January 12, 2016
After rebounding in recent years, 2015 tobacco counts fell across most of the film industry, in some cases approaching or exceeding 2010 lows. (See film list)
Films with tobacco
Overall, 50 percent of all top-grossing US films featured tobacco imagery in 2015, down from 72 percent in 2002, when the Smokefree Movies campaign was launched. Thirteen percent of G/PG films, 47 percent of PG-13 films and 69 percent of R-rated films showed tobacco.
In 2015, 46 percent of all films with tobacco carried a youth-accessible rating from the MPAA (PG or PG-13). There were 31 youth-rated films with tobacco in 2015, half the number in 2002.
Tobacco incidents in films
January 11, 2016
Clayton Velicer and I recently published "Hiding in the Shadows: Philip Morris and the Use of Third Parties to Oppose Ingredient Disclosure Regulations," in PLOS One. This paper details how Philip Morris worked to mobilize popular oppostion to legislation requiring ingredient disclosure in Massachusetts despite the fact that their own polling showed that people wanted ingredient disclosure of what is in cigarettes.
This work is relevant today as countries work to implement the FCTC's ingedient disclosure provisions. It is also relevant to the FDA should it ever decide to start relasing information on what is in tobacco products. (As we described before, the so-called trade secret claims that the cigarette companies make are not valid because all the companies reverse engineer each others' prodcuts. The only people that the ingredients are secret from is the public.)
Here is the abstract for our new paper:
January 3, 2016
Just before the holidays, Truth Initiative released an important report, Played: Smoking in Video Games, that highlights the fact that the movies are not the only entertainment medium that help sell tobacco to kids.
Here are the main conclusions:
• Tobacco use is prevalent in video games played by youth.
• Tobacco use in video games is viewed as making characters “tougher” or “grittier.” In some cases, players can choose to make their characters use tobacco, and in other cases, players have no choice about whether their characters use tobacco.
• Tobacco use in video games is likely to promote youth smoking. The U.S. Surgeon General has concluded that exposure to tobacco use in films promotes youth smoking. Video games are likely to work in similar ways.
• Video game content descriptors often fail to mention tobacco use.
WHAT INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS CAN DO TO ENSURE TOBACCO USE IN VIDEO GAMES IS NOT CONTRIBUTING TO YOUTH TOBACCO USE:
• Monitor the content of games purchased for and used by youth.
January 3, 2016
The Wall Street Journal has reported that e-cigarette marketers — including Relativity honcho Ron Kavanaugh — boast publicly about exploiting product placement in Hollywood movies.
That’s the opposite of Big Tobacco’s longtime habit of keeping smoking deals secret or at least deniable.
Has blatancy paid off? Or back-fired?
2015 saw more movies with e-cigs than ever. Yet e-cigs have gone decidedly downscale since their 2010 premiere in the hands of Johnny Depp. E-cigs now show up in the hands of actors with lower buzz and in movies with smaller budgets (see table of top-grossing US movies shoing e-cigarettes).
The good news? All the major studios have kept e-cigs out of their kid-rated movies since 2011.
Not so good? E-cigs are showing up in movies marketed to young adults, potentially crossing over to teen audiences on video.
December 30, 2015
My UCSF colleagues and I just published “Impairment of Endothelial Function by Little Cigar Secondhand Smoke” in Tobacco Regulatory Science that showed that secondhand smoke from little cigars had the same kind of large and immediate adverse effects on the function of blood vessels that cigarette secondhand smoke does.
Here is the abstract:
Objectives: Little cigars and cigarillos are gaining in popularity as cigarette use wanes, mainly due to relaxed regulatory standards that make them cheaper, easier to buy individually, and available in a variety of flavors not allowed in cigarettes. To address whether they should be regulated as strictly as cigarettes, we investigated whether little cigar secondhand smoke (SHS) decreases vascular endothelial function like that of cigarettes.
Methods: We exposed rats to SHS from little cigars, cigarettes, or chamber air, for 10 minutes and measured the resulting acute impairment of arterial flow-mediated dilation (FMD).