Two Queensland academics have launched an argument calling for Australians to be informed about so-called snus chewing tobacco, and even encouraged to use it in place of standard tobacco.
Experts suggest chewing tobacco proposal
July 4, 2007
Smokeless tobacco should be legalised and promoted to smokers as a less dangerous alternative to cigarettes, public health experts have urged.
Two Queensland academics have launched an argument calling for Australians to be informed about so-called snus chewing tobacco, and even encouraged to use it in place of standard tobacco.
But the controversial proposal has been criticised by others in the field who say publicly plugging the tobacco product would be irresponsible and counter-productive.
Professor Wayne Hall and Carol Gartner, from the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland, said it was time Australia dropped its snus ban, instituted in the 1980s.
“We think it would be good public health policy to encourage inveterate smokers to adopt less harmful ways of using nicotine to reduce the disease burden caused by tobacco smoking,” they wrote in the international journal PLoS Medicine.
The oral tobacco is widely used in Sweden, where a recent study of 280,000 men showed smokers were at least 10 times more likely to get lung cancer than those who used snus.
The Swedish experience was a prima facie case for recommending the product, the authors said.
Prof Hall said it was paternalistic to deny smokers accurate information about, and access to, snus on the grounds that it was still a tobacco product.
But Simon Chapman, a professor of public health at the University of Sydney, said no form of tobacco should be promoted.
The practice would only encourage smokers to use both products, taking advantage of snus while drinking in smokefree bars, he wrote in the same journal.
“Transnational tobacco companies are already marketing snus using slogans that mention smoking, such as, ‘When you can’t smoke, snus’.”
Prof Chapman and his colleague Becky Freeman also said snus was a culturally-specific product that was unlikely to take off in Australia like it had in Sweden.
It would be more effective to focus on high-dose pharmaceutical nicotine sold under-the-counter in pharmacies, to reduce smoking, they said.
