In summary, do not mistake Cohen’s distorted idea of harm reduction as anything more than cigarette market prolongation. This playbook isn’t new. For decades, the tobacco industry refused to acknowledge that cigarettes are deadly…” prolong cigarettes’ dominance of the tobacco/nicotine market. But by denigrating safer tobacco products, Cohen et al. With a regulatory framework like this, no wonder Many other alternatives to cigarettes are already available, and many others are under development. Let alone medications to treat a condition that will It is outrageous that the agency and most of the ..read more

Everyone shares Cohen’s concern for children, and society should discourage them from adopting dangerous adult behaviors. If Cohen was consistent, however, she would call for sanctions on companies selling alcohol, which poses a far greater threat to teen health , and she would focus on marijuana, used by 25 percent of all teens over the past 30 years ..read more

This statement is full of falsehoods. Tobacco harm reduction proponents are not industry allies ; they are allies of those who will die prematurely this year. The FDA-approved cessation methods Cohen et al. diss have only a woeful 7% percent success rate, as noted above. Many other alternatives to cigarettes are already available, and many others are under development ..read more

tobacco is not a synonym for smoke , but she repeats the , proving again she chooses to ignore that nicotine is the reason people smoke, but not the reason that smokers die ..read more

Authorization as a cessation device would not be handled by the FDA tobacco center, but by the drugs or medical device centers. The FDA approved nicotine medications decades ago, even though, to meet FDA requirements for approval, they’re expensive and ineffectively low-dose, require warnings far greater than those on cigarettes, and don’t provide the nicotine spike that smokers get when they light up. With a regulatory framework like this, no wonder nicotine medications are successful for only about 7% of smokers who try them . For what other medications does the FDA accept a 93% failure rate ..read more

That’s why Congress gave the Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco in 2009. Cohen misrepresents the principle public health goal, which isn’t to reduce tobacco use, but to prevent the that result each year from smoking. That number hasn’t appreciably changed for the 15 years the FDA has had regulatory authority ..read more

Dr. Joanna Cohen recently authored a misleading and factually incorrect commentary on tobacco harm reduction in The Hill Here is my rebuttal, in bold ..read more

  Most health professionals are familiar with Medscape , a free resource that describes itself as “the leading online global destination f ..read more

Smokers in Japan consumed 92.4 billion cigarettes in 2023 -- less than half as many as they did in 2014.   Since vapor products are illega ..read more

  Over the years, I have documented cases in which my colleague and I exposed fatal errors in published articles about smoke-free products ..read more