September 26, 2019
With the replacement of Juul CEO Kevin burns by Altria’s Chief Growth Officer K.C. Crosthwaite, Juul has dropped any pretense of not being a tobacco company.
Juul also announced that the company is suspending all broadcast, print and digital product advertising in the U.S., and is refraining from lobbying the administration on its recently announced policy that would pull flavored e-cigarettes from the market that haven’t received marketing authorization from FDA, and would “comply with the final policy” when effective. through the premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) process. (Juul, however, is continuing to spend millions of dollars on ads that contain unauthorized reduced risk and cessation claims in its campaign to pass San Francisco Proposition C, which would replace the City’s existing e-cig regulations with ones Juul wrote.)
September 24, 2019
Our colleagues in England who remain wedded to e-cigs have been saying that the cases of lipoid pneumonia are an American phenomena. They missed this case report -- Respiratory failure caused by lipoid pneumonia from vaping e-cigarettes – published by BMJ showing the same problems are happening there as in America (and other countries).
Here is the abstract:
September 22, 2019
In a strongly worded editorial, "No on Prop. C: Don’t let Juul write San Francisco’s vaping laws," the San Francisco Chronicle came out foursquare against the Juul initiative, Proposition C.
September 21, 2019
Michelle Manderski, Binu Singh, and Cristine Delnevo wrote a letter to American Journal of Preventive Medicine criticizing the paper that Talal Alzahrani and I published using the 2014 and 2016 National Health Interview Survey to demonstrate a cross-sectional association between using e-cigarettes and having had a heart attack on the grounds that we did not include the 2015 data.
As we pointed out in our response, “Adding Data From 2015 Strengthens the Association Between E-Cigarette Use and Myocardial Infarction.” The reason that we did not include 2015 in the original paper is that we did not realize that the 2015 survey asked about e-cigarettes because the question was in a supplement not the main survey. In any event, adding the new data made the association between nondaily e-cig user and MI significant, something that we did not find in our original study. Daily e-cig use was statistically significant in both the original study and with the 2015 data added.
September 21, 2019
The Government of India has stopped the sale of e-cigarettes (and other electronic nicotine delivery systems [ENDS], including PMI’s IQOS heated tobacco product) through emergency legislation (called an “ordinance”), in which the president issues an order on behalf of the Cabinet when the Parliament is not in session. The Ordinance will be considered by Parliament when it returns in December, which can overturn it or enact it into permanent law. Because India has a parliamentary system, the ordinance is likely to be passed into law.