History
Given the varying legal, moral and historical status of tobacco, and the different types of tobacco and tobacco use in different cultures around the world, debates on tobacco harm reduction tend to be geographically defined arguments. For instance, inhalant cigarette smoking is the dominant form in the United States, with a smaller number of users availing themselves of non-inhalant cigars, pipes, and smokeless tobacco. The political climate over the last few decades has led to both restrictions in the sale and use of tobacco and widespread information (and misinformation) about the negative health effects of tobacco use. Despite this, tobacco in all its forms has remained a legal product in most societies. A notable exception is the European Union, where the most dangerous products (cigarettes) are available but smokeless tobacco products, which are far less hazardous, are banned. The exception is Sweden, where there is a long tradition of smokeless tobacco use among men.
Harm reduction, a modality of dealing with other drug use, is beginning to be applied to tobacco use. In October 2008 the American Association of Public Health Physicians (AAPHP) became the first medical organization in the U.S. to officially endorse tobacco harm reduction as a viable strategy to reduce the death toll related to cigarette smoking. Joel Nitzkin, MD, of the AAPHP wrote: "So if we can figure that the nicotine in the e-cigarettes is basically a generic version of the same nicotine that is in prescription products, we have every reason to believe that the hazard posed by e-cigarettes would be much lower than one percent, probably lower than one tenth of one percent of the hazard posed by regular cigarettes."
Read more about this topic: Tobacco Harm Reduction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)