February 26, 2017
We submitted this public comment to the FDA last week. The tracking number is 1k1-8uvs-bibu. A PDF version is available here.
FDA Should Not Extend the Comment Period for its Proposed Tobacco Product Standard Limiting NNN Levels in Finished Smokeless Tobacco Products
Docket Number: FDA-2016-N-2527
UCSF TCORS
Benjamin Chaffee, Wendy Max, Lauren Lempert, Stanton Glantz
February 22, 2017
Because it is an urgent matter of public health, UCSF TCORS (which includes dental, medical, nursing, and public health professionals, scientists, economists, and lawyers) opposes any extension of time to comment on FDA’s proposed rule limiting NNN levels in smokeless tobacco products. Rather, FDA should keep its April 10, 2017 deadline for the comment period, and quickly finalize the proposed rule without delay.
February 23, 2017
Catherine Egbe, Stella Bialous, and I just published “Avoiding “A Massive Spin-Off Effect in West Africa and Beyond”: The Tobacco Industry Stymies Tobacco Control in Nigeria” in Nicotine and Tobacco Research. This paper uses tobacco industry documents to show how the tobacco industry to show how BAT and other tobacco companies blocked development and implementation of Nigeria’s first tobacco control law in the 1990s.
This bit of history highlights the importance of strong implementation of FCTC Article 5.3, which commits parties to the treaty to keep the tobacco companies from infiltrating the government’s policy making process. We also illustrate how the industry is continuing such activities today.
Another important lesson, which is reinforced from earlier work outside Africa, is that the tobacco companies are acutely aware of the global importance of precedent, something that the public health community often ignores.
Africa is a key battleground in global tobacco control and there are initiatives under way to increase taxes there. This paper illustrates how succeeding in that effort will require understanding and countering tobacco industry influence.
Here is the abstract:
February 21, 2017
Tomoyasu Hirano and colleagues just published “Electronic Cigarette Use and Smoking Abstinence in Japan: A Cross-Sectional Study of Quitting Methods” that adds to the already-strong case that smokers who use e-cigarettes are less, not more, likely to quit smoking.
They conducted a national cross-sectional study of 9055 people in Japan who had tried to quit smoking cigarettes in the last 5 years and found that people who used e-cigarettes were 38% less likely to have stopped smoking than people who didn’t use e-cigarettes. This finding of about a 1/3 drop in the odds of having quit is consistent with the meta-analysis of the entire available literature – including the few papers that showed increased quitting among e-cigarette users -- we published last year as well as other results published since then.
Here is the abstract:
February 15, 2017
There is strong and consistent evidence that exposure to secondhand smoke causes heart attacks and that smokefree workplace and public place laws cut heart attacks (and other diseases).
You would question that conclusion if you read the article in Slate by Jacob Grier, a one-time employee of the tobacco industry-supported Cato Institute and bartender, who tries to use the natural variability in results in different studies to argue against this fact.
February 10, 2017
Many people think about youth who start smoking as a homogenous group. Lauren Dutra, Nadra Lisha, Anna Song, and I have found that there are actually four different patterns of youth smoking (in addition to people who never smoke a cigarette).
Our paper, “Beyond experimentation: Five trajectories of cigarette smoking in a longitudinal sample of youth” in PLOS One. While the largest group of kids starts smoking around 12-13 and plateaus in terms of days smoked per month around age 20, there are also kids who only smoke very occasionally, and others who, while they start around 12-13, their smoking peaks around age 17, then dropps off. There are also “late escalators” who don’t even start until they are around 20.
Another important observation is that many of these kids never become daily smokers, which is relevant in the current e-cigarette discussions were some are discounting the value of 30-day smoking as a measure of adolescent and young adult smoking behavior.
There are several important implications: