E-Cigarettes Are the Safer Smoking Alternative
What’s the Latest Development?
Smoke-free products such as electronic cigarettes, which deliver nicotine to the blood without inhaling burning plant matter, are a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes, despite the FDA’s obstinate refusal to permit companies from saying so. “Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical societies, reported in 2002: ‘As a way of using nicotine, the consumption of non-combustible [smokeless] tobacco is on the order of 10-1,000 times less hazardous than smoking, depending on the product.'” If governments acknowledged the relative benefits of smokeless tobacco, the report continued, public health would improve.
What’s the Big Idea?
Blinded by utopian visions of a tobacco-free society, the FDA continues to insist, despite evidence to the contrary, that “no tobacco products have been scientifically proven to reduce risk of tobacco-related disease, improve safety or cause less harm than other tobacco products.” Brad Rodu, professor of medicine at the University of Louisville, argues that this myopic way of thinking is what resulted in America’s disastrous prohibition of alcohol almost 100 years ago. With the FDA’s obstinance, “cigarettes will continue to dominate the American tobacco market, and 440,000 more Americans will die from smoking-related disease every year.”
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