In the 1970s, a company called Swedish Match started advertising snus for Swedish men. Snus was not a new product; the packs of tobacco that consumers throw into their cheeks or lips, where they slowly release nicotine, have been around since the 17th century. But snus had fallen out of fashion and were replaced by flammable cigarettes.
At the time, Sweden, like many other countries, had a smoking problem. Forty percent of the men smoked. But as sales rose, so did smoking rates. By the year 2000, Sweden was the only industrialized country to achieve the World Health Organization ‘s goal of reducing adult smoking to less than 20 percent.
Snus is a fine example of a theory called harm reduction which argues that, instead of promoting public health policies that completely eliminate tobacco, consumers should have access to products which gives them the nicotine they want, but which greatly reduces the health risks associated with cigarettes. Snus delivers a kick of nicotine, but it releases chemicals without the dangers of burns and tar, some of the main contributors to lung cancer.
Sound familiar? When e-cigarettes (also known as vapes) appeared in the mid-2000s, some researchers in the tobacco control community believed that young smokers in the U.S. could make the same choice, leading to smoking rates. overall decline. E-cigarettes create an aerosol by heating a liquid containing nicotine. That aerosol can be absorbed and released as the smoke from regular cigarettes, but it does not contain the tar and many of the toxic chemicals that tobacco smoke produces. Although research suggests that these devices have their own risks, including reduced lung capacity to fight disease, there is a major cause for concern during Covid-19 pandemic disease. . But even with their risks, e-cigarette proponents believed these products could be a safer alternative to flammable cigarettes, just as snus did for the Swedes back in the 1970s and 80s. “People were hoping this would happen,” said John Pierce, a UC San Diego professor who studies cancer and tobacco.
But in a paper published in Pediatrics this month, Pierce and his colleagues show that that does not happen after all. Instead, young people who try e-cigarettes are three times more likely than those who have never tried vaping to become daily cigarette smokers a few years later. And the more tobacco products young people try, the more likely that appearance becomes. “We didn’t get this harm reduction thing,” Pierce says.
Pierce’s team analyzed data from the U.S. Population and Tobacco Health and Population Assessment (PATH) study, which surveyed nearly 50,000 Americans conducted annually by the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration. They focused on people aged 12 to 24 and monitored their responses over the four years between 2013 and 2017, following their use of tobacco products and their progress from occasional testing to time to everyday users.
They found that just over 60 per cent of respondents in this age group had tried a tobacco product at some point and 30 per cent had tried multiple products such as e-cigarettes, hookahs, and cigarillos. Of all the young people in the study, those who tried many different outcomes were 15 percent more likely to be daily cigarette smokers than those who tried only one type of tobacco result. And teens who tested e-cigarettes before the age of 18 were more likely to be daily smokers than those who tried vaping later in life. In other words, the theory that this new product would discourage young people from using cigarettes did not stand.