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JOHNSON: Is smokeless tobacco really safer?  

mokeless tobacco products.

But can't smokeless tobacco kill you just as dead as cigarettes?

Well, yeah, they concede, but smokeless tobacco is less likely to be fatal. And smokers can wean themselves off cigarettes by switching to other products such as snuff and chewing tobacco.

Brad Rodu, an oncology professor at the University of Louisville, argued passionately in these pages that smokeless tobacco provides a nicotine fix without causing smoking-related diseases. "Unlike cigarettes, smokeless doesn't cause lung cancer, heart disease or emphysema," he wrote. "The health risks from smokeless are only about 1 to 2 percent those of smoking. Statistically, lifelong smokeless users have about the same risk of dying from that habit as automobile users have of dying in a car wreck."

Further, smokeless tobacco does not produce smoke, hence it eliminates the dangers of secondhand smoke.

Don't reach for that pouch of chew just yet.

Smokeless tobacco contains at least three known carcinogenic agents: N-nitrosamines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and radioactive polonium 210. It increases the threat of various oral cancers. It also has been associated with esophageal, pancreatic, prostate and kidney cancer, possibly even heart disease, says Dr. John Spangler of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. . . .

Neither is Wake Forest's Spangler, who directs tobacco intervention programs at the medical school. "Those who argue in favor of smokeless tobacco as a means to quit smoking -- ”an 'alternative' to cigarettes, if you will ” -- ignore the fact that there is not a shred of scientific evidence showing, in a randomized, controlled clinical trial setting, that smokeless is effective in helping patients quit smoking," Spangler says.

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