Snus and the Art of Suppression: Part 5 – The report that nearly was
Why is snus banned in the European Union? How did it happen? Snusforumet, in partnership with author and commentator Christopher Snowdon, brings you the inside story behind one of the EU’s more confounding policies.
For the next several weeks, Snusforumet is publishing excerpts from the story behind the EU snus ban as written in The Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition since 1800, a 2011 book written by Christopher Snowdon.
However, Snusforumet subscribers get instant access to the whole story. Click here to subscribe to Snusforumet and get the entire chapter on snus from The Art of Suppression emailed straight to your inbox.
Part 5 – The report that nearly was
The original version of the ENSP report was by no means an unequivocal endorsement of snus in harm reduction. Instead, it weighed up the evidence and accepted that there were cogent arguments on both sides. It conceded that there were always risks in trying a new approach, but it welcomed “new and fresh ideas” and called for a comprehensive tobacco control strategy which “maximises public health gain while respecting individual self-determination.” This balanced approach was evidently not to the ENSP’s liking and both the tone and the content were radically altered before publication. Contrasting the final publication (renamed ‘ENSP Status Report on Oral Tobacco’) with the version submitted by Research voor Beleid reveals the extent of the rewriting.
Chapter 3 of the original report, for example, was written by the Polish scientist Witold Zatonski and was titled ‘The harm reduction capacity of oral tobacco’. In the original document, Zatonski had written:
There can be no doubt that the survival in Sweden of the 19th century custom of using oral tobacco [by] the male population has contributed significantly to the fact that the prevalence of smoking in Sweden in the second half of the 20th century was much lower than in many European countries. The relatively low prevalence of smoking is the reason behind a low incidence of lung cancer in Sweden. [emphasis
added]
This was changed in the final report to downplay the role of snus in the ‘Swedish experience’:
It is likely that the surviving 19th century custom of oral tobacco use by Swedish men is one of the factors responsible for the lower rates of lung cancer and other tobacco-related diseases in the 20th century among Swedish men, compared to male populations in other European countries… We must also consider the Swedish tobacco control model, which is regarded as exemplary in the world. [emphasis added]
Zatonski had originally written that lung cancer rates in Finland and the UK will…
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