April 19, 2017
On Monday April 17, 2017, Supervisor Malia Cohen introduced legislation to prohibit the sale of all flavored tobacco products, including menthol, in the City and County of San Francisco. While several other cities have enacted restrictions on flavors (and some that included menthol), this is the first blanket prohibition.
Introduction of this important law builds directly on educational activities about how menthol is used to target African American and other communities led by my colleague Valerie Yerger, Carol McGruder, and Phil Gardiner. The educational activities have been and will continue to be a key element of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center's SFCAN partnership with San Francisco to quickly reduce cancer in San Francisco. This is a great example of research translation from the ivory tower to the community.
March 31, 2017
The UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Archive is well-known an widely used by tobacco control researchers and advocates, as well as people interested in a wide range of other topics, such as global warming deniers (many of who have histories of working for Big Tobacco).
Few people realize that the tobacco documents are now part of the larger multi-industry UCSF Industry Documents Library that has included documents from Pharma for several years.
Now we have added a third collection of documents, the new Chemical Industry Documents Archive that has been launched with nearly 2,000 documents and more to come in May and beyond.
March 30, 2017
Every time I have posted a comment on a new study showing that e-cigarettes adversely affect blood vessels and blood in ways that increase risk of a heart attack, a friend and colleague who remains part of the (shrinking) collection of e-cigarette enthusiasts emails me and with he comment that, “if they are so bad where’s the evidence that e-cigarettes increase the risk of a heart attack?”
The first evidence just appeared.
Using the National Health Interview Survey (NIHS), a large national survey done in the US, Nardos Temesgen and colleagues at George Washington University, found that the odds of a heart attack increased by 42% among people who used e-cigarettes.
This increase in risk was on top of the increases in risk due to any smoking that the e-cigarette users were doing. This is a particularly important finding because most e-cigarette users are dual users who keep on smoking at the same time that they use e-cigarettes. What this means is that dual use of e-cigarettes with cigarettes is substantially more dangerous than smoking alone.
March 23, 2017
Eric Crosbie, Patricia Sosa, and I just published “Defending strong tobacco packaging and labelling regulations in Uruguay: transnational tobacco control network versus Philip Morris International” in Tobacco Control. It shows how local and international tobacco control advocates collaborated to defend Uruguay’s strong graphic warning labels against PMI’s trade challenge and provides a model for similar collaborations globally.
In order to facilitate dissemination, we have also translated the paper into Spanish and also made it available for free on the UCSF open access server as well as directly from the journal. Here are the links:
Tobacco Control: English version http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2017/03/22/tobaccocontrol-2017-053690
Tobacco Control: Spanish version http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/tobaccocontrol/suppl/2017/03/15/tobaccocontrol-2017-053690.DC1/Uruguay_UCSF_published-Spanish.pdf
UCSF (free access): English version http://escholarship.org/uc/item/07n9m5wn#
March 22, 2017
The Regulations.gov tracking number is 1k1-8vee-7yms. A PDF version is here.
The FDA’s Proposed Tobacco Product Standard Limiting NNN Levels in Finished Smokeless Tobacco Products is Well-Justified, but the Regulatory Impact Analysis Understates Benefits and Overstates Costs
Docket Number: FDA-2016-N-2527
UCSF TCORS
Wendy Max, Lauren Lempert, Benjamin Chaffee, Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, Eunice Neeley, Lucy Popova,[*] Peyton Jacob, Stanton Glantz
March 22 2017
In its proposed rule setting a tobacco product standard requiring that the mean level of N-nitrosonornicotine (NNN) in finished smokeless products sold in the U.S. must not exceed 1.0 μg/g of tobacco, the FDA took a major positive step towards protecting public health and reducing cancer risks associated with smokeless tobacco use. Congress gave FDA the express authority to regulate the design and contents of tobacco products by creating tobacco product standards, and UCSF TCORS applauds FDA for taking this action.