Unmodified tobacco has essentially the same risk as modified tobacco. It has always been a myth that BT makes cigarettes more addictive and more harmful (BT manipulates tobacco used in cigarettes to make it consistent so that every one you smoke is the same as the last, despite lots of year to year variances in tobacco. Weather effects tobacco as it does every other plant). What causes the harm in cigarettes is inhaling the products of combustion. It doesn't matter if it is organic unmodified tobacco or heavily manipulated tobacco, the harm is pretty much the same.
There really is only one thing the FDA needs to do to make a sea change to reduced harm products, and that is to stop lying. Simply tell the truth that there are ways of using tobacco/nicotine (smokeless tobacco and
vaping) that are several orders of magnitude less harmful then inhaling smoke and people will make the rational choice to the less harmful product.
Sweden now has the lowest daily smoking rate in the world at 5%. It did not take any massive government intervention. People simply switched to snus because they knew it was less harmful then cigarettes. The same thing is happening in the UK with vaping. The government, for the most part, is truthfully informing people on the relative risk, and vaping has already replaced smoking in a good percentage of people.
The real problem in the US is the decades of lying by government and public health groups on the relative risk of different tobacco products. About 90% of the public believes smokeless tobacco has essentially the same risk as cigarettes, while the truth is that ST is about 99% less harmful then inhaling smoke. The same thing has been happening with vaping. When I started in 2009 (if my memory serves me right) somewhere in the 20% range believed vaping was as harmful as cigarettes, now it is in the 60% range.
People are not going to make the switch if they are grossly misinformed as to the relative risk. The FDA and CDC needs to start telling the truth as to the relative risk of different tobacco products. That is pretty much all that needs to be done.
