An HLF white paper published today examines the policy landscape surrounding tobacco harm reduction, the use of vaping (e-cigarettes and similar products) in helping nicotine users to quit smoking, and why there is more work to be done in this area to improve public health.
Vaping and other low-risk tobacco/nicotine product use have emerged as the solution to the long-time scourge of cigarette smoking. In the U.S. and several other countries, a huge portion of smokers have quit by switching to vaping over the last fifteen years. Additionally, some Americans have switched to other low-risk products, as have a large portion of smokers in some other countries. This reduction—by far the largest since the effects of the initial education campaigns about the harms of smoking that started about 1965—has reduced the health impact of smoking in the U.S. dramatically, and it is a bit lower still among the U.S. Hispanic population. However, there is still a lot of room for improvement. The current U.S. policy environment actively hinders this progress rather than promoting it.
The paper is authored by Carl V. Phillips, MPP, PhD. Dr. Phillips is an epidemiologist and economist. He is a former public health school and medical school professor, and was a pioneer in modern epidemiology methods. Starting in 2001, he became one of the first researchers focused on tobacco harm reduction (a term he introduced into the discourse), in the effort to encourage smokers to switch to lower-risk alternatives to cigarettes.
