Snus for health

>> Imperial Tobacco’s new smokeless product divides the industry’s critics

NO SPITOON NECESSARY: Snus

by SAMER ELATRASH

Snus (pronounce it “snoose”) may be the biggest thing to come out of Sweden since the flat-pack house. The pasteurized moist snuff, sold in loose powder or in sachets, is the most popular tobacco product in Sweden, which requested to opt out of a European Union-wide ban against oral tobacco when it joined in 1995. Few in Canada had heard of it until Benjamin Kemball, president of Imperial Tobacco Canada, held up a sachet of the stuff at a lecture to the Canadian Club of Montreal last week and tucked it behind his lip. Snus secretes nicotine directly into the bloodstream, and can marinate for over an hour. The used packet can then be placed in the nearest trashcan.

Kemball had been invited by the Canadian Club to unveil Imperial Tobacco’s new plan on “social responsibility.” He said the company would fund “youth smoking prevention” programs, help curtail illegal tobacco sales and come up with less harmful tobacco products.

“It’s just PR to give them credibility,” says François Damphousse, the Quebec director of the Non-Smokers Rights Association, whose group turned down Imperial Tobacco’s invitation for a dialogue. Pointing to the “youth smoking prevention” program, which discourages retailers from selling tobacco to youth, he says that in the past, tobacco companies, sensing tighter regulations on the horizon, used the program to show they were taking the issue seriously. (In 1995, a Philip Morris executive advised his company: “If we don’t do something fast to project the sense of industry responsibility regarding the youth access issue, we are going to be looking at severe marketing restrictions in a very short time.”)

Damphousse shares his distrust of Imperial Tobacco with other anti-tobacco groups. But snus, which Imperial Tobacco will test-market in several Canadian cities over the next year, is stirring debate within the anti-tobacco lobby.

Damphousse says his group might be among the minority in the anti-tobacco lobby that, on pragmatic grounds, says Canadians should know about the potential benefits of snus. “It’s less dangerous, but it still poses a risk,” he says. “We’ve got to look at the facts. It’s the lesser of two evils. It’s probably a good thing that people have an option that is less dangerous for them.”

Other groups have taken a hard line on snus. Neil Collishaw, with Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, won’t hear of it. “It’s dangerous, and I don’t see any public health benefit.” Presenting it as a less harmful option to cigarettes is a “simple minded analysis,” he says.

However, the evidence is piling up that snus is far less harmful than cigarettes. Lancet, the definitive British medical journal, published a study last week that suggested snus users in Sweden reported the same levels of lung and oral cancers as non-smokers did. Snus users were more prone to pancreatic cancer than non-smokers, but less than smokers were. “The banning or exaggerated opposition to snus in cigarette-rife environments is not sound public health policy,” wrote the authors of the Lancet report. Snus has become more popular than tobacco in Sweden, which has one of the smallest smoking populations in the world.

Imperial Tobacco Canada claims it is market-testing snus for the public’s well-being. “If there is a benefit for society and public health, then it is our responsibility to provide solutions for consumers,” says Imperial Tobacco spokesman Yves-Thomas Dorval.

Dorval insists the snus campaign has nothing to do with smoking bans. “I know it may sound uncredible for a tobacco spokesman,” he says, but “it’s not because of the smoking ban. It’s a coincidence, in a sense.”

That’s doubtful, though. British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco’s parent company, sized up the impact of smoking bans on its business in a 2000 report, “Future Business Vision,” predicting, “The increasing number of restrictions on smoking in public places will have an impact on tobacco consumption habits... Currently still largely found in the U.S. and Sweden, non-combustible tobacco could win a wider acceptance.” BAT started producing snus and in 2005 rolled it out in South Africa, Sweden and Japan.

In 2006, BAT partnered with Reynolds American Inc., the maker of Camel cigarettes, to produce a Camel brand of snus, test marketed in Sweden and several American cities.

A big question is how tobacco companies, and health groups that want Canadians to know about snus, will get the word out. Federal regulation tightly controls tobacco advertising. In the U.S., the United Smokeless Tobacco company requested in 2002 that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issue an advisory opinion on permitting the advertising of snus as an “issue of significant public interest.”