The Competitive Enterprise Institute (of the "They call it pollution, we call it life" ads) says liberal nanny-state propaganda is suppressing the truth about healthy tobacco use. The good news, they say, is that when you get cancer from dippin', you're a little less likely to die than you would be if you got it from smoking (links in the original).
But of course good PR for any tobacco product can’t go without response from the WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative, which, scientific evidence be damned, released a statement warning that smokeless tobacco products are “no safer than the other smoked tobacco products,” a statement that simply flies in the face of common sense and the findings of the National Cancer Institutes: from 1988 to 2001, the 5-year survival rate for oral cavity and pharynx cancers was a little below 60%, and the 10-year rate was a little below 50%. Only about 15% of lung and bronchial cancer patients make it to five years.
See also: one epidemiologist laments, with a presumably straight face, that "funding goes only to research on how to quit smoking, not on finding a safe level of smoking."
(from Think Progress)