements of federal officials. Case in point: FDA Commissioner Robert Califf’s April 11 tobacco testimony before the House Oversight Committee.
Dr. Califf made so many false statements that I penned a response for Real Clear Health. Following are some additional observations related to his testimony.
Readers know that I don’t tolerate doctors who claim they saw many people die from the ravages of tobacco, when those patients actually died from the smoke! Similarly, I can’t let the federal official in charge of regulating tobacco get away with mislabeling it in the same fashion as the World Health Organization and the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. Califf wrongly claimed that harm reduction is an industry term. My late colleague Dr. Philip Cole and I used that term in an article published by the American Council on Science and Health in 1995. The Institute of Medicine, hardly a tobacco industry tool, titled a 2001 report, “Clearing the Smoke: Assessing the Science Base for Tobacco Harm Reduction (here).”
For 30 years, I’ve been saying, without challenge, “Nicotine, when consumed without the harmful constituents of cigarette smoke, is no more harmful than caffeine.”
Fifteen years ago Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical societies, agreed with me, finding, “…that smokers smoke predominantly for nicotine, that nicotine itself is not especially hazardous, and that if nicotine could be provided in a form that is acceptable and effective as a cigarette substitute, millions of lives could be saved.”
Dr. Califf should stop supporting the cigarette industry by
trashing vastly safer cigarette substitutes. That's called tobacco harm escalation.
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