Tobacco Substitutes: Harm Reduction or Smokescreen?

  • The PLoS Medicine Editors

Tobacco Substitutes: Harm Reduction or Smokescreen?

  • The PLoS Medicine Editors
  • Published: July 31, 2007
  • DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040244


Don't journals have a duty to give all sides of a debate? That was certainly the argument that the BMJ put forward when it published a paper that concluded that harm caused by passive smoking had been overestimated [2]. Unfortunately, that paper turned out not to be free of bias and may in fact have been part of the tobacco industry's ongoing attempt to discredit evidence of the harms caused by passive smoking [3]. In trying to be fair, the BMJ may have been the victim itself of cynical maneuvering by an industry not known for its interest in playing by the rules in promotion of its products. By publishing papers such as the one on snus, could we be legitimizing a debate that at best can only shift tobacco dependence from one product to another? Should we only publish papers that point out the wrongdoing of the tobacco industry (e.g., [4]) or advocate the abolition of all tobacco products?




  1. 1. Gartner CE, Hall WD, Chapman S, Freeman B (2007) Should the health community promote smokeless tobacco (snus) as a harm reduction measure? PLoS Med 4: e185. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040185.
  2. 2. Enstrom JE, Kabat GC (2003) Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960–98. BMJ 326: 1057–1061.
  3. 3. Bero LA, Glantz S, Hong MK (2005) The limits of competing interest disclosures. Tob Control 14: 118–126.