HARM reduction is a concept that many people and governments struggle with, especially when dealing with recreational drugs. Take smoking, for example. Even smokers know it is dangerous. Many would like to give up and many have tried. Such is the power of nicotine and social conditioning that most fail. Yet there is a safer alternative.
Snus, or sucking tobacco, comes in pouches that sit between lip and gum. In Sweden it can be bought at local stores and its advocates argue that unlike nicotine patches or gum, snus is enjoyable. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of men have switched from smoking to snus. Sweden now has by far the lowest percentage of male smokers in Europe. Swedish men also have the lowest rate of lung cancer in Europe.
Despite this, the European Union will not countenance snus outside Sweden. Legally, countries seem incapable of coping with novel psychoactive substitutes, even if they are safer. There is more to overcome than legal barriers. A strong common-sense argument holds that the best incentive for smokers is 鈥渜uit or die鈥�, and anything that dilutes this message is bad. Politicians are wary of encouraging anything that might be construed as a vice.
Advertisement
True, snus has some downsides: it can raise blood pressure, for example, and more people are taking it up. Still, the health risks for men who crave nicotine are lower in Sweden than just about anywhere else.
Now scientists want to make alcohol safer by separating its pleasurable qualities from its negative consequences (see 鈥淭o your good health鈥�). That, too, is unlikely to go down well with everyone. The pleasure of alcohol has made it one of the world鈥檚 most widely used recreational drugs. However, that pleasure comes at a high price in terms of injury and disease, crime, traffic accidents and domestic violence.
Governments already know the best ways to reduce this toll: by raising the price of a drink and limiting access to it. Yet in most rich westernised countries, the price of alcohol is falling and access is rising. Most other measures, including educating schoolchildren, do not have a long-lasting effect. Which leaves a technical fix.
Safer alcohol will have to overcome not only the barriers facing other harm reduction measures but also powerful moral opposition. Intriguingly, if scientists really can separate alcohol鈥檚 pleasurable effects from the violence and disease it causes, many reasons for that moral opposition should disappear. This has to be an experiment worth trying.
