"This is a wake-up call for the public health community," says Gregory Connolly of Harvard School of Public Health. "It's a total sea change."

For smokers who can't light up in the office or at a restaurant, a new aspirin-sized tablet, called "Camel Orb," will let tobacco melt in their mouth. The dissolvable product — arriving January in stores in Portland, Ore., Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis — is the first such product by a major tobacco company and is part of a booming market in smokeless alternatives to cigarettes as smoke-free laws sweep the nation.

"It's meeting the needs of smokers," says Rob Dunham, of R.J. Reynolds, maker of Orb and Camel cigarettes. With lozenge-like Orb, he says there's no smoke, no spit, no litter.

In the past two years, the nation's two largest cigarette companies, R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris USA, have moved into the smokeless tobacco market as cigarette sales continue to fall. Each introduced smokeless pouches or "snus, " touted as spit-free products that sit inside the mouth. They also bought smokeless tobacco companies.

"We've been very pleased with the consumer response" to Marlboro Snus, says David Sutton, spokesman of Altria Group, which owns Philip Morris USA. He says smokeless is a "growing category" with sales rising 6%-8% annually. He says cigarette sales are falling 2%-3% each year.

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