Most smokeless tobacco use does not cause cigarette smoking: results from the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.

Those who either never progress from smokeless tobacco (SLT) to smoking or smoked before using SLT logically cannot have smoking caused by SLT use. The prevalence of such use permits strong inferences about the overall importance of the potential causal effects of SLT on cigarette smoking. We found that the majority of SLT ever users (66%) in the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) were noncausal users.

Regular smokeless tobacco use is not a reliable predictor of smoking onset when psychosocial predictors are included in the model.

Tomar analyzed the CDC's Teenage Attitudes and Practices Survey (TAPS) and reported smokeless tobacco may act as a starter product for or gateway to cigarettes. Regular smokeless tobacco users at baseline were said to be 3.45 times more likely than never users of smokeless tobacco to become cigarette smokers after 4 years (95% CI=1.

Most smokeless tobacco use is not a causal gateway to cigarettes: using order of product use to evaluate causation in a national US sample.

Aims: To evaluate non-causal and causal patterns of smokeless tobacco (SLT) and cigarette use; to assess the prevalence of 'non-gateway' and possible 'gateway' patterns of SLT use.

Design And Setting: Data from the Cancer Control Supplement to the 1987 National Health Interview Survey, a representative survey of non-institutionalized adults in the United States. From reported age at first use, participants were categorized by type and sequence of tobacco product use.