Category: cigarettes information

The government’s “nudge unit” wants to encourage the use of smokeless nicotine cigarettes, banned in many countries around the world, in an attempt to reduce the numbers killed in the UK by smoking diseases each year.
The Cabinet Office’s behavioural insight team – better known as the nudge unit – wants to adopt the new technology because policy officials believe the rigid “quit or die” approach to smoking advice no longer works. Rather, they want nicotine addiction to be managed to help smokers who otherwise won’t quit – an approach the unit believes could prevent millions of smoking deaths. Ten million people in the UK smoke, and smoking claims 80,000 lives a year.
The nudge unit’s first annual report, published on Thursday, says the unit – the first of its kind around the world – has, in the face of criticism, implemented a series of measures they believe could save thousands of lives a year, as well as £100m over the course of the next parliament.
Ideas already being rolled out include “nudging” people to donate organs by asking someone to opt out rather than opt in when filling out an online driving licence application. The report also says the government is to change tax forms to tell people how many people in their area have paid their taxes ahead of them.
Now the unit wants to explore and encourage new products that deliver nicotine to people’s lungs but without the harmful toxins and carcinogens in tobacco smoke that kill.
The annual report reads: “It will be important to get the regulatory framework for these products right, to encourage new products. A canon of behaviour change is that it is much easier to substitute a similar behaviour than to extinguish an entrenched habit (an example was the rapid switch from leaded to unleaded fuel). If alternative and safe nicotine products can be developed which are attractive enough to substitute people away from traditional cigarettes, they could have the potential to save 10,000s of lives a year.”
Current alternatives to smoking range from smokeless tobacco to the Swedish snuff-like product Snus, which is illegal in the UK. Versions of smoke-free cigarettes are illegal in Australia, and banned in Canada, Brazil, Singapore and Thailand because side-effects haven’t been tested.
But experts have advised the UK government that the nicotine contained in some new, smoke-free cigarettes is no more harmful than caffeine in coffee. A Cabinet Office source said: “A lot of countries are moving to ban this stuff; we think that’s a mistake.”
John Britton, professor of epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, told the Guardian that on top of the current smokeless range – which includes electronic or “e-cigarettes” that simulate smoking by producing an inhaled mist – there are three or four devices in different stages of development. But he said some companies have been reluctant to develop this technology because they had expected it to be as tightly controlled as pharmaceutical drugs.
Britton said: “If a manufacturer makes a health claim for anything then it becomes a drug, and drugs have to be regulated with tight controls. The current nicotine replacements are sold as drugs; however, e-cigarettes contain nicotine but get around this by making no health claim and so can be sold freely, but with little or no information on safety or standards. What we’re asking for is a regulation change to bring all nicotine products into a light-touch regime that will guarantee reasonable purity and safety standards but make them as available as cigarettes in a shop.”
The Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is looking into approving these devices for use. If it finds in their favour, the government is likely to push for them to be placed prominently in shops alongside tobacco cigarettes, where they would be sold at a cheaper rate.
The unit is keen to engage with those critics who believe its analysis and intervention in people’s behaviour is “nanny statism”.
David Halpern, the unit’s head, told the Guardian: “As with seatbelts and the smoking ban, these ideas were unpopular at first but after a while when you explain them to people, they understand and say, ‘Yeah, alright then.’
“A year in,” Halpern added, “we’re much more confident about how well this can work, and the early trials have also made us much more confident about public acceptability. There’s no doubt it can save many lives and hundreds of millions of pounds. In fact, our problem has become that we have so many inquiries from across Whitehall, we have to turn down many of the requests for help.”
By Allegra Stratton
guardian.co.uk

Bite-sized dissolvable “orbs” that look like breath mints and melt in your mouth are the tobacco industry’s latest attempt to fight falling U.S. cigarette sales.
Charlotte is one of two test markets for Winston-Salem-based Reynolds American’s newest products: dissolvable, smokeless tobacco lozenges that come as orbs, sticks or strips.
The products all contain less nicotine than cigarettes, between .5 and 3 milligrams instead of 12 to 15 milligrams. And, Reynolds spokesman David Howard said, they meet a “societal expectation.”
“There’s no secondhand smoke, no spitting and no cigarette butt litter,” Howard said.
But health officials still worry about the risks of smokeless options.
Smokeless tobacco users may not get lung cancer, health experts say, but they risk mouth cancer, gum disease and tooth loss. Prenatal dangers for pregnant women also still exist.
“There are no safe tobacco products,” said Dr. Matt Carpenter, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina who’s researching the effect of smokeless products on smoking habits.
Huntersville, N.C., resident Joey Hodge, who’s smoked for almost five years, sees the appeal of smokeless products that won’t be as tough on his lungs or make him smell like smoke. But the 20-year-old isn’t sold on Reynolds’s newest offering.
“They were definitely not the greatest thing I’ve ever tasted,” Hodge said. Plus, he added, the products “really didn’t do much” to satisfy his nicotine craving.
Hodge’s reaction isn’t the sort tobacco makers are hoping for. As cigarette sales slide because of the health risks and social stigma, tobacco companies are counting on smokers like Hodge to fuel the new smokeless market. The dissolvable products sell for about $2 for a 12-pack – comparable, Reynolds says, to its other smokeless products.
“They can enjoy tobacco pleasure without bothering others and without having to leave the workplace, or the restaurant or the bar,” Howard said.
Analysts say new laws banning cigarettes in public places, like the ban on smoking in restaurants and bars that took effect in North Carolina last January, are among the factors driving a steep decline in cigarette sales.
“In recent years you’ve seen smoking banned in most states in most bars and restaurants. That kind of takes away the fun,” said Phil Gorham, industry analyst for investment firm Morningstar.
In its second quarter earnings report last month, Reynolds reported the number of cigarettes sold in the U.S. fell 4.4 percent. Gorham said companies like Reynolds can combat falling sales by increasing prices in the short term, but they’ll eventually need to diversify revenues.
While American sales of cigarettes drop 3 percent to 4 percent every year, the market for smokeless products grew 3 percent in 2009 and 7 percent in 2010, said Mary Gotaas, tobacco industry analyst for researcher IBISWorld. This year, smokeless sales are expected to jump 8 percent, Gotaas said.
While Reynolds is testing its new dissolvables, Richmond, Va.-based rival Philip Morris has its own product in the works: a dissolvable tobacco stick.
The growth of smokeless products worries some public health advocates who think the new products appeal to children. During the first round of testing, the orbs’ packaging resembled Tic-Tacs, creating concern that children might confuse them with candy, said Dr. John Spangler, professor of family health and community medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
For this round of testing, there’s larger packaging and new warnings. Packages now say “This product contains nicotine and is for adult tobacco consumers only” and “There is no safe tobacco product,” in addition to one of four required FDA warnings.
The Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee of the FDA is holding hearings exploring the implications of smokeless products. Right now, all tobacco products must be age-restricted and kept behind the counter, just like cigarettes.
Warning labels on smokeless tobacco products must cover at least 30 percent of the packaging and every product must carry one of four messages: “Smokeless tobacco is addictive,” “This product can cause mouth cancer,” “This product can cause gum disease and tooth loss,” or “This product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes.”
Howard said there’s no expectation that smokeless dissolvables will be regulated less strictly than other tobacco products. But Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, one of 12 senators who called for the hearings, called dissolvables the latest way for tobacco companies to stay “one step ahead of the sheriff.”
One issue on the committee’s agenda: the potential use of smokeless tobacco products as quitting aids. Gotaas said that appeal is one of the factors driving smokeless sales.
Dean Torrance of Charlotte, a smoker for 20 years, has tried, and failed, to quit. She said smokeless products may be just what she needs. “I would like to be able to do smokeless to get me to stop,” Torrance said.
But doctors say there are safer ways to quit smoking. Both Spangler and Carpenter recommend their patients use tested and proven medications, such as nicotine replacement pills and patches, instead of other tobacco products with unknown consequences that could keep them addicted.
Said Carpenter: “The very best thing that anybody can do for their health, if they’re a smoker, is to quit all tobacco products completely.”
By Eleanor Kennedy
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