Isn smokeless tobacco safer to use than cigarettes?
A. No. There is no safe form of tobacco. Smokeless tobacco can cause mouth, cheek, throat, and stomach cancer. Smokeless tobacco users are 50 times more likely to get oral cancer than non-users. Those smokeless tobacco users who don’t develop some type of cancer are still likely to have signs of use, like stained teeth, bad breath, and mouth sores. As generally available in the United States, smokeless tobacco is clearly safer than cigarettes. For example, there is evidence that smokeless is not a significant cause of lung cancer or other respiratory disease, which accounts for about 60 percent of the deaths from cigarettes. This alone is grounds for calling smokeless safer than cigarettes. I can’t be sure of the scientific basis of the claim that “smokeless tobacco users are 50 times more likely to get cancer than non-users,” but wouldn’t the more pertinent numbers, given the question of relatively safety, compare the oral cancer risks of smokeless tobacco with the oral cancer risks o
