Denver City Council’s crusade against flavored nicotine products continues to vex those of us who, as a matter of civic responsibility, desire to see a marked reduction in the smoking of tobacco, particularly among youth.

The question, from a public policy perspective, becomes one of how to reduce the societal harms of smoking, the predominant of which is the risk of cancer.

We are a couple generations into it being common knowledge tobacco contains harmful carcinogens. It also contains nicotine, which is not a carcinogen, but is addictive. So is caffeine (Denverites, hold on tight to your Starbucks). People who use tobacco habitually do not, one must presume, do so for its cancer-causing properties, but for whatever pleasure is derived from nicotine. So it would follow efforts directed toward reducing the costs brought on by tobacco ought to include mechanisms which separate the harmful (carcinogens) from the pleasurable (nicotine).

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The medical community has known this for years, and has long recognized the medicinal properties of nicotine, particularly in the form of patches and gums, as a smoking cessation aid.

Consider ZYN, a Swedish brand of nicotine pouches, made by Swedish Match (a subsidiary of Philip Morris International), which announced a factory here in Colorado a few months ago. Last month, the nearly 100-year old Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the marketing of 20 different ZYN nicotine pouch products, including flavors. In the agency’s press release, Dr. Matthew Farrelly, director of the Office of Science in the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products noted:

“To receive marketing authorizations, the FDA must have sufficient evidence that the new products offer greater benefits to population health than risks… In this case, the data show that these nicotine pouch products meet that bar by benefiting adults who use cigarettes and/or smokeless tobacco products and completely switch to these products.”

Now, I should think most of us, who hope to reduce smoking, would consider this a rather positive development. One wee bit of a caveat for those in Denver who might wish to benefit, however: most of these products, the flavored ones at least, will be unavailable by force of law. But fear not, lovers of nicotine — tobacco cigarettes are still there for you and for our kids.

Dr. Brian Erkkila was at one time the lead toxicologist for the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, where he oversaw determining which products could be made available for market. He now works for Swedish Match, but that is hardly on the order of Jerry Falwell working for Planned Parenthood; for existential business reasons, if you are unprepared to accept the moral imperative of their doing so, Philip Morris has shifted its business model toward providing smoke-free alternatives for their customers. Anyway, here’s what Dr. Erkkila had to say about his former employer’s decision, in a recent appearance on KHOW:

“If you think about it… it’s the first nicotine pouch to ever be authorized (by the FDA). They said that having it in flavors was really important to moving smokers away from their cigarettes, that it has really low levels of toxins, that people who start using them switch over away from cigarettes, and that youth aren’t really using it.”

Sums it up rather nicely. What does he think about Denver’s flavor ban, you ask? Well…

“If you think about all the other smoke-free products, you’re thinking about your vapes and your heated tobacco; all of that business is going to leave the city… if I used to be a smoker and I switched to a smoke-free product, and it’s too hard for me to go get the product I want, I might go back to smoking, right?”

Right. What’s more, the FDA backs him up. A little further down in their release announcing their approval of those ZYN products, the agency said they “found that the applicant showed these nicotine pouch products have the potential to provide a benefit to adults who smoke cigarettes and/or use other smokeless tobacco products that is sufficient to outweigh the risks of the products, including to youth.”

We have arrived at a very strange point in history, indeed, where Philip Morris is doing far more to prevent smoking-related cancer than the social engineers on Denver City Council.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.