NFL Biosciences is has a Marketing Authorization Application for a smoking cessation technique derived from an allergen treatment in the 1970s that has been quietly used as an unauthorized smoking cessation tool for 10 years. A lot like vaping pens were before the Obama administration tried to claim all tobacco was as harmful as cigarette smoking, an actual carcinogen.
And it works better than placebo, just like vaping, but lots of people have quit using hypnosis and we know that isn't science. This helps due to off-target effects from its original purpose, preventing allergic reactions in workers who used tobacco plants, thanks to how it modifies glucose metabolism.
Being against smoking but also against smoking cessation tools is some of the bizarre focus problem of World No Tobacco Day, on May 31st. Smoking is so systemic in Europe that only half of smokers there even bother to pretend saying they'd like to quit compared to America. Their deaths due to smoking are 70% higher. Let's not even get started on Asia where the smoking rate is higher than the US and Europe combined. That only 12% of Americans now smoke, and falling, is good for public health. But bad if you raise money campaigning about smoking. Smoking has plummeted because, even as much as I like to complain about food coloring hysteria, anti-GMO, vegetable oil, nuclear energy, and ultraprocessed food scaremongering, the U.S. still has the highest adult science literacy of any country in the world.
Go ahead, look it up. I can wait. People who want government to throw more money at their solutions need to convince us we're getting stupider and other countries are ahead of us.
The reality is, Americans are 72% scientifically illiterate, evenly divided among Republicans and Democrats, and that is still number one in the world. So we have led in the smoking decline and stunts like World No Tobacco Day had nothing to do with it. To keep money coming in, groups pivoted from smoking to...pipes?
Well, all nicotine. Despite the fact that nicotine has never killed anyone. Someone actually tried to commit suicide with nicotine once and despite ingesting 500X the LD50, nothing much happened. Nicotine couldn't even kill someone who was really trying.
Cigarette smoke kills, but because you inhale smoke not because of the nicotine. The nicotine is just the addictive chemical that keeps people coming back. Like alcohol, except alcohol companies are a lot more efficient about their carcinogen and far better at government relations. Not only do they sell the addictive chemical as the carcinogenic product, they mask their addictive chemical with nice flavors - and then get a million health experts to say it should be used "in moderation."
Just imagine if a doctor told a patient who smokes cigarettes, with the exact same IARC carcinogen classification as alcohol and plutonium, to smoke cigarettes in moderation.
The medical fact is that no pipe or cigar or nicotine product you don't inhale has ever killed anyone, and before you trot out some breezy epidemiology claim saying they can "link", "correlate", and "suggest" deaths, that was debunked after Big Tobacco was forced to turn over tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. Master Settlement and lawyers immediately hired people to generate evidence for a new harm they could sue over. Which was second-hand smoke.(1) And it failed, because the methodology they had to use in order to create the link was about as convincing as the epidemiology linking vaccines to autism and gluten to low IQ.(2)
Still, if you are going to drum up excitement about your product, your corporate marketing department will use the largest number of deaths they can find on the Internet, 8,000,000 per year, and note that 15% of those are second-hand. Then invoke a virtual cost of $600,000,000,000. That is even more money than President Biden spent in 2024 to hire government workers to make employment look less worse than it was.
Here is the problem NFL Biosciences create for themselves with their NFL-101 product. If tobacco is the problem, and therefore vaping is as bad as smoking, then your product made from chemicals in a tobacco leaf has to answer some awkward questions.
The heads of this French company know that the same bad epidemiology they are promoting to claim they are preventing harm will be turned on them if the product gets popular. Like President Obama did to vaping pens. They are just hoping to make a lot of money before the lawyers get to them.
And let's wish them success. Vaping, patches, gums, hypnosis, chewing gum, this NFL-101 product, it does not not matter how people stop smoking cigarettes, just that they do it.
NOTES:
(1) Then they tried third-hand smoke. Yes, particulate matter left over if someone smoked in the room a month ago was supposedly killing people.
(2) If you are newer to epidemiology hysteria, it's as legitimate as food coloring and vegetable oil disease. And vegetable oil was made popular the same way low-fat diets were: Bad epidemiology that caught public attention so media outlets promoted it and then shady researchers jumped into the field to reaffirm it.