June 19, 2018
Despite the overwhelming support to uphold San Francisco’s ban on selling flavored tobacco products, with 68.4% of voters supporting the law despite a $12 million campaign to overturn it by RJ Reynolds (part of British American Tobacco), health advocates should not relax yet.
RJR may, of course, also sue, but suits against similar laws have failed elsewhere and the San Francisco City Attorney took care to learn from these earlier legal challenges to write a well-crafted law that is designed to withstand legal attack.
More important, based on experience implementing clean indoor air laws, I would not be surprised if RJR (and perhaps other tobacco interests) engages in a campaign to undermine the law by encouraging merchants not to comply, publicizing non-compliance, then working to get the law ignored or repealed.
It is, therefore, that the San Francisco Health Department and health advocates take an active role in educating merchants and consumers (something, ironically, that the political campaign for Prop E contributed to) and be ready to take formal enforcement actions against non-compliant businesses after a reasonable warning period.
Being proactive in implementation will ensure success which, after a while, will become routine. Anything less leaves the door open to ongoing problems.
June 11, 2018
One of the arguments coming from Public Health England and the other e-cig cheerleaders there is that youth use is very low.
A new study using data collected in the UK between June 2015 and April 2016 of schoolchildren (mean age 14.1, n=499) shows that, like everywhere else, a substantial number of kids using e-cigarettes have never smoked cigarettes. In fact, at 52.6%, this is the highest fraction of never smokers reported by adolescent e-cig users.
This observation, combined with the substantially stronger gateway effect for smoking McNeill and colleagues reported in their longitudinal study of UK youth, may be another reflection of the likelihood that all the enthusiasm for e-cigs among much (but not all) of the British health establishment is recruiting kids to a lifetime of nicotine addiction.
The new paper is “More than half of adolescent E-Cigarette users had never smoked a cigarette: findings from a study of school children in the UK” by Fulton E, Gokal K, Griffiths S, Wild S ( Public Health. 2018 Jun 2;161:33-35. doi: 10.1016/j.puhe.2018.04.014. [Epub ahead of print]).
Here is the abstract:
June 11, 2018
Proponents of tobacco harm reduction, including the FDA, take British psychologist’s Michael Russell's idea that, " It's not the nicotine that kills half of all long-term smokers, it’s the delivery mechanism” advanced in his 1991 paper "The future of nicotine replacement" as an article of faith, despite the fact that he simply presented it as a “hypothesis.” In addition, as I noted before, this view was promulgated long before we knew that nicotine has many direct adverse health effects, particularly related to cardiovascular and lung disease (including, perhaps, a causative role in COPD) as well as cancer promoter.
Now Jesse Elias and Pam Ling have published a paper showing direct collaboration between Russell and the tobacco industry in their paper “Invisible smoke: third-party endorsement and the resurrection of heat-not-burn tobacco products.”
Here is the introduction to their discussion of Russell:
June 7, 2018
Rachel Barry and I just published “Marijuana Regulatory Frameworks in Four US States: An Analysis Against a Public Health Standard” in American Journal of Public Health. This paper presents a normative framework for marijuana regulation based on best practices from tobacco and alcohol control and assess the laws in the first for states to legalize adult use marijuana. In particular, we assess what has happened so far in the legalizing states against 67 public health best practices and find that, overall, only between 34% and 51% of states are following public health best practices.
The paper also contains a detailed appendix assessing all four states against the specific policies and the sources for these policies.
Here is the abstract:
June 7, 2018
Senate Concurrent Resolution 143 passed the California State Senate Health Committee on June 6, 2018 on a vote of 6-0 (5 Dems, 1 Rep).
SCR 143, authored by Senator Richard Pan, urges the major motion picture companies and their trade association, the Motion Picture Association of America, to give an “R” (Restricted) rating to any new film designed for viewing by children or teenagers that contains scenes of tobacco use, with limited exceptions. This Resolution is sponsored by BREATHE CALIFORNIA Sacramento Region.
Dr. Gordon Garcia, a physician at Kaiser and father of Claire Garcia, who runs the Thumbs Up Thumbs Down data collection that the whole worldwide Smokefree Movies movement is based on represented Breathe California Sacramento Region and Dr. Stanton Glantz, Director, of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education Smokefree Movies project testified.
While the MPAA did not have the courage to formally oppose the resolution, a lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America “expressed concern about” the Resolution, giving the MPAA’s standard set of half-truths. Obviously, the members of the Committee were not persuaded by their comments.