September 21, 2011
In considering any applications for modified risk tobacco products, the FDA should give serious consideration to the fact that the major tobacco companies are currently subject to an on-going federal court orderunder the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act for creating an illegal racketeering enterprise for the purpose of defrauding the public. The court also found that the pattern of past activities that led to this decision is continuing and likely to continue in the future.
Creation and promotion of products that were presented to and perceived by the public as “safer” than conventional cigarettes when, in fact, they were not, has been and remains a central element of this fraud. Modified risk” products have a strong potential for simply being the latest chapter in this fraud.
Manipulation of science and the presentation of scientific results has also been a central element of the fraud. For these reasons, the FDA should be extremely sceptical of any scientific results or claims advanced by any tobacco company or any organization with funding or other connections to the tobacco industry. Searching the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (legacy.library.ucsf.edu) for industry documents related to “harm reduction” yields many documents that were withheld on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.
August 29, 2011
We now have the date for the Tobacco Center's "It's About a Billion Lives" symposium. It will be from 8:30 to 12:30 in UCSF's Cole Hall on Friday Feb 3. The keynote speaker will be Ursula Bauer, the Director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and Sam Hawgood will do the wrap up.
August 29, 2011
A new paper, just published in Thorax, entitled "Smokng in movies and adolescent smoking: Cross cultural study in six European countries, is the largest such study to date, involving over 16,000 teens from Germany, Iceland, Netherlands, Poland and Scotland, found that youth who were highly exposed to onscreen smoking were about twice as likely to smoke as lightly exposed youth. This paper is particularly important because the social environment and background prevalence varies widely across these countries. In addition, the study was large enough to control for the number of movies seen, which would capture other exposures such as sex and violence. As in earlier studies, there was a dose-response, with the larger marginal effects tending to be in the more lightly exposed kids. This paper builds on the already strong evidence that smoking in movies causes smoking and that there is a dose-response, raising further concerns about the practice of governments subsidizing films with smoking.
August 27, 2011
Simon Chapman and Matthew Farrelly published an essay in PLoS Medicine that appeared in the same issue as our paper repeating Simon’s well-worn arguments. Their essay is here.
Here is our comment on their arguments:
SMOKING IN MOVIES: ARGUMENTS VS. EVIDENCE
Chapman and Farrelly’s essay [1], “Four Arguments Against the Adult-Rating of Movies with Smoking Scenes,” reflects the same fundamental misunderstanding of the logic and implications of modernizing the ratings system that Chapman made in a similar essay in 2008 [2].
August 27, 2011
Government Inaction on Ratings and Government Subsidies to the US Film Industry Help Promote Youth Smoking
by Chris Millett, Jonothan Polansky, Stanton Glantz was published earlier this week in PLoS Medicine at http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001077
Here is the editors’ summary: