E-Cigarette Falsehoods from the President of the American Medical Association

 

American Medical Association President Bruce A. Scott, M.D., authored an article, posted on the AMA website today, “Flavored e-cigarettes pose dire threat to youth and public health,” that includes the following: “Tobacco products cause cancer. Overwhelming evidence demonstrates that multiple types of cancer are linked to tobacco products, including e-cigarettes”

This is grossly incorrect, as Dr. Scott intentionally conflates the risks of tobacco use with those of smoking. He provides links to another AMA article that discusses youth and E-cigarette and vaping associated lung injuries (EVALI), but cancer is not mentioned there.

In today’s piece, Dr. Scott writes, “The use of tobacco in various forms remains the nation’s leading cause of preventable death.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it claims the lives of 1,300 Americans every day, or about one in every five deaths annually. As an ear, nose and throat surgeon in Louisville for more than 30 years, I’ve seen up close the devastating damage that cigarettes and e-cigarettes cause—mouth and throat cancers that too often change lives forever or end lives prematurely.” (emphasis added) The article linked here by Dr. Scott discusses smoking only.

Conflation of tobacco and smoking is a common practice among prohibitionists, as I have noted before (here, here, here), but it is beyond the pale for the president of the AMA to treat “tobacco use” as a synonym for “smoking”, and worse, to unequivocally claim that he has “seen up close” that e-cigarettes cause mouth and throat cancer.

 

Call It Whatever You Want -- Tobacco Harm Reduction Saves Smokers’ Lives

 

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.