November 9, 2017 – e-cigarettes Instead?

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Anchor lead: Is it reasonable to expect a wholesale switch to e-cigarettes? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Lower the nicotine in combustible cigarettes and people will quit the habit. That’s the clear underpinning of a new strategy unveiled by Scott Gottleib, FDA commissioiner, but Enid Neptune, a lung expert and antismoking advocate at Johns Hopkins, has some concerns.

Neptune: What it looks like is they see e-cigarettes as being the transitional devices that people will use as they come off the low nicotine combustible cigarettes. And the endpoint for e-cigarette use is just unexplained.  :16

Neptune says the problem is complex.

Neptune: Getting people off nicotine is not just simply reducing the nicotine in cigarettes. You have to address the habit. You have to address the long term exposure to nicotine so you have to have some larger model in mind as opposed to we’ll reduce it to a certain level and then they will invariably stop smoking at some point.   :21

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.