Smokeless nicotine seen as 'bridge' for military members, veterans quitting cigarettes

Smokeless nicotine products are being seen as a “bridge” to quitting cigarettes for former and current members of the military, which has an entrenched culture of tobacco use, multiple experts said during a Tuesday event for The Hill.

“I’m a vascular and intervention radiologist, so, over, again, over my career, I’ve taken care of a lot of folks with critical limb ischemia, stroke to, you know, that are sequelae of cigarette smoking from past years, and so we’re trying to get folks away from the combustible cigarettes,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Health Affairs Stephen Ferrara told The Hill’s Kathleen Koch during the event titled “Serving Those Who Serve, Embracing Tobacco Harm Reduction.”

“So, we’re looking at nicotine replacement or other things that will satisfy or try to give people a bridge so that they cannot get the most toxic part of the tobacco experience as a way to eventually get to full cessation,” he added later.

In the discussion, Ferrara estimated that about 30 percent of U.S. service members use tobacco products, calling the rate of use “about twice” in comparison to the general population.

In 2018 data from the Pentagon, 37.8 percent of active-duty service members said they had used tobacco or nicotine products, with 18.4 percent of service members saying they smoked cigarettes and 13.4 percent saying they used chewing tobacco.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the cigarette smoking rate for the U.S. adults in 2022 was estimated to be 11.6 percent.

HunterSeven Foundation co-founder and Chief Health Officer Chelsey Simoni discussed her personal experience with cigarette harm reduction. She talked about her push for her husband, a former smoker who vapes, to quit and trying to buy him nicotine pouches instead.

“I’m a realist. My husband smokes, now he vapes. And, you know, I was actually at the base up the street, and I was like, ‘I’m going to grab him some Zyn,’ because I’ve been influencing him to try to quit, and they weren’t for sale there. And so, you know, I think one of the biggest things —,” Simoni said before Koch interjected with a question.

“But, tobacco, cigarettes, were?” Koch asked.

“Cigarettes were on the shelves, and so was chewing tobacco,” Simoni added. “And so, a big concern, I think the biggest concern, that we see with HunterSeven and with the veteran population — you know — we support hundreds of thousands of people, whether it be education, thousands of veterans with cancer screening, early identification, cancer care.

“One of the biggest things we see is that a lot of veterans and service members, along with providers, don’t understand the difference between tobacco and nicotine. One’s addictive, nicotine, one causes cancer, tobacco and so, that’s the foreground of what we need to start with.”