November 8, 2024 • 11 mins
DON'T BAN SMOKELESS TOBACCO PRODUCTS, DENVER The City Council is considering a ban, but I've got an actual doctor, Dr. Brian Erkkila, Director of Regulatory Science at Swedish Match North America to be exact, who says that banning those products takes away an important option smokers use to quit smoking. I'm talking to him today about it, but you can read about the proposed ban here and here. He joins me at 1pm.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
He is the director of regulatory Science at Swedish Match
North American and we're here to talk about kind of
a weird topic to discuss with a physician, because the
city of Denver is considering banning smokeless tobacco products, and
that you would think you'd be like, oh great, the
medical community's got to be behind that, But the reality
(00:21):
is smokeless tobacco products can have an important role in
helping people quit, and doctor Urkle is coming on to
talk about that.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
First of all, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Thank you, Mandie, thank you so much for having me.
And just real quick a point of clarification. I'm a
doctor of PhD Brian Arklet, but I've been studying part
of finals tobacco and nicotine for about twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
That makes more sense in one way, but I still
stand by the fact that I think there's a lot
of physicians who would agree that anything that helps people
with smoking is a good thing. So tell me a
little bit about these smokeless tobacco bands and why you
don't think they're a good idea after studying this for
so many years.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah, I mean, if we think about you know, what's
being proposed by the city Council and Denver. What they
want to do is ban all flavored tobacco products. Okay,
So the issue with that is that it treats all
products exactly the same. So it's pretty much well known
in scientific circles and by the Food and Drug Administration
that tobacco products exist on a continuum of risk.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
So you have combusted cigarettes, those are by far the
most harmful, right, But then if you go down that continuum,
you have things like smokeless tobacco, vape cigarettes, heated tobacco,
nicotine pouches, all of that, right, and so those products
are significantly less harmful. So what this would do if
they ban all the flavored tobacco products is it would
(01:48):
ban a majority of those smoke free products that are
less risky, leaving consumers only the most harmful product.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I know, I'm an ex smoke or myself. I was
able to you know, cold turkey at like thirteen times
before I actually quit over a period of time. But
I know a lot of people who have used these
products to quit smoking. Because for me, and I'm just
gonna say it as a former smoker, the thing that
is the hardest to break is like the physical habit
(02:18):
of smoking, you know, the whole business of unwrapping a
pack of cigarettes and packing them and doing all of
that that business with your hands.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
So if you can sort of break that habit.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
First, it gets a lot easier to not think about
smoking because you figured out something else to do with
your hands. I know that sounds ridiculous to no one,
just someone who's never smoked, but I promise you like
the entire the entire ceremony of lighting a cigarette is
kind of the actions.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Can be very powerful. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3 (02:49):
No, it's it's absolutely true, and it's coming from another
former smoker back in my younger days. Right, that ritual
is really important that you know, maybe it can ratorial
moment with your friends or in the car or something
like that. Right, So, what I think these smoke free products,
you know, like you're thinking your heated tobacco products or
your electronic cigarettes, what they allow you to do is
(03:11):
kind of keep up that ritual, but you lose a
majority of the harm that comes from combusted tobacco. When
you light a cigarette, right, it produces about seven thousand chemicals.
A lot of those are carcinogens, they cause cancer, they
cause heart disease, they cause respiratory disease, and all the
level of those compounds and these smoke free products we're
(03:31):
talking about you so much lower, ninety percent lower for
a lot of them, right, So you're keeping up the ritual,
but you're getting.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Rid of a lot of the bad stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
So that's why they've been successful in helping people move
away from cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Do you have data on how many people transition from
regular cigarettes to either vaping or some other smokeless tobacco
product on the way to quitting.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I mean, do we have any data about that?
Speaker 4 (04:00):
We do, I mean, it really varies.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
So we know that in the United States, there's been
millions of people who've been able to do this right.
And so generally there's been scientific studies that have kind
of compared giving people who smoke an electronic cigarette versus say,
your traditional nicotine replacement therapy like a nicorette or something
like that, and the east cigarette in those studies has
(04:24):
been shown to be more successful, about twice as successful
as the nicotine replacement therapy.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
It would seem that we would want to embrace any
sort of thing that can help people stop smoking.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
But is the fear that it's going to go in
the other direction?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Is it the fear is they're going to start vaping
because it's not as gross as smoking a cigarette, and
then all of a sudden they're going to be addicted
and then they're going to be smoking cigarettes. Is that
where this is coming from? Do you know what's underpinning
these desires for a ban?
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Well, I think there's a couple of places it comes from. First, right,
I think one of the most sort of pernicious is
that you know a lot of the people who sort
of start these or propose these bands haven't really lived
that life. You know, they've never been a smoker, They
don't know people who smoke. So is there's a thing
sometimes there's a lot of compassion there the gateway, which
is what you're referring to people using a smoke free
(05:16):
product and then going onto a combusted product.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
We have a lot of.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Data from the CDC and the FDA that shows that
that's not really happening.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Right.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
I think one of the major concerns that comes up
when we think about flavor tobacco in particular, and I
think something that you know, many of the city Council
are bringing up is that it entices youth to start
using these products. And of course, you know, I adamantly
believe that no one under age should be using these products.
But if that's the conversation that we want to have,
(05:46):
I think we should have it based in facts, right,
And so if we think about Denver specifically, you know,
the use of any tobacco product in Denver by youth
has dropped by about seventy percent since twenty nineteen, right.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
That's an enormal misdrop.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
You know, if we think about combusted cigarettes, you know,
youth smoking. Youth smoking used to be up you're forty percent,
you know, back in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
Now what's at one point six percent?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Right?
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So I think you know a lot of these fears
about youth taking up these products. Of course it is happening,
but at a much lower rate than I think people
are kind of saying that it is in some of
these hearings.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Do you have any information on how this negatively impacts
businesses when these when these laws pass? Is that in
your area of expertise?
Speaker 4 (06:34):
Yeah, I mean I do.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
I do know a lot of ways that this has
gone down in the past, right, So the first and
the one that you know, I think is most important
is that it takes away choice from those people who smoke. Right,
You got seventy thousand people in Denver who smoke, and
they should have the option to choose what the product
that they want to use, and they should definitely be
allowed to choose the smoke free product to lower their risk.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
It's a better option for them. Right.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
But I mean, we've seen this sort of ban go
into place in other places.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Right, So when this happened.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
In Massachusetts, you saw a huge increase in cross border sales.
So not only did Massachusetts and its tax revenue, it's
there were still a lot of products coming into the market.
It didn't really you know, stop all the flavored products coming.
In San Francisco is a really interesting example, they banned
flavored electronic cigarettes, and when they did that, youth smoking
(07:30):
actually went up, right, And you only have to look
right next door to Denver to Golden Colorado where you
can they had a flavored tobacco ban, right, And a
lot of these businesses who sold these products are in
a lot of trouble.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
They're going out of business, and it's gotten to the
point where.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
The city is actually even giving them grants to try
and you know, save the businesses that they basically put
out of business by banning a majority of their products.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
One last question for you that I want to get in,
and that is what kind of studies are we doing now?
Because I know we all know what cigarettes do to you,
combustible cigarettes. We all know just the stuff that you
just listed, all the stuff that's in there, and all
the and the garbage. But if we had any kind
of studies on vaping, are we too soon down this
path for us to have any clearer understanding of the
(08:17):
difference on the impact on people's health because inevitably, these
bands are put forth by people who, you know, in
the spirit of good intentions, are trying to inflict their
will on other adults who should be able to make
their own decisions.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
But are are we studying that stuff yet?
Speaker 1 (08:33):
And if so, what does the data say about the
health effects of vaping versus smoking?
Speaker 4 (08:40):
Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
This is a huge area of research, which you know
I followed at the FDA and I continue to follow
to this day. So again, you know, when you start smoking,
smoking related disease takes a long time to happen.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
It doesn't happen overnight. It's a decade's thing. So we've
only been studying these products for about fifteen years. But
that doesn't mean we can't figure out what's going on, right.
So the way that we do that is we kind
of measure the load of toxins that people have in
their bodies when they are using an e cigarette, for instance,
instead of a combusted cigarette, and we see that that's
(09:14):
much much lower.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
And when those levels are lower, you know.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
You have much less risk of developing sort of the
tobacco related disease that we think of, like COPD or
lung cancer. So everything is pointing in the right direction
to these products being significantly less risky.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Doctor Erkla, I appreciate your time.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
He's the director of regulatory science at Swedish Match talking
about this, and I'm I don't know when the city
council is supposed to take this up, but it's going
to be interesting to see because it's going to be
business owners, right, It is going to be business owners
that have to stand up because most people don't even
know this is going on.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
They won't know what's going on until.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
They go to their store to buy their smokeless tobacco
products or their vappen that's flavored, and find out they can't.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Do it anymore. That's what happened in Golden So.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
I'm hoping that the business owners will at least help
people mobilize and go in and say, look, you know what,
appreciate you trying to help us, but we're good. We're adults.
We can handle our own decision making. The thing that
gets me, I understand why people would say, look, we
don't want you to smoke inside regular combustible cigarettes because
it stinks, it leaves.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Nicotine all over the wall. Like, I get that.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
What I don't understand is that when people are exhaling water, vapor,
you know, and none of the other I don't understand
why they can't just let people make their own choices
when really, aside from the occasional disgusting cloud of cotton
candy smelling stuff you have to walk through, this is
not hurting anyone else. That's the thing I get with
cigarette smoke. I get it. I don't get why people
(10:42):
want to hate on this when it doesn't impact them
directly in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that gets me
the most is that by banning the flavored products, you're
taking away the less harmful products and leaving them most harmful,
this cigarette. And I think something the council could do
is take a moment really look at the facts objectively
and kind of really really take a look at the
science from the FDA that says that, you know, smoke
(11:12):
free products post less risk than combusted cigarettes. And I
would hope they would talk to some of these retailers.
I would hope that they would talk to some people
who used to be smokers and switched over to smoke
free products to really really understand sort of the repercussions
of the decisions that they're making.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Doctor Urcle, I appreciate your time today and thanks for
sharing the information with us, and hopefully the Denver City
Council will not do anything stupid.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Thank you very much.
He is the director of regulatory Science at Swedish Match
North American and we're here to talk about kind of
a weird topic to discuss with a physician, because the
city of Denver is considering banning smokeless tobacco products, and
that you would think you'd be like, oh great, the
medical community's got to be behind that, But the reality
(00:21):
is smokeless tobacco products can have an important role in
helping people quit, and doctor Urkle is coming on to
talk about that.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
First of all, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Thank you, Mandie, thank you so much for having me.
And just real quick a point of clarification. I'm a
doctor of PhD Brian Arklet, but I've been studying part
of finals tobacco and nicotine for about twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
That makes more sense in one way, but I still
stand by the fact that I think there's a lot
of physicians who would agree that anything that helps people
with smoking is a good thing. So tell me a
little bit about these smokeless tobacco bands and why you
don't think they're a good idea after studying this for
so many years.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah, I mean, if we think about you know, what's
being proposed by the city Council and Denver. What they
want to do is ban all flavored tobacco products. Okay,
So the issue with that is that it treats all
products exactly the same. So it's pretty much well known
in scientific circles and by the Food and Drug Administration
that tobacco products exist on a continuum of risk.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
So you have combusted cigarettes, those are by far the
most harmful, right, But then if you go down that continuum,
you have things like smokeless tobacco, vape cigarettes, heated tobacco,
nicotine pouches, all of that, right, and so those products
are significantly less harmful. So what this would do if
they ban all the flavored tobacco products is it would
(01:48):
ban a majority of those smoke free products that are
less risky, leaving consumers only the most harmful product.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I know, I'm an ex smoke or myself. I was
able to you know, cold turkey at like thirteen times
before I actually quit over a period of time. But
I know a lot of people who have used these
products to quit smoking. Because for me, and I'm just
gonna say it as a former smoker, the thing that
is the hardest to break is like the physical habit
(02:18):
of smoking, you know, the whole business of unwrapping a
pack of cigarettes and packing them and doing all of
that that business with your hands.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
So if you can sort of break that habit.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
First, it gets a lot easier to not think about
smoking because you figured out something else to do with
your hands. I know that sounds ridiculous to no one,
just someone who's never smoked, but I promise you like
the entire the entire ceremony of lighting a cigarette is
kind of the actions.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Can be very powerful. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3 (02:49):
No, it's it's absolutely true, and it's coming from another
former smoker back in my younger days. Right, that ritual
is really important that you know, maybe it can ratorial
moment with your friends or in the car or something
like that. Right, So, what I think these smoke free products,
you know, like you're thinking your heated tobacco products or
your electronic cigarettes, what they allow you to do is
(03:11):
kind of keep up that ritual, but you lose a
majority of the harm that comes from combusted tobacco. When
you light a cigarette, right, it produces about seven thousand chemicals.
A lot of those are carcinogens, they cause cancer, they
cause heart disease, they cause respiratory disease, and all the
level of those compounds and these smoke free products we're
(03:31):
talking about you so much lower, ninety percent lower for
a lot of them, right, So you're keeping up the ritual,
but you're getting.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Rid of a lot of the bad stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
So that's why they've been successful in helping people move
away from cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Do you have data on how many people transition from
regular cigarettes to either vaping or some other smokeless tobacco
product on the way to quitting.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I mean, do we have any data about that?
Speaker 4 (04:00):
We do, I mean, it really varies.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
So we know that in the United States, there's been
millions of people who've been able to do this right.
And so generally there's been scientific studies that have kind
of compared giving people who smoke an electronic cigarette versus say,
your traditional nicotine replacement therapy like a nicorette or something
like that, and the east cigarette in those studies has
(04:24):
been shown to be more successful, about twice as successful
as the nicotine replacement therapy.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
It would seem that we would want to embrace any
sort of thing that can help people stop smoking.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
But is the fear that it's going to go in
the other direction?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Is it the fear is they're going to start vaping
because it's not as gross as smoking a cigarette, and
then all of a sudden they're going to be addicted
and then they're going to be smoking cigarettes. Is that
where this is coming from? Do you know what's underpinning
these desires for a ban?
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Well, I think there's a couple of places it comes from. First, right,
I think one of the most sort of pernicious is
that you know a lot of the people who sort
of start these or propose these bands haven't really lived
that life. You know, they've never been a smoker, They
don't know people who smoke. So is there's a thing
sometimes there's a lot of compassion there the gateway, which
is what you're referring to people using a smoke free
(05:16):
product and then going onto a combusted product.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
We have a lot of.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Data from the CDC and the FDA that shows that
that's not really happening.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Right.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
I think one of the major concerns that comes up
when we think about flavor tobacco in particular, and I
think something that you know, many of the city Council
are bringing up is that it entices youth to start
using these products. And of course, you know, I adamantly
believe that no one under age should be using these products.
But if that's the conversation that we want to have,
(05:46):
I think we should have it based in facts, right,
And so if we think about Denver specifically, you know,
the use of any tobacco product in Denver by youth
has dropped by about seventy percent since twenty nineteen, right.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
That's an enormal misdrop.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
You know, if we think about combusted cigarettes, you know,
youth smoking. Youth smoking used to be up you're forty percent,
you know, back in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
Now what's at one point six percent?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Right?
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So I think you know a lot of these fears
about youth taking up these products. Of course it is happening,
but at a much lower rate than I think people
are kind of saying that it is in some of
these hearings.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Do you have any information on how this negatively impacts
businesses when these when these laws pass? Is that in
your area of expertise?
Speaker 4 (06:34):
Yeah, I mean I do.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
I do know a lot of ways that this has
gone down in the past, right, So the first and
the one that you know, I think is most important
is that it takes away choice from those people who smoke. Right,
You got seventy thousand people in Denver who smoke, and
they should have the option to choose what the product
that they want to use, and they should definitely be
allowed to choose the smoke free product to lower their risk.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
It's a better option for them. Right.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
But I mean, we've seen this sort of ban go
into place in other places.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Right, So when this happened.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
In Massachusetts, you saw a huge increase in cross border sales.
So not only did Massachusetts and its tax revenue, it's
there were still a lot of products coming into the market.
It didn't really you know, stop all the flavored products coming.
In San Francisco is a really interesting example, they banned
flavored electronic cigarettes, and when they did that, youth smoking
(07:30):
actually went up, right, And you only have to look
right next door to Denver to Golden Colorado where you
can they had a flavored tobacco ban, right, And a
lot of these businesses who sold these products are in
a lot of trouble.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
They're going out of business, and it's gotten to the
point where.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
The city is actually even giving them grants to try
and you know, save the businesses that they basically put
out of business by banning a majority of their products.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
One last question for you that I want to get in,
and that is what kind of studies are we doing now?
Because I know we all know what cigarettes do to you,
combustible cigarettes. We all know just the stuff that you
just listed, all the stuff that's in there, and all
the and the garbage. But if we had any kind
of studies on vaping, are we too soon down this
path for us to have any clearer understanding of the
(08:17):
difference on the impact on people's health because inevitably, these
bands are put forth by people who, you know, in
the spirit of good intentions, are trying to inflict their
will on other adults who should be able to make
their own decisions.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
But are are we studying that stuff yet?
Speaker 1 (08:33):
And if so, what does the data say about the
health effects of vaping versus smoking?
Speaker 4 (08:40):
Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
This is a huge area of research, which you know
I followed at the FDA and I continue to follow
to this day. So again, you know, when you start smoking,
smoking related disease takes a long time to happen.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
It doesn't happen overnight. It's a decade's thing. So we've
only been studying these products for about fifteen years. But
that doesn't mean we can't figure out what's going on, right.
So the way that we do that is we kind
of measure the load of toxins that people have in
their bodies when they are using an e cigarette, for instance,
instead of a combusted cigarette, and we see that that's
(09:14):
much much lower.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
And when those levels are lower, you know.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
You have much less risk of developing sort of the
tobacco related disease that we think of, like COPD or
lung cancer. So everything is pointing in the right direction
to these products being significantly less risky.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Doctor Erkla, I appreciate your time.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
He's the director of regulatory science at Swedish Match talking
about this, and I'm I don't know when the city
council is supposed to take this up, but it's going
to be interesting to see because it's going to be
business owners, right, It is going to be business owners
that have to stand up because most people don't even
know this is going on.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
They won't know what's going on until.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
They go to their store to buy their smokeless tobacco
products or their vappen that's flavored, and find out they can't.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Do it anymore. That's what happened in Golden So.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
I'm hoping that the business owners will at least help
people mobilize and go in and say, look, you know what,
appreciate you trying to help us, but we're good. We're adults.
We can handle our own decision making. The thing that
gets me, I understand why people would say, look, we
don't want you to smoke inside regular combustible cigarettes because
it stinks, it leaves.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Nicotine all over the wall. Like, I get that.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
What I don't understand is that when people are exhaling water, vapor,
you know, and none of the other I don't understand
why they can't just let people make their own choices
when really, aside from the occasional disgusting cloud of cotton
candy smelling stuff you have to walk through, this is
not hurting anyone else. That's the thing I get with
cigarette smoke. I get it. I don't get why people
(10:42):
want to hate on this when it doesn't impact them
directly in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that gets me
the most is that by banning the flavored products, you're
taking away the less harmful products and leaving them most harmful,
this cigarette. And I think something the council could do
is take a moment really look at the facts objectively
and kind of really really take a look at the
science from the FDA that says that, you know, smoke
(11:12):
free products post less risk than combusted cigarettes. And I
would hope they would talk to some of these retailers.
I would hope that they would talk to some people
who used to be smokers and switched over to smoke
free products to really really understand sort of the repercussions
of the decisions that they're making.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Doctor Urcle, I appreciate your time today and thanks for
sharing the information with us, and hopefully the Denver City
Council will not do anything stupid.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Thank you very much.
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