Brad Rodu, an oral pathologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, thinks smokers ought to give up tobacco completely. But if they choose not to, he says, they are much better off with smokeless tobacco than with cigarettes. By this measure, Rodu argues, smokeless tobacco is 98 percent safer than smoking. He and his colleagues estimate that the life expectancy of a smokeless tobacco user is virtually the same as the life expectancy of a nonsmoker. Rodu, who compares smokeless tobacco to methadone, has been condemned by other opponents of smoking because they consider his message detrimental to the cause.
Tobacco is tobacco.
It's like telling someone to jump from the fifth floor instead of the 10th floor. Public health and prohibitionism also clash in the debate over proposals to force the gradual removal of nicotine from cigarettes. As tobacco's opponents themselves have been pointing out for years, people tend to adjust their behavior when they switch to cigarettes with a lower nicotine yield. They consume more cigarettes, take more puffs, inhale more deeply, hold the smoke longer, and so on. This means they absorb more toxins than the official tar yield suggests.