Dear Mr. Simonson,
I am following up with the voice mail I left earlier today.
It was with some dismay that I listened to the replay of your story:
http://news.wpr.org/post/county-bans-snus-chewing-among-employees
The mission of our organization, the Consumer Advocates for Smoke-free Alternatives Association (CASAA), is to "ensure the availability of effective, affordable and reduced harm alternatives to smoking by increasing public awareness and education; to encourage the testing and development of products to achieve acceptable safety standards and reasonable regulation; and to promote the benefits of reduced harm alternatives."
There was significant misinformation and even an outright lie put forth by the individuals featured in your story. For one, snus is a completely "spit-free' product, so there is no reason for Douglas County Administrator Andy Lisak to be concerned about cleanliness when it comes to snus. It is no more noticeable when in use nor "messy" than Mr. Lisak's favorite gum. They may as well ban nicotine gum, too.
Secondly, Wisconsin American Lung Association Policy Director Donna Wininsky states that her organization is encouraging governments and businesses to ban the use of smoke-free products. This is extremely unfortunate because even with all of the increases in tobacco taxes, a statewide smoking ban and massive campaigns against smoking, the adult smoking rate in Wisconsin is still at 19.9% for adults and 20.5% for high school youth (
See ALA), which is only a 5.2% reduction in adult smokers since 2007! That means 94.8% of the people who were smoking in 2007 are either still smoking or have been replaced by new smokers. (The youth rate has fared worse, since the teen smoking rate was actually lower at in 2006 at 19.69%.
See DHS.) If those inveterate smokers would switch to a smoke-free alternative, smoking-related disease and death could be completely eliminated. Ms. Wininsky's claim that "Smokeless tobacco isn’t any less dangerous than smoking cigarettes" is completely untrue and she knows it. All scientific evidence shows that smoke-free tobacco is far less hazardous than smoking. Obviously, smoke-free tobacco does not cause one of the most common and deadly forms of smoking-related disease - lung cancer. Additionally, over 30 years of research and study of snus has proven that smokers who switch to snus reduce their health risks to that of an former smoker and nearly to that of a never-smoker. And while smoke-free tobacco carries an extremely low risk of oral cancers, smokers are actually twice as likely to get oral cancers than smoke-free tobacco users.
Unfortunately, organizations like the ALA believe that all tobacco use should be prohibited, regardless of the low health risks of many modern tobacco products. Their policy is basically that of "quit or die" rather than to accept the truth about the effectiveness of tobacco harm reduction. They cannot fathom the idea that people would be using tobacco with health risks that are comparable to caffeine use. By perpetuating the false belief that smoke-free alternatives are as dangerous as smoking and removing incentives for smokers to switch to these far less hazardous alternatives, Douglas County and the ALA are misleading dedicated smokers into believing that they may as well just keep smoking. Douglas County smoking employees who may have tucked a nearly harmless, invisible, spit-free snus in their mouth, rather than go off on a smoking break, now have no incentive to do so. Mr. Lisak and Ms. Wininsky are fooling themselves if they think that those smokers will quit smoking because the option of smoke-free products to use while working has been taken away from them. It's akin to banning employees from eating fat-free ice cream while regular ice cream is still readily available.
This policy, if implemented statewide, would simply result in continued smoking-related disease and death for thousands of Wisconsin smokers who would have otherwise switched to reduced harm products. We must stop basing policy on half-truths, misinformation and lies.
Please feel free to contact me for more information or if you have future stories on the topic of smoke-free alternatives and would like to get an opposing opinion based on science and fact.
Sincerely,
Kristin Noll-Marsh
Vice President
Consumer Advocates for Smoke-free Alternatives Association
