May 5, 2016
Lauren Lempert and I just published "Implications of tobacco industry research on packaging colors for designing health warning labels" in Nicotine and Tobacco Research. This paper uses previously secret tobacco industry documents to learn how to make better warning labels.
Here is the abstract:
Introduction: Health warning labels are an important way to educate the public about the dangers of tobacco products. Tobacco companies conducted research to understand how pack colors affect consumers’ perceptions of the products and make packages and their labeling more visually prominent.
Methods: We analyzed previously secret tobacco industry documents concerning the tobacco industry’s internal research on how cigarette package colors and design influence the visual prominence of packages and consumers’ perceptions of the harmfulness of the products.
May 5, 2016
The FDA issued its “deeming rule” extending jurisdiction to e-cigarettes, all cigars, hookah, and other products (including products that have not been created). The rule itself is 499 pages long, not counting related “guidance” documents that detail implementation.
The best evidence that this rule represents a step (albeit small) forward is the fact that Mike Siegel has described it as “a disaster for public health.”
Based on my very fast (and likely incomplete) reading of the rule, I think Siegel’s summary of the provisions (but not the public health impact) is accurate as far as it goes. Here is what he wrote (less his commentary).
1. Pre-Market Tobacco Applications
May 4, 2016
On Saturday, 9 April 2016, the eve of the MTV Movie Awards, kids from Canada and the US joined forces to call for smokefree youth-rated movies (press release).
Jointly organized by the Ontario Coalition for Smoke-Free Movies and Reality Check of New York, 130 young people dressed in red and blue hit the streets around Toronto City Hall to hand out infographics on the dangers of on-screen smoking.
The recent Ontario Tobacco Research Unit (OTRU) report Youth exposure to tobacco in movies in Ontario, Canada: 2004-14 found that the large majority (86 per cent) of movies with smoking released in Ontario were rated for children and teens.
OTRU estimates that at least 185,000 children and teens aged 0-17 living in Ontario today will be recruited to cigarette smoking by their exposure to smoking on screen. The report also projects that at least 59,000 of those smokers will die prematurely from smoking-related disease.
May 4, 2016
Today, May 4, 2016, Governor Jerry Brown signed five tobacco control bills into law as part of the Governor’s special legislative session.
The Legislature's passage and Governor Brown's signing of these six laws represents Sacramento standing up against Big Tobacco for the first time in a long time and restoring California's leadership position in fighting Big Tobacco. Bringing e-cigarettes into the California's clean indoor air and tobacco licensing laws, closing loopholes in the state's clean indoor air law, raising in the age to 21, and ending the raid on California's anti-tobacco education and research activities to pay for enforcing tobacco license laws are all big steps forward.
In particular, it is a reversal of the trend we documented in out 2014 report, Tobacco Control in California, 2007-2014: A Resurgent Tobacco Industry While Inflation Erodes the California Tobacco Control Program. The last, seemingly minor bill changing the way retailer liscense fees are handled will increase funding for California's tobacco control and research programs by about $2.5 million a year (that had been getting diverted to pay for the licensing programs).
May 3, 2016
In June 2015 we published our paper “The smoking population in the USA and EU is softening not hardening” in the journal Tobacco Control. We showed that as smoking prevalence has declined over time, quit attempts increased in the USA and remained stable in Europe, US quit ratios increased (no data for EU), and consumption dropped in the USA and Europe. These results contradict the hardening hypothesis which is often used as part of the tobacco industry’s strategy to avoid meaningful regulation and protect its political agenda and markets, claiming that there is a need for harm reduction among those smokers who “cannot or will not quit.” Indeed, rather than “hardening” the remaining smoking population is “softening.”
In February 2016 we received an email from Robert West, editor of the journal Addiction, informing us that Addiction was about to publish an article by Plurphanswat and Rodu entitled “A Critique of Kulik and Glantz: Is the smoking population in the US really softening?” whose sole purpose was to critique our Tobacco Control paper, and offered to let us respond to the criticism.