Stop smoking if you want to cut the cost of health care in America by $170 billion a year!

Easier said than done. There are a billion smokers in the world. I was once one of them. I was born in 1948; baby boomers like me grew up in a miasma of cigarette smoke. I don’t recall giving my father anything for Christmas but bottles of scotch and cartons of cigarettes. By 1962, having barely reached the age of puberty, I was smoking a pack of Winstons a day. Throughout high school and college, I had no illusions about its addictive properties; tobacco owned me. Quitting was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

On July 28, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb announced a proposal to cut nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels. Widely viewed as a major policy shift designed to move smokers toward potentially less harmful e-cigarettes, Gottlieb made it clear that, “While there’s still much research to be done on these products and the risks that they may pose, they may also present benefits that we must consider.”

He went on to say, “It’s not the nicotine itself that is responsible for the cancer, the lung disease and the heart disease … it’s the chemical compounds in smoke created by setting tobacco on fire that directly causes illness and death.”

Although welcome news, the announcement struck me as a little late in coming. Four years ago Britain’s medical establishment endorsed smokeless tobacco products like e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to combustible cigarettes and an effective aid in helping smokers quit smoking altogether.

As reported in this newspaper on July 31, (“E-Cigarette Use Linked to Smoking Cessation”), in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in last month’s online edition of the journal BMJ, researchers, analyzing and comparing consumer data collected by the 2015 U.S. Census, reached the same conclusion: Not only do e-cigarettes help smokers replace cigarettes, e-cigarettes help smokers completely kick the habit.

Philip Morris International, second in size only to the world’s largest tobacco company, China National Tobacco, has spent the last three years and $3 billion in research and development creating a heat-not-burn product called IQOS (I Quit Other Smoking) that preserves the ritual of smoking, including the throat hit that vaping lacks, without producing all of the toxic by-products that cause cancer.

In studies conducted in Japan, where demand for IQOS has outstripped the supply, test results show levels of potentially harmful constituents in smokers who have converted to IQOS on a par with those of nonsmokers.

Three million smokers have already converted to IQOS. By 2025, Philip Morris estimates that at the current rate of conversion, 40 percent of its revenues will come from heat-not-burn and its output of combustible cigarettes will drop by a third. The company has petitioned the FDA for permission to market IQOS in the U.S. as a reduced risk product.

Once seen as the done thing to morally oppose “Big Tobacco,” that attitude today is hopelessly wide of the mark. The onslaught of antipathy that accompanies its almost every mention obscures the big picture.

Commissioner Gottlieb got it right. Smokeless tobacco alternatives are here to stay. While we debate the pros and cons of reducing nicotine in cigarettes to nonaddictive levels, policymakers need to come to grips with the fact that promotion of e-cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products as alternatives to smoking combustible cigarettes is an effective strategy for reducing the harm of smoking.

Ted Pizzino, an ex-smoker and Philip Morris shareholder, is a retired airline purser in Honolulu who writes for Medicareorbust.com.