MAQ
[1] Doesn't smokeless tobacco give you oral cancer?
Any risk of oral cancer from smokeless tobacco is so low that we cannot measure it. According to the Surgeon General, 75% of the oral cancers in the United States are caused by smoking (particularly when combined with heavy drinking). Many studies have show that smoking increases your risk about 10 times and that if there is an increased risk from smokeless tobacco, it is perhaps around one tenth. In other words, not only is using smokeless tobacco associated with about 99% less risk overall, compared to cigarettes, but it is also associated with 99% less risk of oral cancer.
[2] If you really care about health, why don't you help people quit rather than promote another type of tobacco?
The people who aren't quitting need consideration too. There are thousands of people and billions of dollars devoted to promoting tobacco abstinence, but about 20% of the population continues to smoke. We are working to help them, which is where we think our efforts are most needed.
[3] Why can't people just quit?
Wouldn't it be great if everyone could just quit using tobacco? Unfortunately we all know people who have tried to quit and haven't been able to. Even with the many methods for helping smokers quit, many cannot seem to walk away from nicotine. If they can't stop using nicotine, and there is a healthier alternative to their habit, shouldn't they have the option of trying it?
And let's not forget that people have the freedom to use nicotine if they wish to. If they decide for any reason to keep using it, there are still good reasons to make safer alternatives available. It would save lives if people wouldn't drive, but we won't make people stop, and we won't stop trying to make it safer just because they keep doing it.
[4] Won't saying it's safer create new users who never used nicotine in the first place?
We understand that this is a possibility, but the net effects for public health will undoubtedly be positive. For every smoker who switched to smokeless tobacco, over 50 non-smokers would have to start using smokeless tobacco to cancel out the health benefits, and that is not going to happen.
In addition, not telling the truth would be a violation of one of the most fundamental rules of health ethics: Experts are obligated to tell people the truth and let them make their own decisions. This includes letting smokers know that they have a much less harmful alternative. But it also means letting non-users know how low the risks from smokeless tobacco are; if they decide that using it is worth those low risks, it is their right to use it (it is not that we want them to do this, but they have the right to make choices about their own health). Those who lie about the risks of smokeless tobacco to trick people into not using it are being paternalistic and unethical.
[5] Isn't it naive to trust anything that comes out of the tobacco industry?
Since we have the evidence, we don't have to worry about the motives of the industry. What the industry is doing is irrelevant to whether the health claims are real or not. Switching from smoking to using smokeless tobacco reduces your health risk whether the tobacco companies say it does or doesn't or whether they make money or not.
[6] Isn't this just another industry lie like "light" cigarettes?
There was never any scientific evidence that light cigarettes would be less harmful, and they were not. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that smokeless tobacco is much less harmful.
[7] I've read that each tin of snuff has the same amount of nicotine as 60 cigarettes. Isn't that a fatal dose?
Yes, and each package of Nicorette gum (110 pieces at 4 mg each) contains more nicotine than about 200 cigarettes and a box of 21 Nicoderm patches (21 mg each) contains roughly the amount of nicotine you would find in 260 cigarettes.
Does this mean that Nicorette and Nicoderm are worse or as bad as cigarettes? Does it mean that using these pharmaceutical products are worse than using smokeless tobacco? Nicotine may be addictive but when considering using tobacco the smoke is what you should be worrying about.
Nicotine users, whether smokers, smokeless users, or pharmaceutical nicotine users, determine how much nicotine they take at a time. If you were determined to overdose on nicotine, a package of patches would be much more likely to do the job than tobacco products. A bottle of Tylenol contains a fatal dose too but is that an argument against using it? You would not use it all at once, so this is really just a scare tactic. After all, your refrigerator probably contains a fatal dose of food, but you are not likely to eat it all at once.
[8] I would like to try switching to smokeless tobacco. Where can I buy it?
Though we do encourage smokers to switch to smokeless tobacco, we are not in the business of selling it or endorsing any particular brand.
A number of different types of smokeless tobacco should be easy to find. Usually, you can find smokeless tobacco wherever cigarettes are sold. And like any other tobacco, it can also be ordered over the internet for home mail delivery.
For more questions, and more in depth discussion of these same quesions, go to our FAQ section.
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