Cigarette or Snus?
The cigarette smoking may relieve the boredom or satisfy a craving. It was always portrayed as sexy, glamorous and cool in the movies. For intellectuals and artists, it was an aid to thought and creativity.
But in Britain, exposed as deadly and addictive, leading to the death half of its long-term users, the Public Health Community has condemned smoking and a growing majority of adults rejected it. Today, 6 months after England joined the rest of the UK in bringing a smoking ban in. There is almost no enclosed public place where smoking is permitted, except smoker’s home and the fresh air. In the 1980s, smoking anywhere was the social norm. You could light up in hospitals, in cinemas and on Underground trains.
In Britain the good news is that the number of men who smoke has fallen to 25% and the number of women has fallen to 23%. In fact, the number of smokers in Britain has risen from 9.5 million to 9.9 million since 2001. Public information campaigns warn about the danger of smoking. The marketing and advertising of all tobacco products has been banned. All cigarette packs have conspicuous health warnings. Stop-smoking programs are free. The highest cigarette taxes in the world are in Britain. Some special reports extremely reduce smoking rates among women.
The tobacco industry, of course, is interested in the cigarette’s future. British American Tobacco (BAT) in Southampton, David O’Reilly, describes how the company is studying two different types of product: one – a safer cigarette, and the other – snus.
O’Reilly says: “It is already possible to develop products that reduce the consumer’s exposure to toxicants. You can’t just put it on the market and wait 30 years to see whether people who have used it have lower levels of lung cancer or heart disease or emphysema.” Using new achievements in biological science, BAT is trying to invent a system of trials and tests that will predict whether a product lowers the risk of smoking-related diseases. They add: “We’re probably five to 10 years away from being able to do that, realistically. But that’s where most of our R&D effort is going”.
With snus has a long history and got back popularity in the 1970s. People considered that the product was somewhere between 90 and 98% safer than a cigarette.
BAT has just begun test marketing in Canada under its du Maurier label and it was already done test marketing snus in South Africa under its Lucky Strike and Peter Stuyvesant brands and. But there will be no test marketing in Great Britain because snus is banned (except in Sweden, where it has an exemption) throughout the EU by European law. As the law stands – tobacco companies are free to sell nicotine even though the cigarettes containing it are known to be lethal. But it is illegal to sell to the public alternative nicotine products without a licence even if they are known to be safe. This ban seems anomaly but anyway it exists.
