Thanks for writing and circulating this much needed piece. Anyone who support general harm reduction strategies should strongly consider supporting tobacco harm reduction. What is holding them back?
I think there are a few things holding them back and I can describe all of them with one word, balance.
A hyper focus on youth prevention which contributes to forgetting people who smoke.
An extreme focus on addiction regardless of how harmful it is/isn’t. To them all forms of addiction/ dependence is equally harmful.
A strong desire to squash an industry profiting off of that addiction, and forgetting humans buy many addictive things and industry or illicit sellers make a profit.
Fear of a new thing when we don’t know what happens when used long term, and forgetting the thing that is easiest to buy and use is often deadly.
I think that motivates people to want to eliminate these new things before they’re as big as combustible products. Many of them have worked for decades trying to end the death and disease from smoking and fear having to repeat those efforts with the new products.
And I think many of them have no connection with the groups who have the highest prevalence of smoking. Those people are usually not included in the conversation.
Thanks for writing and circulating this much needed piece. Anyone who support general harm reduction strategies should strongly consider supporting tobacco harm reduction. What is holding them back?
Ed
Thanks Ed!
I think there are a few things holding them back and I can describe all of them with one word, balance.
A hyper focus on youth prevention which contributes to forgetting people who smoke.
An extreme focus on addiction regardless of how harmful it is/isn’t. To them all forms of addiction/ dependence is equally harmful.
A strong desire to squash an industry profiting off of that addiction, and forgetting humans buy many addictive things and industry or illicit sellers make a profit.
Fear of a new thing when we don’t know what happens when used long term, and forgetting the thing that is easiest to buy and use is often deadly.
I think that motivates people to want to eliminate these new things before they’re as big as combustible products. Many of them have worked for decades trying to end the death and disease from smoking and fear having to repeat those efforts with the new products.
And I think many of them have no connection with the groups who have the highest prevalence of smoking. Those people are usually not included in the conversation.
I appreciate your insights. For us, balance is seeing multiple perspectives at the same time.
But I call this the absence of nuance. Any absolute such as “nicotine-free future “ impairs understanding
We want accomplish many things in public health and not just one thing.