Mitch Zeller (new head of FDA's Center for Tobacco Products) on tobacco endgame and harm reduction

[Bill Godshall]

Reflections on the ‘endgame’ for tobacco control
Mitch Zeller (2013)
Reflections on the

This article was just published yesterday, and is probably Mitch's last article before he was hired by FDA.

There is a spectrum or continuum of tobacco and medicinal products that aim to do the same thing—deliver nicotine to the user. But the toxicity associated with those products varies dramatically. At one end of the spectrum is the conventional cigarette, which is designed quite deliberately to create and sustain an addiction to nicotine. Smoke particles deliver nicotine to the lungs and through the bloodstream to the brain in less than 10 s. Cigarettes kill half of all long-term users and are expected to claim the overwhelming majority of the projected 1 billion deaths from tobacco in this century if trends continue.3

At the other end of the spectrum is the current generation of medicinal nicotine products such as gum, patches and lozenges. Made without tobacco (though the nicotine is derived from tobacco), these products pose significantly less risk and have been approved by regulatory bodies around the world as both safe and effective for tobacco cessation.

Along the path of the continuum of risk are products that pose less harm to the individual than cigarettes but for which less is known about their population-level health impacts. Here, we would place smokeless and dissolvable tobacco products as well as the ‘e-cigarette’.

Although Mitch acknowledges that smokeless, dissolvables and e-cigs are all less hazardous than cigarettes, he has long refused to acknowledge that these products are at nearly the same location as NRT products on the continuum of risk (i.e. NRT is 1, cigarettes are 100, and e-cigs are between 1-2).

also

The Strategic Dialogue on Tobacco Harm Reduction: a vision and blueprint for action in the US
by Mitch Zeller and Dorothy Hatsukami (2009)
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Mitch Zeller (who replaced Lawrence Deyton as head of FDA's Center for Tobacco Products) wrote both of these articles while working as a lobbyist for GlaxoSmithKline (via Pinney Associates).

Please note that I and other leading tobacco harm reduction advocates were NOT INVITED to participate in the "Strategic Dialogue on Tobacco Harm Reduction" that is described in the 2009 article.

Nothing like having a strategic dialogue on THR organized by THR opponents who don't invite THR advocates.

 

[Jman8]

I realized from reading the article that I'm an AEE

Anti Endgame Enthusiast.

 

[Fiamma]

And the elephant in the room is nicotine does not kill, combusted tobacco kills. It's child is NRT's are NOT effective substitutes for smoking tobacco cigarettes for most people trying to quit.

Big Pharma's greed may yet kill us all.

 

[Angi2299]

So....the new head of the FDA's Center for TOBACCO Products is a Pharma shill (sorry - "lobbyist")???