Tobacco Harm Reduction - Origins

“The case is advanced for selected nicotine replacement products to be made as palatable and acceptable as possible and actively promoted on the open market to enable them to compete with tobacco products. There will also need to be health authority endorsement, tax advantages and support from the anti-smoking movement if tobacco use is to be gradually phased out altogether. It is essential for policymakers to understand and accept that people would not use tobacco unless it contained nicotine and that they are more likely to give it up if a reasonably pleasant and less harmful alternative source of nicotine is available. It is nicotine that people cannot easily do without, not tobacco. It will be assumed … our main concern is to reduce tobacco-related diseases and that moral objections to the recreational and even addictive use of the drug can be discounted providing it is not physically, psychologically or socially harmful to the users or to others.”

- Professor Michael Russell – consultant psychiatrist, Institute of Psychiatry, London.

See also p.24 of the report: Burning Issues: The Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction 2020