PERSPECTIVES
Commentaries
A doomed dinosaur
Correspondence to:
Yussuf Saloojee, Executive Director, National Council Against Smoking, South Africa; ysalooje@iafrica.com
Received 13 November 2008
Accepted 13 November 2008
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The cigarette is a pharmacological dinosaur. It produces a cocktail of over 4500 chemicals, making it the dirtiest and deadliest way of delivering nicotine to smokers. The availability of less toxic nicotine-containing products, for long-term use, makes the elimination of cigarettes a realistic and desirable target.
The benefits of a ban are potentially great. It is only after the advent of cigarettes that the epidemic of tobacco-related diseases took off. Previously, people had used snuff, cigars and pipes for 500 years with comparative safety (Res Adv Alcohol Drug Problems. 1976;3:1–47).
The spectre that haunts prohibition is smuggling. Yet, the boundary between licit and illicit use of harmful products is shifting and negotiable. In the 1860s opium was available at every corner grocer’s store in the United Kingdom, today morphine is only legally available by prescription. Asbestos manufacturing is prohibited in some 40 countries, with South
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