These corporations make not only cigarettes and snuff but also a new product, snus (rhymes with moose), which provides tobacco in a dissolvable pouch that eliminates the need for unseemly spitting. So they are in a position both to promote smoking cessation and make money off alternatives to cigarettes, giving them a keen incentive to invest in informative ads.
Right now, Americans could use that kind of illumination. A 2005 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that only 11 percent of smokers who were aware of smokeless tobacco think it is safer than cigarettes, while 83 percent disagree -- which is the equivalent of believing it’s safer to drive without a seat belt than with one.
Critics, however, see nothing whatsoever to be said for smokeless tobacco. In fact, they want to raise taxes on such products to keep buyers away. They fear that far from serving to move smokers from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco, any ads discussing the comparative dangers will move nonsmokers to become enslaved to nicotine, which in turn will lead them to congregate on the sidewalk, puffing away.
But the evidence points in the other direction. As the popularity of snus rose in Sweden, smoking fell sharply, to the point that Swedes now have the world’s lowest smoking rate. Youngsters there who partake of snus are less likely, not more, to take up cigarettes.
The Royal College of Physicians says that “the large majority of U.S. smokeless users do not in fact progress to smoking.” And if some American snuff users go on to become smokers, said the group, it may be because they are laboring under the delusion -- lovingly preserved by federal policy -- that cigarettes are no more harmful than smokeless tobacco.
Right now, American smokers are stumbling around in a dense cloud of ignorance, misinformation and propaganda. Letting smokeless tobacco companies dispense truth would do a lot to clear the air.