November 12, 2015
The deeming rule that the FDA submitted to the Office of Management of Budget was leaked to the Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Association (tveca.org), together with the FDA guidance document on how the FDA plans to implement the rule,
TVECA made the guidance available on its website and I am including a copy here. (It is a 36 MB image, so downloading will take a while).
The TVECA has not made the deeming rule available on its website, reportedly because the FDA requested that they not post it on their site or share it with anyone, and they have complied with that request.
Given that the rule is in the hands of the industry, the FDA (really the Obama Administration) shold level the playing field and release the rule, as submitted to the OMB, to the public and public health community.
November 5, 2015
The recent paper “How does electronic cigarette access affect adolescent smoking” by Yale University economist Abagail Friedman [1] has attracted a lot of attention from e-cigarette advocates (see links at the end of this post) because of its conclusion that “Across the board … reducing e-cigarette access increases smoking among 12 to 17 year olds.”
The paper correlated cigarette use in six national cross-sectional (“snapshot”) survey waves of cigarette use collected between 2002 and 2013 with whether or not the respondents lived in states covered by laws restricting sales of e-cigarettes to kids. The paper showed declining cigarette use in all states, but after the laws passed, the levels of (declining) smoking were higher than predicted levels without the law.
In interpreting the results in this paper, it is important to keep in mind what it did not include in the analysis: e-cigarette use. As Dr. Friedman noted in her paper, “this analysis does not measure electronic cigarette use, and thus cannot speak to shifts in that behavior or its long run effects.” She also took care to note that the market had not yet reached equilibrium, which is particularly important when thinking about kids and e-cigarettes.
October 30, 2015
The American Academy of Pediatics just released new Tobacco Prevention Guidelines. Among other things, the guidelines say:
"Advertising and promotion is a cause of tobacco use initiation in adolescents. Therefore, tobacco advertising and promotion that is accessible to children should be prohibited, including point-of-sale advertising, product placements in movies and other entertainment media, and promotion in print or Internet-based media accessible to youths.” [Emphasis added]
They also recommended against use of e-cigarettes for cessation.
October 30, 2015
The Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! movie database, created by Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails, contains detailed information on smoking in over 2300 movies released since 2002. Working with your volunteers, Breathe updates the database every week. This information forms the backbone of all the lists and charts on the Smoke Free Movies site.
Now you can search it for yourself. You can access it from a link in the upper right corner of the Smoke Free Movies website or directly at http://tutd.library.ucsf.edu.
Check it out!
October 24, 2015
Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/business/us-chamber-of-commerces-focus...
It is based on a lot of information in the tobacco industry documents. See for yourself at http://industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu