July 14, 2016
Jonathan Polansky and I just published “Tobacco product placement and its reporting to the Federal Trade Commission” through the University of California eScholarship initiative. This report compares the product placement activities by the cigarette companies between 1978 and 1994 that are discussed in the companies’ internal correspondence with what they reported to the US Federal Trade Commission. We found that only about half the activities were reported.
Our report also contains a list of the movies that appeared to have product placement.
This information illustrates the need for the FTC (and FDA) to act to at the very least ensure accurate reporting and to make sure that movies (and other entertainment media like video games) are not being used to engage in subliminal advertising for tobacco products.
Here is the Executive Summary:
The historical record strongly suggests that asking tobacco companies to report their product placement activities and expenditures did not capture all activity in this area.
July 12, 2016
Today the CDC published a very well done study showing that 81% of residents in multiunit housing have already made their units smokefree. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is still sitting on a rule that would make HUD subsidized multiunit housing smokefree. (As it has done with FDA rules on tobacco, the Administration’s cost-benefit analysis also vastly overstates costs and understates benefits.) The CDC’s national data provides powerful evidence on the importance of this issuing a final rule. It also supports local and state legislation mandating smokefree multiunit housing.
People who do the right thing and make their homes (apartments) smokefree should not be accosted by toxic chemicals in other people’s secondhand smoke.
Here is the CDC press release, which is a good summary of the paper:
July 11, 2016
Jessica Barrington-Trimis and her colleagues have published two important papers in Pediatrics on the link between e-cigarette and cigarette use, both based on a large longitudinal sample of Southern California youth who have been followed for many years.
Their paper “E-cigarettes, Cigarettes, and the Prevalence of Adolescent Tobacco Use” showed that, contrary to assertions of e-cigarette cheerleaders, the large increase in e-cigarette use observed in several national studies in recent years are not simply reflecting kids taking up e-cigarettes instead of e-cigarettes. While some kids who are using e-cigarettes are also smokers, kids are being attracted to e-cigarettes who would otherwise not be attracted to tobacco products.
Here is the abstract:
July 9, 2016
While e-cigarettes deliver fewer cancer-causing chemicals than conventional cigarettes, the evidence that e-cigarettes substantially increase heart and lung disease keeps piling up. This is important because heart and vascular disease (including stroke) and non-cancer lung disease account for over 70% of smoking-caused deaths. In addition, unlike cancer, where the dose-response effect for exposure to carcinogens is reasonably linear at the doses tobacco products deliver, the effects on cardiovascular disease are highly nonlinear, with the biggest increases in risk at the lowest doses.
Aruni Bhatnagar recently published a well-written (and cautiously interpreted) review of the evidence, “E-cigarettes and Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Evaluation of Evidence, Policy Implications, and Recommendations,” in which he observes
June 9, 2016
The New England Journal of Medicine just published two alternative views on what to tell patients about using e-cigarettes for smoking cessation, one from Chris Bullen and one from. You can read both at http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMclde1602420.
Check it out.