It’s not just the smoke…….part 2

Most of the time, this blog focuses on the “smoke” part of tobacco, just because that’s what I did. But I came across a great first person account about “smokeless tobacco” from a writer at the Wall Street Journal which pretty much says it all.

By KEVIN HELLIKER

In the course of researching the science behind smokeless tobacco in 2006, I purchased some of the product. I wanted to read its labels and see what these tobacco “pouches” and “pellets” looked like.

Some time later I popped a tobacco pellet into my mouth. I’m not sure why. I hadn’t smoked in two decades and had only negative memories and opinions about cigarettes. I was a fanatical exerciser and careful eater. Maybe I was curious. In any case, the pellet tasted like a mint but delivered a buzz.

Months passed before I did it again. But you can see where this is headed. Within a year, I was flat-out addicted to the nicotine in the smokeless tobacco. But I was in denial: I did it only at the office. Except that eventually I did it everywhere, careful to hide my stash from my wife and nearly everyone else. In social and professional gatherings I nurtured an invisible addiction.

I knew I needed to quit. But the science behind the risks of low-carcinogen smokeless tobacco failed to worry me. No increased incidence of mouth cancer had been found in Swedish men who used it, and other research on them had found only small increases in risks for other cancers and cardiovascular disease. More personally, smokeless tobacco raised neither my heart rate nor my blood pressure (though compared to most users, I consumed tiny amounts). Even so, I now embodied the concerns of public-health officials: Touting smokeless tobacco as less harmful than cigarettes would make it alluring to non-smokers.

Public-health officials as high ranking as the surgeon general continued calling smokeless just as dangerous as cigarettes long after published research showed otherwise. Even if it is less dangerous, many public-health officials said, no evidence exists that smokers would switch to smokeless. Yet among Swedish men the smoking rate had plummeted with a concurrent rise in smokeless use. And I knew two smokers who had quit via use of smokeless tobacco. I also had a friend whose father had made the switch, only to revert to cigarettes upon being told that smokeless was no less dangerous. He died of lung cancer.

All this made me think that the increased use of smokeless tobacco must be hard to swallow for public-health officials, who have crusaded against the tobacco industry.

What finally did it for me was a statement I heard from an academic researcher with no ties to the tobacco industry: “Using smokeless is dumb. Smoking is dumber.”

“Dumb” was hard to argue. For even if the risk associated with smokeless tobacco is no greater than the risk of driving, using it takes you nowhere. Unless you’re switching from cigarettes, there’s no upside.

But besides the word “dumb,” what prompted me to quit was my wife’s reaction when she finally found my stash.

Write to Kevin Helliker at kevin.helliker@wsj.com

Hiliarious that he was “researching” the product and ended up getting hooked. Um, it’s kind of the way the tobacco companies roll.