May 12, 2019
The new ACS CAN recently released a press release, “Political Contributions from E-cigarette Manufacturer Juul Exposed by ACS CAN Campaign to Snuff Tobacco Money Out of California Politics” summarizing new tobacco industry campaign contribution data in California.
Their website Snuff Tobacco Money out of California Politics shows that Democrat Adam Gray, chair of the Assembly Government Organization (GO) Committee, accepted $196,000 in tobacco industry campaign money since July 2014. This is more than four times the amount accepted by the second biggest recipient of tobacco money, Republican Assembly Member Frank Bigelow, who accepted $46,400. Bigelow is the Vice Chair of Assembly GO.
May 11, 2019
On May 9, Tobacco Free Kids, AHA, ALA, ACS CAN, and Truth wrote the FDA asking them to investigate unauthorized smoking cessation claims Juul is making in its new ads.
In fact, the health groups' letter is the investigation. FDA should simply use this information and start enforcing the law.
Juul is taking advantage of FDA’s about “switching” that the FDA included in its rule on what is and is not considered a cessation claim. Essentially, what the FDA did was gave Juul (and other e-cigarettes and now PMI’S IQOS) direction on how to sidestep an otherwise FDA’s well-crafted rule to prevent precisely what Juul is doing.
May 11, 2019
While the largest and best-know collection in the UCSF Industry Documents Library is the Truth Tobacco Documents Library, we now also include Drug, Chemical Food industry documents. Thanks to a donation of documents from Kaiser Health News, we have now added our first collection of internal drug industry documents on OxyContin promotion. Check them out here.
I hope that this collection will be the first of many. In particular, state attorneys general should follow Minnesota Attorney General Hubert "Skip" Humprey III's example and refuse to settle their lawsuits unless the defendant drug companies agree to allow them to make all the discovery documents public, rather than destroying them, as has happened in the first two settlements.
May 11, 2019
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has posted its latest Smoking in the Movies fact sheet online. It covers movie data through 2018 and concludes:
An R-rating for movies with tobacco use can potentially reduce the the number of teen smokers by 18%, preventing up to 1 million premature smoking deaths among youth alive today.
The CDC has updated its health surveillance of onscreen smoking yearly since 2013. View our archive of CDC fact sheets.
CDC also links to the Smoking in Movies fact sheet from Leanord Nimoy's ("Mr. Spock") Tips from Former Smokers.
Breathe California-UCSF reports provide much of the data for the CDC's updates. Download our latest full-length report.
This item, prepared by Jonathan Polansky, is cross-posted from the Smokefree Movies blog.
May 7, 2019
Dorie Apollonio and I just published “Tobacco industry promotions and pricing after tax increases: An analysis of internal industry documents” in Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
Public health advocates see price increases as a key strategy to reduce tobacco use. As the title indicates, we studied the tobacco companies’ internal documents to see how they use price promotions and price changes to blunt the effects of tax increases. Policymakers and advocates need to understand these industry strategies which range from wholesale price changes to buffer the effect of tax increases to shifting where people buy their cigarettes so that they can block these industry strategies to maximize the impact of hard-fought tax increases.
Here is the abstract:
BACKGROUND: Increasing tobacco taxes, and through them, prices, is an effective public health strategy to decrease tobacco use. The tobacco industry has developed multiple promotional strategies to undercut these effects; this study assessed promotions directed to wholesalers and retailers and manufacturer price changes that blunt the effects of tax and price increases.