A new series of medical studies sponsored by the National Cancer Institute will examine whether using smokeless tobacco is a potentially safer option than smoking.

One set focuses on whether such smokeless products as snus and the dissolvable products from RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company provide "a truly less-harmful alternative to conventional tobacco products, both at the individual and population level", according to the institute's grant application.
Another set, including one that was started 1 September 2009 at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, is aimed at developing strategy to encourage reduced use or even quitting smokeless-tobacco products. Wake Forest is receiving a USD 2.9 million grant for its study. The institute said that the studies are necessary because "previous tobacco-use reduction efforts pursued by the public-health community were disadvantaged by incomplete knowledge and methods for evaluating the health impact of modified tobacco products."
Among the goals are: determining the health risk of smokeless tobacco products; whether the products serve as a gateway for non-tobacco users, particularly teenagers and young adults, into smoking; and whether they can be accurately marketed as a reduced-risk alternative to cigarettes.
"The harm-reduction thesis, as applied to smokeless-tobacco products, is that a significant number of smokers can and will switch to smokeless tobacco and quit smoking," said Mark Wolfson, one of the two lead researchers for the Wake Forest study. "One of the reasons we think this study is so important is that many new smokeless-tobacco products are being marketed as a substitute for smoking. We don't know whether people toggle back and forth between different products." (pi)