• 9/13/2007
  • Edmontaon, Alberta, Canada
  • staff
  • CanadianPress.com

Imperial Tobacco Canada announced Wednesday it will test market a new type of smokeless tobacco in Canada called snus – and while the company is touting it as a safer alternative to cigarettes, it’s been banned as a health risk in most of Europe.

Benjamin Kemball, president and CEO of Imperial, said the powdered tobacco product will be sold at 230 retail outlets in Edmonton in the coming months to determine whether it might catch on with consumers. Users wad the moist powder between their lips and gum, where it dissolves.

Kemball points to recent studies from Sweden, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia which suggest that snus is less harmful than cigarettes.

“According to these independent reports, there is no increase to the risk of lung (or oral) cancer among snus users, compared to people who have never used any tobacco products at all,” he said in an interview.

“We should be looking at products such as this because if people are able to move away from cigarettes and to this sort of product, there will be a substantial reduction in risk to those people.”

The European Union banned snus in all countries except Sweden and Norway in 1992 after a World Health Organization report concluded that oral tobacco products were carcinogenic to humans. It’s also banned in Australia.

In 2004, the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice upheld the European ban, ruling that the dangers of snus merited that it be outlawed.

In an article published in the medical journal The Lancet in May, researchers from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey’s School of Public Health examined a Swedish study on snus use.

The study followed 280,000 male construction workers for 20 years, and found that snus use did not increase the risks of oral cancer, whereas smoking more than doubled the risk.

Snus users had a higher risk for pancreatic cancer than people who have never smoked, but the risk of the illness was still highest for smokers.

“Snus is not harmless,” wrote researchers Jonathan Foulds and Lynn Kozlowski. “For all the major smoking-caused diseases … the risks are lower with snus than with smoking.”

The authors weren’t suggesting that smokers be advised to switch to snus but instead recommended that “clinicians advise their smoking patients on more flexible ways to quite smoking with existing approved medicines, rather than snus.”

There’s also concern about the way that the product could be marketed in Canada, especially if it’s marketed the same way some chewing-type tobaccos are. Rob Cunningham, a senior policy analyst for the Canadian Cancer Society, said companies have targeted youths with advertising campaigns to grow the market for chewing tobacco.

“It’s been in publications with a high youth readership, and they’ve had candy and fruit flavours that are attractive to kids. A very important source for any tobacco company to grow is kids, and they know it,” Cunningham said.

He doubts tobacco companies are trying to turn people away from smoking to something less harmful.

“Their commercial interest is in expanding the market, or slowing the decline of the market,” he said from Ottawa.

Although Kemball wouldn’t specify exactly why Edmonton was chosen for the test market, Les Hagen of the lobby group Action on Smoking and Health noted that Alberta currently accounts for 40 per cent of the smokeless tobacco market in Canada.

Hagen dismissed the company’s efforts to portray snus as less harmful than cigarettes as “a hollow public relations gesture.” He said snus will be sold under the DuMaurier brand, which will end up promoting sales of DuMaurier cigarettes, not discouraging them.

While snus packages will carry the same health warnings as chewing-type tobaccos, said Kemball, they won’t be as graphic as those on cigarette packages.

They will be blunt. One reads, “This product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes.”

Michael Chaiton, a researcher for the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit at the University of Toronto, conceded that snus is not as harmful as smoking but said smokers wanting to quit shouldn’t look to snus for help.

“The use of snus like that has no health advantages whatsoever,” he said. “It’s a way of maintaining cigarette use and that is no win at all for public health.”

Chaiton said snus manufacturers actually remove a bacteria that can create nitrosamines, which are carcinogens.

“If they really believe that they have a product that smokers would use and that is much safer than cigarettes, then they have an obligation to stop selling cigarettes,” Chaiton said.

Between 2000 and 2006, the percentage of Canadians who smoked daily or occasionally declined to 18 per cent from about 24 per cent.

According to figures from the Canadian Cancer Society, in Norway, where snus is also used, the incidence of smoking in males between 16 and 74 fell from 50 per cent in 1985 to 36 per cent in 2006.

Daily snus use climbed from 3.2 per cent in 1985 to 11.2 per cent in 2006, with that number as high as 17.9 per cent for young men under 24.