I wanted to blog about the Healthy Neighborhoods, Healthy Schools meeting we held Tuesday night at Eckstein in Northeast Seattle with members of the Council’s Committee on the Built Environment, members of the School Board’s Operations Committee, but the video of the meeting hasn’t been posted by Seattle Channel yet. I’ll wait a couple of more days so I can include the link to the meeting. Instead I’m going to tell you about Orbs and Snus packets.
If you made a wildly popular, wildly profitable product for decades, but then saw your profits slide due to regulation and taxation aimed at decreasing use of your product, what would you do? You’d adapt and find a new way to package your product, right?
Wednesday we had the first meeting of the Seattle-King County Board of Health’s Tobacco Policy Committee where we talked about our own need to adapt when it comes to tobacco products. It’s time to amend local polices and regulations to better capture how the tobacco industry has changed after the big tobacco lawsuit settlements of the past couple of decades and to address where we’ve failed to change smoking rates. While we’ve made great strides in pushing down smoking rates among adults, those declines don’t show up evenly among all demographic groups and youth smoking rates in King County have gone up in recent surveys. However, more disturbing are the new ways the tobacco industry has developed to leave cigarettes behind and enter a new “cool” world of nicotine delivery.
The bottom line: when you’re on the ropes, make something fruity or minty, and make it like candy.
Camel started test-marketing Orbs, Strips and Sticks in 2008 in three U.S. cities, including Portland. The Orbs look pretty much like Tic Tacs, but they’re pellets of finely ground tobacco with mint or cinnamon flavoring. Same concept for the Camel Sticks and Strips. So, you drop the carcinogens in the tar and chemicals in cigarette smoke, but you still have the zoom and addictive draw of the nicotine. Also new to the U.S. line-up of smokeless options are “snus,” on the market now from at least Camel and Marlboro. Snus (the word is Swedish for tobacco) come in a cool little tin, kind of like buying a tin of mints. In fact you can find Camel and Marlboro snus in minty flavors, as well as standard “tobacco” flavors. Here the tobacco companies have removed the major barrier to chewing tobacco – the spit factor. (Cue high school memories of tripping over some guy’s abandoned spit cup in the cafeteria.) Camel started test marketing snus packets in 2006 in Portland. (What is it about Portland and the market for new nicotine delivery systems?)
Along with these new products come changes to existing ones. For instance, while rolling papers are age-old, kiwi-strawberry flavored ones packaged to look like fruit wrap snacks are a new entry into the market. Where Skoal used to come in just one flavor – shredded tobacco flavor? — it now comes in cherry and apple. Swisher Sweets amid other mini-cigars come in an ever-expanding array of fruit flavors. Grape strikes me especially repellent, but mango isn’t far behind.
There’s been very little health testing done in the U.S. on any of these products so far. Some harm reduction advocates say that any move away from cigarettes is a step in the right direction. Other researchers say that while we may see less lung cancer from Orbs and snus, we don’t know whether we’ll see the same kind of mouth cancers from dissolving pellets or strips, or from snus compared to conventional “chew.” For some reason snus increases the chances of developing pancreatic cancer. Ironically, while the tobacco companies imported the snus concept from Europe, snus has been banned in European Union countries since 2004 over concerns about carcinogens.
While all these products no doubt are developed for adults with expendable cash to support nicotine habits, there’s little doubt the cute tins, bright colors and flavors will appeal to kids and young adults. Even if cancer rates decline, the addictive quality of the nicotine remains and is reason enough to make these products less attractive to young people and less easy to obtain. One idea is simply to ban flavored tobacco. Does that go too far? It would be great to tax these products in King County in order to make the expense the deterrent. Unfortunately, we’re preempted by state law from assessing a local-level tobacco tax. If you have ideas for the Seattle-King County Board of Health’s Tobacco Policy Committee, send them and I’ll bring them to the meetings.