snus

A man with Tourette Syndrome, a nerve disorder developing in childhood and involving muscle tics (repetitive involuntary movement) and voice problems (here), recently posted online his experience with smokeless tobacco. …

Two internationally renowned tobacco policy experts are urging “the FDA and like campaigns and health information websites” to “follow established ethical principles and accepted communication methods to inform the public…

Investigators in Sweden, Italy and the United States report that “non-smoking men who used snus had a substantially reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease…” The research, published in the International Journal…

After two and a half years’ review, the FDA Center for Tobacco Products rejected Swedish Match’s request to eliminate or revise the 30-year-old, egregiously inaccurate warnings that are required to…

Norwegian researchers report that snus users had lower risks for gastroesophageal reflux symptoms (GERS) than never users (abstract here). This builds on Swedish findings of six years ago that snus…

The association of tobacco use and body weight has long been a matter of concern. In 2004, I collaborated with Swedish investigators to publish the first research on whether switching from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco blunts some of the weight gain normally seen with quitting via abstinence (abstract here, blog post here).

The New York Times has added more fuel to the anti-tobacco-harm-reduction fire with a December 4 editorial (here) rehashing the somewhat slanted reporting that appeared in the paper’s news pages on November 30. In two stories that day, the Times explored issues surrounding Swedish Match’s FDA application to change the warnings on its snus products. As I noted (here), “The Times and their quoted experts did a major disservice to their audience; they failed to report the simple truth, that mouth cancer risk for Swedish snus is next to nil.”

The New York Times has published (here) a reasonably accurate portrayal of the Swedish snus experience that I have chronicled for over a decade (here, here, andhere). Reporters Matt Richtel and David Jolly examined Swedish Match’s FDA application to remove the federally mandated mouth cancer and not-safe-alternative warnings from snus products. I have discussed this landmark filing previously (here).

Brad Rodu, Endowed Chair, Tobacco Harm Reduction Research at the University of Louisville and Senior Fellow at the Heartland Institute discusses tobacco harm reduction on “The Legislature Today’ radio show…

[First published Sept. 30 in The Oklahoman.] A quit-smoking strategy with “the potential to save millions of lives” will be the subject of an Oklahoma legislative hearing Wednesday. At issue…