The Gateway | Wednesday, 16 November, 2005

Researcher defends grant to study smokeless tobacco

Chloé Fedio

Iris Tse

NO SMOKING U of A researcher Carl Phillips is exploring cigarette alternatives.

The makers of Copenhagen and Skoal chewing tobacco have provided a $1.5 million grant to one U of A researcher for his study of smokeless tobacco.

The controversial grant was approved by the University’s board of ethics, providing the funding to Dr Carl V Phillips, expert in health policy and epidemiology and assistant professor of public health in the faculty of medicine.

“The salient underlying fact is that smokeless tobacco is a very good substitute for cigarettes from a health perspective, and from a perspective of providing nicotine—it’s much, much safer than the use of cigarettes,” Phillips said.

Les Hagen, executive director of the anti-smoking group Action on Smoking & Health, agreed that nicotine itself is not so harmful when delivered in forms other than tobacco, but that smokeless tobacco is not excluded from this.

“I don’t buy into the ‘quit or die’ argument. I think that we should be looking at safe ways of delivering nicotine. And we know that nicotine itself is not very harmful in comparison to tobacco,” Hagen said.

Phillips, however, emphasized that there’s overwhelming scientific evidence to suggest that smokeless tobacco is significantly less damaging than using cigarettes, and claims that ethical violations by some in his field are misleading the public, intentionally providing misinformation on the topic by lumping all forms of tobacco in the same category.

“Why don’t people make the change? I think the answer is quite obvious—and that’s what a lot of my research points towards—that they don’t know it. And the reason they don’t know it is that there’s a concerted effort by anti-tobacco activists to keep people from learning this,” Phillips said.

Phillips explained that smokeless tobacco doesn’t necessarily refer to chewing tobacco, and that there are cleaner products available, like solid piece, similar to hard candy, or tobacco contained in pouches, similar to teabags, that are ingested orally.

“The standard anti-tobacco position, this notion that everybody is going to suddenly quit smoking tomorrow or next year, is utterly absurd, and yet somehow they continue to act as if that’s the case,” he said.

“Frankly, they’re doing nothing short of killing people. Every year that passes where they don’t give people the option of switching to a reduced-risk alternative ... is another year that millions of people smoke that might not have smoked, and thousands of them die as a result,” he said, emphasizing that it’s important to make research on smokeless tobacco available to the public to make it a viable option to smoking cigarettes.

However, Hagen said smokeless tobacco shouldn’t be overemphasized.

“Smokeless tobacco is indeed harmful, and it’s highly addictive, and it has the potential to kill when used exactly as intended. It is not as harmful as cigarettes—in fact cigarettes are far more harmful than smokeless tobacco—but smokeless tobacco is not without harm,” Hagen said.

And while Hagen supports harm reduction, he questioned the ethics of Phillips’ research.

“I think harm reduction is an issue that requires further examination, there’s no question about that in my view; however, the issue at hand is, should the University of Alberta accept large sums of money from a tobacco company to conduct research on harm reduction?” he questioned.

Conversely, Phillips said that criticizing the source of funding usually comes down to observers not liking the results of a study, and having no grounds to condemn it on its merits.

“I think that the whole funding question is a huge distraction from actual real work,” Phillips said.

Furthermore, Phillips said the money, provided by US Smokeless Tobacco Company (USSTC), is unrestricted in its results, as he only has to focus his research on smokeless tobacco relating to health issues.

“Bias—if that’s the word you want to use—in research is almost never driven by funding from any particular side,” he said.

But Hagen said that while research on harm reduction is useful, focusing on smokeless tobacco is limiting research on other nicotine alternatives.

“Let’s get away from smokeless tobacco for a minute, cause there’s a hell of a lot more to harm reduction than smokeless tobacco. In fact, the most popular form of harm reduction is nicotine replacement,” he said, pointing to the patch, the gum, and the nicotine inhaler.

“There certainly are merits in researching harm reduction as applied to tobacco use, there’s no question, but good, sound research in science is independent and objective and is not sponsored by a tobacco company.”

All research projects at the University’s are assessed from the standpoint of an ethics review, and acceptance of any funding requires the approval of the chair of the department in which the principal investigator is appointed, the approval of the dean of that faculty and subsequent University approval. The University was unavailable to comment as of press time.

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