November 10, 2019
Several people have emailed me asking what I thought of the analysis “Epidemic of youth nicotine addiction? What does the National Youth Tobacco Survey reveal about high school e-cigarette use in the USA? (Preprint)” that Robert West, Jamie Brown, and Martin Jarvis posted to a non-peer reviewed preprint server. They did this analysis to debunk concerns expressed by FDA and others that e-cigarettes are expanding the nicotine epidemic based on the huge increase in e-cig use by youth last year. West et al’s bottom line is: “Data from the NYTS do not support claims of a new epidemic of nicotine addiction stemming from use of e-cigarettes, nor concerns that declines in youth tobacco addiction stand to be reversed after years of progress.”
November 9, 2019
Dan Orenstein and I just published "The Grassroots of Grass: Cannabis Legalization Ballot Initiative Campaign Contributions and Outcomes, 2004–2016" in the Journal of Health Policy Politics and Law. Much ot our surprise, money spent on the initiative campaigns didn't predict the outcomes.
Here is the abstract:
Context: As of November 2018, medical cannabis was legal in 33 US states and recreational cannabis in 10, mostly enacted via ballot initiative.
Methods: We identified 32 cannabis legalization initiatives from 2004 to 2016 and obtained campaign contribution and state political and demographic data. After exploratory analyses of 15 potential independent variables, we quantified effects of 4 factors (initiative year, voter turnout, population born before 1946, advocate funding advantage) on voter support and likelihood of passage.
November 6, 2019
The biggest problem scientists who want to help figure out what is causing the epidemic of vaping-induced lung injury is that it is impossible for investigators to study the actual products that are being used.
This is because the Drug Enforcement Administration DEA prohibits investigators going out and buying legal (at the state level) cannabis products to study. A university that violates this DEA policy could lose all federal funding under the Safe and Drug Free Schools Act. The only cannabis that can be studied is from a farm in Mississippi that grows it under contract with NIDA. This cannabis is not like cannabis grown today. DEA has said they are going to authorize more grower contracts (they just got sued over this), but is moving very slowly. More important in terms of the vaping lung disease epidemic, even if DEA allows more growers, this will not solve the problem of the need to study the THC devices that are causing the disease.
Fixing this does not require a change in the law. All that has to happen is for the Administration to tell the DEA to allow legitimate investigators to go buy products for study and study them.
Of course, DEA might worry that local pot shops could declare themselves researchers and exploit this rule to sell more product.
This could be avoided by implementing the following policy:
November 6, 2019
After putting $18 million into a campaign to try to trick San Francisco voters into letting Juul rewrite our public health laws, Juul only got 19.5% of the vote.
In other words, 80.5% of San Franciscans uphed the flavor ban, effective T21 legislation, and the Board of Supervisors' decision that e-cigarettes should not be sold or delivered in SF until they have won FDA authorization.
That is an even bigger defeat than RJR suffered when they tried to overturn the flavor ban.
This victory should help speed the spread of comprehensive e-cigarette control legislation at the local and state level.
Congratulations to all the health advocates who worked so hard against what some people through were impossible odds.
November 1, 2019
Yesterday, working with collagues at CDC and Breath California Sacramento, we published "Tobacco Use in Top-Grossing Movies — United States, 2010–2018," in the CRC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, continuing the CDC's parctice of monitoring the presence of smoking in movies, a major stimulus for youth tobacco use. (Other articles in the same issue were on diabetes, opiod overdoses, dracunculiasis, and the outbreak of serious lung disease among e-cigarette users.) Like much in public health, it is a good news-bad news story. The good news is that pressure from the Smokefree Movies campaign, its public health partners, state attorneys general and investors have cut tobacco use (mostly smoking) almost 95% in the youth rated fictional films. The bad news is that the media companies have turned the exception for smoking by real people who actually smoked (i.e., Winston Churchill) in the recommended R rating for films with tobacco into a huge loophole to load biographical dramas with smoking to the point that over progress stopped.