Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 5, 1994 TAG: 9405050152
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BIRMINGHAM, ALA. LENGTH: Medium
The university-funded study was not meant to influence the debate over whether tobacco companies hope to get young people hooked on the nicotine in smokeless tobacco so they'll move on to cigarettes, its author said.
``It's an issue of consumer knowledge,'' said Dr. Brad Rodu of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. ``It's an issue because nothing is known at this point.''
The study appears in the May issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association.
Dr. Scott Tomar, a smokeless tobacco specialist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, hasn't seen the study but said it was important because it is the first to give nicotine levels by brand.
Tobacco manufacturers have never made the information public, Tomar said, and other researchers have left out brand names for fear of lawsuits by tobacco companies.
Ten million American adults use smokeless tobacco. The CDC estimated about 20 percent of high school-age males chewed tobacco or dipped snuff in 1991, an eightfold increase from 15 years earlier.
A study released by the surgeon general in 1992 asserted that 75 percent of the 30,000 new cases of oral cancer reported that year were caused by tobacco use.
An industry group, the Smokeless Tobacco Council, contends there is no scientific evidence linking smokeless products with cancer.
Rodu and two colleagues analyzed varieties of moist snuff, plug tobacco and chewing tobacco that account for 95 percent of the smokeless tobacco sold in the United States.
The research showed moist snuff - the only type of smokeless tobacco with increasing sales, according to the trade journal Tobacco Reporter - also has the highest nicotine levels. Skoal Long Cut Wintergreen, a best-selling type of moist snuff made by U.S. Tobacco Co., had the highest nicotine level of 11 brands analyzed: 3.35 percent of its total dry weight.
Dr. Dietrich Hoffmann of the American Health Foundation said any nicotine level above 2 percent is high, and anything above 3 percent is ``very high.''
Skoal Long Cut Straight and Copenhagen, another U.S. Tobacco product, ranked second, with levels of 3.33 percent and 3.2 percent.
by CNB