Rather than encourage smoking cessation and harm reduction, the US Centers for Disease Control have spent over a decade undermining products that were not Big Pharma. That has been and remains a mistake. Smoking kills, and anything that helps reduce or eliminate it, from patches to gums to vaping to hypnosis, should be available.

A new study says there is a good reason why Sweden has dramatically lower lung cancer rates than much of Europe; they use nicotine pouches instead. Smoking has declined in the US, primarily thanks to awareness campaigns from nonprofits like us, lawmakers and public health experts debate the safety of nicotine pouches, but for those already smoking there need to be more ways to get to inhale carcinogens less.

Tobacco companies are fine with that. Philip Morris was out in front promoting vaping over cigarettes, and had a great deal of success in other countries, but the Obama administration instead declared war on it.(1)



As smoking continues to decline, and good riddance - you are next, alcohol - tobacco companies would like to make money doing things less harmful. Pouches are far less harmful. Sure, some epidemiologists will trot out sketchy correlation, like they do with cigars, pipes, and vaccines, but that's not science, it is advocacy and in the case of tobacco, funded by groups who got rich off the Master Settlement with tobacco companies decades ago and need a new war to win.

Faced with declining cigarette sales, tobacco manufacturers in the U.S. are turning to tobacco-free nicotine pouches, such as Velo and Zyn, which are among the few segments of the industry that’s growing. In the closing days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the first government-approved pouch, ZYN.

While blocking the company from competing with Big Pharma patches and gums by saying they can help reduce smoking.

There's already enough data to see how they're being used. The Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies looked at surveys from the Census Bureau’s Tobacco Use Supplement and combined that with quitting behavior before and after 2019, when Snus received a Modified Risk Tobacco Product designation from the Trump administration, allowing them to note they reduce harms from smoking.

Uptake is still low, at 2.5% it is barely above chewing tobacco, but in rebuttal of Obama-era claims that any nicotine not made by Johnson&Johnson was a gateway to smoking, uptake by non-smokers is essentially non-existent.

That means government can take off the brakes. CDC doesn't need to manufacture another epidemic, like they did with vaping and prediabetes, they can actually help prevent disease by not looking for new ways to lobby Congress for money.

The biggest users were instead people who had recently quit smoking. That is the goal to get America healthier. We don't need to subsidize organic food and supplements, we'd help a lot of people by making it easier to quit smoking. Young people are already unlikely to smoke or drink alcohol so awareness campaigns are reducing future customers.

Let's not duplicate the vaping problem, where government declared war on it and that created a fad among young people. They have even less interest in this than Copenhagen, progressive social authoritarians don't need to again pretend they are saving lives when it is really just about another culture war to fight.

NOTE:

(1) The federal government made 10,000 products illegal while insuring the only companies that could survive regulatory roadblocks to approval were large conglomerates. They declared it a youth epidemic - if any young person had tried it one time in a year.