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The Scientific Committees provide the Commission with the scientific advice it needs when preparing policy and proposals relating to consumer safety, public health and the environment. As one of these committees, SCENIHR’s mandate is to question emerging or newly-identified risks on broad, complex or multi-disciplinary issues requiring a comprehensive assessment of risks.

The European Commission Directorate General for Health and Consumer Protection (DG Sanco) wishes to review the scientific basis for the current regulatory framework on tobacco products to include smokeless products.

Smokeless products include moist snuff, oral tobacco, chewing tocacco, and nasal snuff. Studies suggest that smokeless tobacco may pose harm, yet currently the ’Tobacco Products Directive ’ [1] does not prohibit the marketing of such products.

Interested parties are invited to submit by the 12th May 2006:

- Recent (2004 onwards) scientific peer reviewed research papers and reviews on this issue.

- Other publicly available credible scientific information that may not be easily available and which is directly relevant to this issue.

Footnotes

[1] Directive 2001/37/EC on the approximation of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States concerning the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco products.

Last modified on April 28 2006.

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29 April 2006 11:20, by Professor A. Phillips Griffiths

Call for Information - Health Effects of Smokeless Tobacco Products

"smokeless tobacco may pose harm, yet currently the ’Tobacco Products Directive ’ does not prohibit the marketing of such products"

A previous report: (http://www.ash.org.uk/html/regulation/html/eusmokeless.html) concludes that smokeless tobacco is considerably less dangerous than smoking.

The quote from 2212 suggests an assumption that if smokeless tobacco poses harm there is a case for prohibiting its sale.

The question should be whether smokeless tobacco is significantly less dangerous than smoking. As some researchers have pointed out, in those circumstances to ban smokeless tobacco would increase risk since nicotine addicts would then try to satisfy their their addiction by using cigarettes. (Banning cigarettes is politically impossible and even if it were not it would be no more effective than is banning other even more dangerous drugs.)

See online : Health Effects of Smokeless Tobacco

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15 January 19:09, by Dr. Sam Garten

for free information on SNUS..

http://news.snus.biz and http://snus.biz

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