Media

By Jane Stevenson

One of the country’s leading tobacco companies wants smokers to butt out.

Peter Luongo, managing director of Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc. (RBH), launched the week-long Unsmoke Canada campaign at the Empire Club of Canada on Tuesday, saying his company wants to stop selling cigarettes by 2035 — the year the federal government hopes to reduce current smoking rates by two-thirds.

“We said with new technology, we can do better than that,” Luongo told reporters after giving a luncheon speech at a downtown hotel. “We can stop selling cigarettes altogether.”

Instead, the company wants to sell smoke-free alternatives such as a pen-like device called IQOS. A battery in the device heats up tobacco to a temperature less than half of that of combusted cigarettes and does not produce any smoke.

Luongo said the main culprit in terms of “smoking-related diseases” is not addictive nicotine or tobacco, emphasizing neither are entirely risk-free, but “the inhalation of smoke which contains thousands of chemicals.

“‘So while nicotine is addictive, it’s not nearly as dangerous as the smoke from cigarettes,” he said.

Luongo, a Philadelphia native who’s lived in Toronto the last two years, says RBH’s parent company, Philip Morris International, invested more than $9 billion dollars to research and produce smoke-free alternatives to cigarettes.

“Now new technology could mean the end of cigarettes,” said Luongo.

IQOS has been sold in Canada for two years and was recently approved for sale anywhere in the U.S. Luongo said it’s just “the first of many” alternatives to cigarettes.

“For the first time in its history, the FDA authorized an electronically-heated tobacco product for sale in the United States,” said Luongo.

Luongo, who launched the Unsmoke Canada campaign leading up to World No Tobacco Day on Friday, also noted IQOS is different than vaping.

“It has real tobacco so the flavour is much closer to what you’d expect from a cigarette,” he added. “And the nicotine delivery is closer to a cigarette.”