This week, another member of the old-guard tobacco companies moved from ankle- to knee-deep in the accelerating e-cigarette free-for-all. RJReynolds branch of tobacco giant Reynolds American, the 2nd largest tobacco company (after Phillip Morris), launched its new, sophisticated electronic cigarette, called Vuse. It has some features unique to this product, aimed at making attempting to quit deadly addictive cigarettes easier for desperate smokers. They thus join Lorillard, whose purchase of Blu e-cigs last year started the trend, and recently Altria announced they would be selling a similar product later this year. Expect all the majors to get in on this win-win for them and for public health before too long.
ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross, who runs ACSH s Facebook page on the subject of reduced-risk cessation products for addicted smokers who want to quit but have been unsuccessful, had this to say: I don t feel the urge to delineate the Vuse features as they are well described in both RJR s press release and in several news reports dealing with it. I would like to emphasize that, while those who mindlessly, or with ulterior motives, attack this new venture as some sort of sign of the revival of Big Tobacco Apocalypse, the opposite is true. It was always inevitable given the tremendous success, as assayed by sales figures anyway of e-cigarettes, that the experts in tobacco, nicotine, and marketing the tobacco industry pro s would get involved. If the public health agencies and NGOs weren t bound up in agenda and dogma based in the 2oth century, they would recognize the onslaught of e-cigarettes as harm reduction devices, for the public health miracle that it is. Those in the know money market experts have predicted that sales of e-cigarettes may well outstrip those of cigarettes within the next half-decade. What a huge benefit that would be, as the devastation wreaked upon smokers sick and dying, and their families, would be dramatically reduced by the much less harmful uptake of e-cigarettes. Maybe someday the CDC and the FDA and the EU and the WHO will catch up to the tobacco industry in trying to save smokers lives and who would have imagined such a statement coming from ACSH, devoted and dogged opponents of Big Tobacco since our founding in 1978?
