October 6, 2011
| The National Institute for Drug Abuse's National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse (NACDA) has made a very important recommendation to NIDA on the issue of tobacco industry funding for research. After summarizing the tobacco industry's long history of funding research as part of its ongoing effort "to deceive the American public about the health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke, the addictiveness of nicotine, the lack of health benefits from low tar and "light" cigarettes, and their manipulating the design and composition of cigarettes in order to create and sustain nicotine addiction," NACDA suggested that NIDA take care to "ensure that the design, conduct, and reporting of research results is not compromised or does not appear to be compromised by an Investigator's or Institution's relationship with the tobacco industry." In particular, they offered two "Points to consider," quoted in full below:
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October 5, 2011
October 4, 2011
The tobacco industry has spent decades working to convince developing countries as well as funding agencies that they should not "waste" their time on tobacco control, but rather focus on infectious diseases like tuberculosis at the same time that the multinational tobacco companies were expanding aggressively in those very countries.
We just published a paper that modernizes mathematical models of the global TB epidemic to include the effects of smoking and passive smoking. This paper shows that, because smoking and passive smoking facilitate the spread of TB and the transition from infection to active TB, continued increases in smoking in much of the world will dramatically delay achieving the Millennium Development Goals for controlling TB. Indeed, in some parts of the world they will never be met.
This fact further bolsters the case that implementing global tobacco control, as described in the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, is a key element of the development agenda because of the impact on infectious disease, as well as the connections for noncommunicable diseases identified in the UN High Level Summit a couple weeks ago. Reducing tobacco use is crucial for achieving the Millennium Development Goals for TB. Tobacco control is tuberculosis control.
October 3, 2011
Jonathan Polansky and I just published a paper in the peer reviewed journal Tobacco Control that analyzed how much money 1232 moves released in the USA between 2002 and 2010 made. After controlling for when the movie was released, the film rating and production budget (a proxy for presence of stars, production values of the film and how heavily the film was promoted), we found that films with smoking grossed 13% less than comparable smokefree movies.
Because PG-13 smokefree films already made 41% more money at the box office than R-rated films with smoking (median $48.6 million vs. $34.4 million), implementing an R rating for smoking to remove it from youth-rated films will not conflict with the economic self interest of producers.
Even smokefree R rated movies made more money than smoking R movies.
Indeed, given Hollywood's obsession with making money, one wonders what the incentive is to keep the smoking in films. Art?
Read the paper at http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2011/09/23/tobaccocontrol-2011-050023.abstract
September 28, 2011
The WHO has issued an updated version of its report, "Smoke-free Movies: From Evidence to Action." This report updates the science (and had the benefit of advance copies of the recent research from Europe as well as knowledge of Simon Chapman's position), reviews the state of policy making around the world, and directlt addresses the new issue of government subsidies to films with smoking.
Here is what the report says about these subsidies: "These subsidies indirectly promote tobacco use through media, and therefore are counter to WHO FCTC Article 13 and its guidelines." This is a particularly important conclusion in light of the fact that the EU has opened a public consultation on the issue of film subsidies and the EU is a party to the FCTC. So is Canada, another FCTC party, where advocates are raising the issue of subsidies to films with smoking.
Here is how the WHO describes the new report on its web site (I added the bold):
WHO releases the second edition of the smoke-free movies report. It underlines the fact that, in some countries, many of the youth-rated films that contain tobacco imagery are the recipients of significant government production subsidies.