September 1, 2016
The New York Times has an excellent article about the tobacco industry’s efforts to block the FDA’s tepid efforts to regulate e-cigarettes shows that the pro-e-cigarette effort is now dominated by big tobacco companies. The cigarette companies clearly see e-cigarettes as part of their integrated business model, not as a competing technology that will drive them out of the highly profitable cigarette business.
While there is a lot of interesting material in the article about the industry’s lobbying and the fact that the bill in Congress to hobble the FDA was written by Philip Morris and that former Senator Mary Landrieu “forgot” to register as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, the most incisive bit of information for me is the fact that an industry lobbyist was working inside the Obama White House Office of Management and Budget, which has consistently held back and watered down FDA’s efforts.
The Times reported,
August 30, 2016
A tobacco control advocate passed along this email, dated 30 August 2016:
____________________________________________________
Subject: Opportunities for e-cigarette companies in TV and film [MARKETING]
We are representing a Hollywood feature film which offers really great featured product placement for an electronic cigarette partner. If you aren’t the primary point we should be speaking with, I’d greatly appreciate your updating me to who is the relevant individual.
STARBRIGHT is an upcoming $27MM budget film, from the producers of Life of Pi, X-Men and Divergent. The film is a very highly stylized fantasy/adventure, with distribution secured throughout Europe for Q1/Q2 2018, and the US pending shortly. We shoot in Louisiana and Oklahoma from September 15 – December 2016, and in Sicily, Italy January 15 – 31, 2017.
I’d like to talk with you about the opportunity, and would need to have you sign a confidentiality agreement so we can share more details ... [Link deleted]
I look forward to receiving your feedback!
[Name deleted]
Who We Are
August 22, 2016
After 7 consecutive weeks of smokefree youth-rated movies, Hollywood falls of the wagon with Viacom’s Florence Foster Jenkins, which has more than 50 tobacco incidents.
It was good while it lasted.
This item is cross- posted from the Smoke Free Movies blog at https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/blog/after-7-consecutive-weeks-smokefree-youth-rated-movies-hollywood-
August 21, 2016
Charalambos Vlachopoulos and colleagues just published “Electronic Cigarette Smoking Increases Aortic Stiffness and Blood Pressure in Young Smokers” in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, which adds to the evidence that e-cigarettes have immediate and substantial adverse effects on the cardiovascular system.
One of the many ways that smoking damages the cardiovascular system is by stiffening major blood vessels. How stiff the aorta (the big vessel leading directly out of the heart) is can be measured by how fast the pressure wave moves down the aorta, the pulse wave moving faster when the aorta is stiffer. Following use of an e-cigarette for just 5 minutes, the pulse wave velocity increased by about 40% as much as smoking a conventional cigarettes and about 80% after 30 minutes of use. The increase in blood pressure was about 80% as big as for a conventional cigarette for both.
Thus, like passive cigarette smoking, the effects of e-cigarette use are nearly as big as smoking despite the lower dose of toxins. This is more evidence for the nonlinear effects of smoke/aerosol on the cardiovascular system.
August 21, 2016
Thomas Willis and colleagues just published “E-cigarette use is differentially related to smoking onset among lower risk adolescents” in Tobacco Control. They followed 1136 youth forward in time for a year and found that e-cigarettes were attracting youth at low risk of smoking to initiate use with e-cigarettes and that kids who started with e-cigarettes were much more likely to be smoking cigarettes a year later than kids who did not start with e-cigarettes.
More important, they found that the effects were biggest in the low risk kids. In particular, if blows away the assertion made by e-cig enthusiasts that kids who start with e-cigs would be smoking conventional cigarettes anyway.
Here is their “What this paper adds” block from the paper: