Alternatives available to reduce cancer deaths
Cigarette companies are winning the addiction battles because many of the one billion smokers around the world can’t quit. The addiction battle, resulting in millions of smoking deaths, is a more serious problem than Covid fatalities, according to a new report, “Cessation, the Right to Health.”
“The number of deaths caused by tobacco has grown to over eight million a year, far more than Covid deaths,” according to the report, which was released just before “World No Tobacco Day” on May 31st.
“Let’s be honest,” the report said, “current stop smoking treatments are no match for cigarettes.”
Part of the problem, researchers say, is because smoking was ingrained into the culture in the1940s, 1950s and 1960s. It was depicted as glamorous; it was in the movies. Even doctors smoked in hospitals while the government gave soldiers and sailors low-cost smokes in World War II. Many of these noxious habits continue for decades.
“We have a long way to go,” Dr. K. Michael Cummings of the University of South Carolina, said in a recent InsideSources on-line roundtable to discuss the report.
How does one defeat the worldwide spread of smoking addiction?
Besides persuading people to give up cigarettes, Cummings said other ways to reduce cancer death rates is steering smokers toward less dangerous things such as vaping as well as decreasing the nicotine content of cigarettes.
Cummings complained that many American doctors don’t understand the effectiveness of this cigarette substitute approach.
He cited a 2015 New England Journal of Medicine study.
“In this six-week study, reduced-nicotine cigarettes versus standard-nicotine cigarettes reduced nicotine exposure and dependence on the number of cigarettes smoked,” according to the article, “Randomized Trial of Reduced-Nicotine Standards for Cigarettes.”
Requiring cigarette makers lower the nicotine content,” Cummings says, would lead to an environment in which “cigarettes would no longer create or sustain addiction and where adults who need or want nicotine could get it from less harmful alternative sources.”
In another New England Journal report in July 2017, an attorney and a doctor agree with Cummings.
“A nicotine-limiting standard could make cigarettes minimally addictive or nonaddictive, helping current users of combustible cigarettes to quit and allowing most future users to avoid becoming addicted and proceeding to regular use,” wrote Dr. Scott Gottlieb and attorney Mitchell Zeller.
Cummings notes this reduced nicotine strategy is effectively employed in Sweden. The use of snus, a low nitrosamine smokeless product, has been an anti-cancer weapon there for decades. This strategy, he notes, has greatly reduced cigarette smoking in Sweden. Snus, he notes, is the “tobacco that doesn’t kill people.”
The incidence of lip, oral pharynx cancer mortality is the lowest in Sweden among the European nations and the United States, Cummings noted.
He said millions of lives could have been saved if others had adopted the Swedish strategy over the last decades. He added that learning from the Swedish successes could reduce global smoking by 15 percent over the next 30 years.
Vulnerability to the smoking addiction can affect almost anyone, a medical researcher says, but it ultimately comes down to personal choice.
“Everybody can decide for themselves whether to give it up. Dr. Daniel Wikler of Harvard University, said “I was a smoker too. It’s hard as hell to give up.” Wikler said he went through hell in his journey to free himself of nicotine.
“The only way I ever got off of cigarettes was, I almost died from it. I had long cases of pneumonia. And at one point I realized after I’d been in the hospital for three weeks, I didn’t have to have a cigarette. And I thought, Hey, the gate to the jail is open. Now, if I run through it, maybe I don’t have to stay in here. And that’s what did it.”
Wikler’s father, also a physician, didn’t escape. He died from smoking.
