Spit or Chew?

I was working today at my local starbucks, finishing a draft of a paper I'm writing on smokeless tobacco. After going through the evidence, I'm still at a loss for how I really feel about it. It's an interesting case because it involves some of the real divisions within tobacco control that aren't often highlighted. Here's the situation: smokeless tobacco is harmful--it gives you oral cancer, cavities, and possibly heart disease, but those risks pale in comparison with smoking. So if smokers decided to all switch to smokeless tobacco for their nicotine fix then that would remove about 90-99% of tobacco-related disease. Which is great, but no one really knows if people will switch. There's lots of cases of switching from smokeless to cigarettes--that's what every body did around the turn of the century (remember the spitoon) and there are plenty of people who tend to start on smokeless at about 12 years old and then switch to smoking when they're older. On the other hand, in Sweden where smokeless tobacco is widely accepted (Mats Sundin, for instance, is a smokeless user), there are claims that the dramatic drop in Sweden over the past 30 years has been assisted by a rise in smokeless tobacco consumption. So the proposals for what to do about it are either a full ban (it would be really easy, basically no one would notice, and you'd keep possession and even importation legal) or endeavouring on a full blown campaign to increase use (lowering taxes, running ads, telling doctors to recommend it, et c.).

So what do I think? I guess I think that having people switch would be a good idea theoretically, but the amount of resources required to change the perception of it would be enormous for potentially little gain. I also think that the people who would be motivated to switch to smokeless for health reasons would be the same people who would quit and essentially that it's an option that's not quite quitting, which may or may not be helpful.

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Speaking of smokeless, I found out that Sossusvlei (a dune that I climbed-see my pictures--) was about 300 feet taller than Camp Fortune.