January 2, 2018
Janice Tsoh and our colleagues at UCSF just submitted this public comment to the CDC on improving their smoking cessation efforts. The tracking number is 1k2-90p6-pbgp and a PDF of the comment is available here.
CDC should employ evidence-based strategies to help people quit using tobacco that support the initiation of quit attempts and maintaining long-term abstinence, including: social media interventions, clinician-extender or point-of-care technology tools, interactive voice response systems, market segmentation, insurance coverage for cessation treatment, tobacco-free policies in substance abuse treatment, mental health and other institutional settings including prisons and military settings.
Janice Tsoh PhD, Dorie Apollonio PhD, Noah Gubner PhD, Joseph Guydish PhD, Sharon Hall PhD, Gary Humfleet PhD, Pam Ling MD, Danielle Ramo PhD, Jason Satterfield PhD, Maya Vijayraghavan MD, Lauren Lempert JD, MPH, and Stanton Glantz PhD
Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California San Francisco
Docket control number CDC-2017-0103
January 2, 2018
January 2, 2018
Shannon Watkins, Ben Chaffee, and I just published “Association of Noncigarette Tobacco Product Use With Future Cigarette Smoking Among Youth in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, 2013-2015” in JAMA Pediatrics. This paper shows that use of any non-cigarette tobacco product, including but not just e-cigarettes, predicts smoking cigarettes a year later. Importantly, the effects of these different products in stimulating future cigarette smoking are independent of each other, which means that dual and poly-product increases the odds of progressing to smoking more than using one product alone. This is very concerning because poly-product use is becoming the norm among young people.
Here is the UCSF press release on the paper:
Nonsmoking adolescents who use e-cigarettes, smokeless tobacco or tobacco water pipes are more likely to start smoking conventional cigarettes within a year, according to new research by UC San Francisco.
December 31, 2017
My colleague Gideon St. Helen submitted this comment to the FDA on December 21, 2017. The tracking number is 1k1-90hj-dh4t; a PDF of the comment is available here.
FDA should reject the tobacco industry’s efforts to guide e-cigarette manufacturing standards and instead formulate their own science-driven tough regulations to protect public health
Gideon St.Helen, PhD1
1Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco
Docket Number: FDA-2013-N-0227
December 21, 2017
December 31, 2017
It is with great sadness that I report that Richard Barnes passed away earlier this week from complications of lung cancer.
Richard never smoked, but was exposed to secondhand smoke earlier in his life.
Richard worked with me for many years as his second career after he retired as a practicing lawyer in Oklahoma. While working there he also served as the American Lung Association’s volunteer lobbyist, where (as described below) he played a key leadership role in passing important tobacco control legislation.
After he “retired,” he applied for and won one of our first postdoctoral fellowship in tobacco control, then funded by the American Legacy Foundation (now called Truth Initiative). Most postdocs are young people who just finished the PhD, MD, JD, DDS, or other doctoral degree. It was unusual for such a senior person to apply to such a training position, but Richard made a strong case that he was using the fellowship to launch his second career.
And, as illustrated by the many important papers and reports he wrote with me (listed below) as well as his own independent writing he certainly did that.
December 27, 2017
One of the arguments that e-cigarette apologists have used against the strong and consistent evidence that e-cigarettes are a gateway to cigarette smoking is that, despite the fact that most of the studies on the relationship between e-cigarette use and starting to smoke cigarettes is longitudinal, is that there could still be some form of reverse causality. They argue that the kids who start with e-cigarettes might have started with cigarettes, but just didn’t.
Krysten Bold and her collages at Yale just drove a big stake through the heart of that (already implausible) argument. In their paper “Trajectories of e-cigarette and conventional cigarette use among youth” published in Pediatrics they followed Connecticut high schools students over three different times and examined the relationship between e-cigarette and cigarette use in both directions. In particular, they looked at whether e-cigarette use at one time predicted cigarette use at the next time and whether cigarette use at one time predicted e-cigarette use at the next time.