2023-09-29 18:30:23
“We live much longer than in the past. How did we get to this point? Thanks to science, research, humanistic knowledge and technological development. We have reduced risks in every area of our lives and we should know how to do the same with smoking. With the knowledge we have we can make enormous changes in the history of public health” and reduce the harm from smoking “with less dangerous products”. Thus David T. Sweanor JD, president of the advisory committee of the Center for Health Law, Policy and Ethics at the University of Ottawa (Canada), in his speech on the occasion of the sixth edition of the summit ‘Tobacco Harm Reduction: new products, research and policies’ which concluded these days in Athens. It was a moment of discussion and debate on the topic promoted by Scohre, an international scientific association of independent experts on smoking control and harm reduction, which involved over 250 experts from all over the world.
Sweanor then underlined the need to push Governments, health agencies and the tobacco industry to collect available data on reducing smoking harm. “People – he explained – buy cigarettes every day and every day we have the opportunity to intervene by offering a less dangerous product, which does not harm the people around us and which creates less addiction; and we can ensure that it is available with more accurate information on relative risk.”
“About 250 million people are trying to quit smoking cigarettes,” noted Andrzej Fal, president of the Polish Public Health Society, director of the Department of Allergies, Lung Diseases and Internal Medicine of the Central Clinical Hospital of the Ministry of the Interior and director of the Institute of Medical Sciences at the Cardinal Wyszyński University of Warsaw. “Supporting them – he continued – should be the main concern of COP10 (the conference of the parties to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control-FCTC scheduled in Panama in November, ed. ) but I fear this is not the case. To stop the smoking pandemic and its financial and health effects, we must increase funding for primary prevention and introduce ‘less harm, less tax’ legislation.”
Yet there is no shortage of examples of health policy that go in this direction. As Konstantinos Farsalinos, adjunct professor at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia and senior researcher at the University of Patras and the Greek School of Public Health of the University of Western Attica, recalled, “today Sweden is the only country smoke-free world despite the rate of nicotine consumption being similar to the European average (around 24%). However – added Farsalinos – in Sweden the vast majority of nicotine consumption comes from ‘snus’ tobacco (wet tobacco powder for oral use, ed.), while in Europe it comes from cigarettes. And what did the European Union do? He banned ‘snus’ tobacco. It’s incredible, it’s a public health scandal.”
Martin Cullip, former company director and international fellow of the Taxpayers protection alliance consumer center, who has written and held for over a decade blog on topics related to the free market and consumer lifestyle. “We cannot allow – concluded Cullip – these products to be banned now, as the World Health Organization seems to hope, because we will have to wait about 60 years before we can get them back”.
#knowledge #innovative #products #harm #reduction