(Newswire.net — February 20, 2018) — Last month, Philip Morris (PMI), the tobacco giant responsible for the Marlboro cigarettes, received their response from an independent panel of experts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The panel rejected PMI’s request to promote their heat-not-burn product, IQOS, as a ‘modified risk’ product. But this is only the first step of the process. Many experts believe that the best way to tackle the enormous global tobacco problem is with new, lower risk products. But what use are they, if the public isn’t sufficiently aware of the benefits? According to Karl Erik Lund, of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, ‘in order to successfully get these products into the hands of the people who need them, the products need to get a competitive head start . . . They need to be taxed less; be able to be showcased in stores; they need to be exempted from the standardised packaging, and we need to inform about the huge difference in harm compared to the cigarette.” Promotion of such products is paramount to educate the public: that’s what is called the “tobacco paradox”.
Offering safer alternatives to smoking
The U.S. is an essential market for PMI, and the IQOS is the innovation that they are betting on to extricate themselves from the traditional cigarette market for good. With demand for ‘safer’ alternatives to traditional cigarettes growing globally, endorsement from the FDA to market specific products under these claims would be substantial and ground-breaking. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has previously indicated that he wants U.S. smokers to have safer alternatives to smoking, and opportunities to support this desire are now presenting themselves.
There are multiple alternatives on the market, and they vary greatly. Heat-not-burn products, like IQOS, heat tobacco rather than burning it, the process that tobacco makers claim reduces the risks. “The idea is that [heat-not-burn devices] will have fewer harmful chemicals than regular cigarettes,” says University of Waterloo’s public health researcher David Hammond. This claim is substantiated by literally millions of pages of scientific data submitted by PMI, and a growing consensus among independent experts. Among their findings, they calculate that the device produces up to 95% fewer harmful chemicals, and that they will save 90,000 lives over 20 years.
What next ?
The irony with the decision is that the panel, as well as many other experts and advocacy groups across the globe, agree that heat-not-burn products contain fewer harmful toxins than traditional cigarettes. There’s substantial consensus on this topic. The concern arises from the lack of sufficient data to confidently prove that widespread promotion of such products would lead to overall harm reduction. Furthermore, there are two sides to this discussion. For those who choose to switch from traditional cigarettes to heat-not-burn alternatives, we have data that supports the short term benefits, but the long-term effects are still unknown.
The other relevant discussion is around how the messaging would be received by the public. Could smokers simply add heat-not-burn products to their repertoire, rather than quitting traditional cigarettes? Could the slick designs and advertising attract teenagers who would be better off never starting in the first place? We just don’t know. Big tobacco has little to no credibility due to their history of lies and deception, and it’s therefore justified that what any decision maker wants is to be sure their decisions are based on sound evidence.
Jeff Stier from the advocacy group Consumer Choice Center, summed up the sentiment of many of the people who spoke at the hearing when he asked, “What are the costs of being too cautious? You do your job when you ask ‘What if’. But what if the FDA is right and non-combustible tobacco products can replace cigarettes to the benefit of public health? What are the costs to public health if we wait?”.