Clearing The Air

Monday, May 02, 2005

Blame Canada

Evidence that the pharmaceutical industry has strategically planned for implementation of smoking bans; to increase sales of their nicotine delivery systems years in advance.

A Reflection On Alternative Nicotine Delivery SystemsMark C. Taylor, MD,. FRCSCPhysicians for a Smoke-Free Canada.

...trend was exemplified by a conference held in Toronto in early 1997.

"unless we establish an aggressive ......strategy that promotes the use of alternative nicotine delivery products our campaign may not achieve our goal...."

-Initiatives to reduce smoking opportunities through bans on smoking in public and work places ....

-The de-legitimization of tobacco and smoking...

Pharmaceutical companies are urged to be more aggressive marketers. "I think it important that drug manufacturers, who will profit from less cigarette sales, pursue this ... and that they lift any voluntary restraints they have from .........attacking the tobacco industry."

To expand the availability of new delivery systems for nicotine, they aresuggesting changes by government regulators, nicotine product manufacturers...

While decided preferable to tobacco smoking, pure nicotine ingestion cannot be considered to be innocuous.

Similarly, alternative nicotine products developed by the pharmaceutical industry cannot be assumed to be benign, in either their current or future forms.

...a comprehensive tobacco use reduction strategy using established policy tools (i.e. total .... ban, dramatic price increases, access restrictions ......) and by developing new policy tools (i.e. changed legal status of tobacco, reduced availability of tobacco products).

Shifting smokers to new nicotine products will divert funds theoretically available to campaigns to reduce tobacco use into a for-profit market of alternative nicotine delivery products.

Between 1991 and 1993, new prescriptions for nicotine patches rose from 0 to over 600,000. That is, almost 10% of Canadian smokers were recruited to try the patch in the second year of its marketing. Pharmaceutical manufacturers could not advertise the patch directly to consumers, although it was directly advertised to physicians and promoted to the general public through news and information media. .... The boom market did not last long (by 1994 new prescriptions fell to 200,000), but not before one patch manufacturer was penalized for charging excessive prices for the product....

The preceding excerpts were taken from an industry symposium, designed to instruct the pharmaceutical industry how to profit from their alternative nicotine delivery systems......while eliminating tobacco usage via government control.