The Health Harming Snus Ban Deception Continues

“We currently have a situation where the safest form of smokeless tobacco in the EU is banned, and that’s the form on sale in Sweden.”

It may surprise many to know that these were the words of Deborah Arnott, then Director of Action on Smoking and Health in 2006. And, maybe even more surprising, it was quoted by none other than the BBC. She went on to explain (quite rightly) that “[s]mokeless tobacco is much less harmful than smoked tobacco. It is smoking something which makes it really dangerous.”

At the time, there was a welcome conversation going on about lifting the European Union (EU) ban on snus, for which there has never been any real justification.

The Origins of the Ban

Snus was initially banned because of the same specious arguments that are being made against e-cigarettes today (do read the original ASH documents at Velvet Glove Iron Fist). Shamefully, prohibition originated in the UK, with then-ASH Director David Simpson absurdly describing it as a “new threat to society,” after which it spread like an infectious disease throughout Europe.

In fact, the potential of snus to prevent deaths via smoking had been identified in 1985 by Michael Russell, who wrote an article in The Lancet to state that:

“Our results suggest that this new product could help people trying to give up smoking. It might be cheaper than nicotine chewing gum and would not require a prescription. If all smokers in Britain switched to sachets about 50,000 premature deaths per year might eventually be saved at an annual cost of less than 1,000 deaths from mouth cancer.”

Russell deducted 1,000 because he was relying on evidence at the time that snus caused oral cancer. That has now been corrected by the largest study to date involving nearly 420,000 people comprising a total of 9.5 million life years. Despite its authors being determined to find some evidence of cancer amongst snus users, it failed and was forced to admit that “[c]ompared to never-snus use, ever-snus use was not associated with oral cancer.”

Russell’s analysis was too late for the UK, but the EU followed suit and banned snus in 1992 on the pretext of “harmonisation.” That is, several countries had stupidly banned the product, and it would be unfair on them if other (more enlightened) countries were still able to allow their citizens to buy it. A classic EU regulatory race to the bottom.

The Swedish Exception and Its Remarkable Results

This cosy European fantasy was dealt a bit of a blow in 1995 when Sweden applied to join the EU. As a recent article in The New Yorker explains:

“In the early nineteen-nineties, when Sweden held a referendum on whether to join the E.U., which had a bloc-wide snus ban, voters adorned their cars with bumper stickers that read, “E.U.? Not without my snus.” Ultimately, Sweden was granted an exemption from the ban in exchange for stricter warning labels.”

Understandably, Swedes did not want their option of enjoying nicotine in a safer way than smoking being taken away from them. And thus started one of the largest ecological scientific experiments ever conducted.

Forget computerised projections or randomised control trials, here was (for thirty years) an entire country, Sweden, with one policy on snus, and the rest of Europe with a separate one. The results could not be starker. Last year, Sweden reached smokefree status 16 years ahead of the EU’s target of year of 2040. The Swedish born population now boasts a smoking rate of 4.5 percent, compared to the European average of 24 percent.

Sweden also boasts by far the lowest level of tobacco-related diseases in Europe, a lung cancer rate of less than half of that in the rest of Europe and its incidence of cancer overall is 38 percent less than the EU average.

The Politics of Denial

In any other field, researchers from other countries would be piling into Stockholm airport to ask how they did it. But not in tobacco control. Instead, the determination to ignore this miracle has been quite astounding.

In 2003, the European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP) was asked by the EU Commission to write a report about Swedish snus. The job was contracted out to a Dutch consulting company which concluded that the snus ban should be lifted across the EU. But that was not the report they submitted to the EU, instead they criminally used Tipp-ex to change the report before the submission.

The conversation from 2006 was brutally crushed despite the EU having consulted on it in 2011. As Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported, there was a huge majority for lifting the ban, but it was corruptly treated and then ignored.

“Of the citizens who submitted their opinions, more than eight out of ten, 84 percent, support lifting the export ban on snus. 86 percent of government representatives and 74 percent of industry representatives wish to lift the ban … The EU Commission, however, dismisses a significant portion of the responses from the 82,000 citizens on the grounds that two-thirds are from Italy and Poland, where tobacco merchants organised petitions.”

Dismissing the public really isn’t a good look.

“But even if we exclude these two countries, the majority is still for lifting the export ban on snus, 10-6, when respondents are broken down by country …  even among the responses from parliamentarians, municipalities, government agencies and ministries a large majority, 71 percent, support lifting the export ban.”

Ongoing Misinformation

The deceit continues though. Just last week, Ashley Dalton (UK public health minister) replied to a parliamentary question about snus by saying that the UK government has “no intention of allowing a banned and harmful product into the UK market” despite the US Food and Drug Administration repeatedly authorising the products as appropriate for protecting public health.

The history of the EU ban on snus is one of manufactured moral panic, corruptly falsified documents, outrageous gerrymandering of public consultations, scientific criminality and downright lies.

The evidence over the last three decades is that snus should be available to be sold, and that if ASH had not taken such an absurd stance in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Europeans would have lived longer lives. One day, politicians may accept the truth instead of believing in fairy tales.

Martin Cullip is International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.