Future Now
The IFTF Blog
The future of cigarettes?
I don't usually think of Wired as a source of information for the Health Horizons blog, but this recent headline caught my eye: The Cigarette of the Future: All the Cancer, None of the Nicotine." The article considers the evolution of tobacco as envisioned by the FDA's former director of the Office of Tobacco Programs, Mitch Zeller. He posits that, from a public health perspective, eliminating the addictive nature of cigarettes would do more to reduce overall susceptibility to the dangers of smoking than any genetic modifications might do to reduce the carcinogens in tobacco. (According to another recent Wired post, scientists at North Carolina Stare, whose research is backed by Philip Morris, have genetically modified tobacco plants to turn off a gene that causes the carcinogenic effects of nicotine in chewing tobacco.)
Zeller explains:
There are at least 69 known carcinogens in tobacco smoke. Let's say they could bring about reductions in 15 or 20 of them, and that's being very charitable. We don't know how big the reductions are and nobody in the tobacco industry can tell you what that actually means in terms of reducing risk. It doesn’t mean anything in public health in terms of reducing harm at the population level.