Advocating Tobacco Harm Reduction in a Hostile Environment

The recent commentary ‘It is Time to Act with Integrity and End the Internecine Warfare Over E-Cigarettes’ addresses the need to achieve a lifesaving rapprochement between the tobacco control mainstream and the tobacco harm reduction community. Failure to end the warfare and reinstate fealty to good science risks millions of additional premature, smoking-related deaths that could otherwise have been prevented. Numerous instances of the undermining of science, and the scientists behind the science, threaten to impede the objective of furthering the development and dissemination of credible evidence and bringing together the major stakeholders for reconciliation and to join in common cause in this vital endeavour. Protecting youth and supporting adults can and must be achieved simultaneously. We must also listen to the pleas of consumers, many from marginalized communities, who have lived experience as smokers who have transitioned off lethal smoked products with the aid of alternative nicotine-containing products and whose voices have been wrongly ignored, distrusted, rejected, and too often dismissed as serving the interests of the “tobacco industry.”