Most youth who use smokeless tobacco are smokers, too
By Anne HardingNEW YORK | Thu Aug 8, 2013 5:17pm EDTSOURCE: bit.ly/13INoAt Pediatrics, online August 5, 2013. (Reuters Health) - Most young people in the U.S. who use newer smokeless tobacco products are smoking cigarettes too, according to new research. "These findings are troubling, but not surprising, as tobacco companies spend huge sums to market smokeless tobacco in ways that entice kids to start and encourage dual use of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco," Vince Willmore, vice president of communications at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization, told Reuters Health in an email. "From 1998 to 2011, total marketing expenditures for smokeless tobacco increased by 210 percent - from $145.5 million to $451.7 million a year, according to the Federal Trade Commission," he added. Swedish-style "snus," introduced to the U.S. in 2006, and dissolvable tobacco products, introduced in 2008, are arguably less harmful than conventional chewing tobacco because they contain fewer nitrosamines, and have been promoted as safer alternatives. But public health experts have been concerned that these products could serve as a "gateway drug" to use of conventional smokeless tobacco and to cigarette smoking. To better understand the prevalence of smokeless tobacco use among young people, Dr. Gregory Connolly of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and his colleagues looked at data from the 2011 National Youth Tobacco Survey, which included nearly 19,000 sixth- to 12th-graders from across the country. Overall, the researchers found, 5.6 percent of young people reported using any type of [...]