Very cool. He was one of the speakers at yesterday's meeting and sat next to me most of the afternoon. He was the one and only harm reduction person that addressed the Committee for Scientific Standards on Modified Risk Tobacco Products. The other presenters from tobacco companies pretty much focused on regular tobacco cigarettes.
The "public health" experts from such organizations as ACS, AHA, and CFTK were claiming that the FDA has to set the very highest standards for modified risk tobacco products and apparently want to ignore 30 years of evidence on how much safer snus is. The FDA should start all over for every tobacco product that wants to make a modified risk claim. There should be (according to them) toxicology testing for each ingredient in a tobacco products, followed by animal studies, pre-clinical behavioral research, pre-clinical cognitive research, clinical trials, more clinical trials, etc. In fact, the rep from AHA made a big deal about Myocardial Infarction and Acute Coronary Syndrome having a higher tendency to be fatal among snus users than non users. Um-hmm. And let's conveniently ignore the overall differences in CV disease rates and deaths between smokers who continued smoking and those who switched to snus.
These self-righteous prigs can't seem to kick loose of their fantasy that if they can just prevent smokers from having any safer alternative, smokers will all magically give up all forms of tobacco use ("quit altogether") tomorrow.
Ironically, one of the speakers said something to the effect of "If you have a patient on the operating table, you're not going to tell him to wait around until the next clincial trial is completed." He went on to advocate all these high standards and billions of dollars worth of testing to be required. He didn't seem to catch the fact that smokers are the patients on the operating table and don't have time to continue smoking another 10 or 20 years until the "public health" advocates say it is ok for them to switch to a less harmful tobacco product.
