NIH webcast meeting is a great opportunity to learn about science and policy issues around marijuana
March 22, 2016
The NIH held a fascinating meeting Marijuana and Cannabinoids: A Neuroscience Research Summit on March 22-23, 2016. It highlighted a wide range of scientific issues around marijuana and cannabinoids, including a policy session at the end of Day 2.
The videocasts are now available. The policy session was the last one on Day 2, before the concluding remarks by Nora and Robert Califf starting at 2:59. Enjoy!
Day 1: https://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?Live=18464&bhcp=1
Day 2: https://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?Live=18468&bhcp=1
I learned an amazing amount of material; the speakers worked hard to speak to a broad audience. Definitely worth watching.
March 19, 2016
A second paper, “The influence of electronic cigarette age purchasing restrictions on adolescent tobacco and marijuana use,” was just published in Prevnetive Medicine by Michael Pesko and colleagues from Cornell. They found that youth cigarette smoking rates in states that prohibited e-cigarette sales to youth were 0.8 percentage points higher than in states without such laws. (This estimate is similar to the 0.9 percentage point increase Friedman reported a few months ago.)
Overall, this is a reasonably done paper. In interpreting the result, however, it is important to note, that, like the Friedman paper, this new paper indicates that, as overall cigarette use continues to fall, e-cigarette youth access controls are associated with relatively fewer kids initiating nicotine use with cigarettes.
Not surprisingly, Brad Rodu and Clive Bates have jumped on this finding to argue against minimum purchase age laws.
March 15, 2016
Nicola Lindson-Hawley and colleagues just published a well-done study, “Gradual versus abrupt smoking cessation,” that compared gradual vs. abrupt smoking cessation and found that abrupt cessation worked better. People who tried to quit by tapering down rather than just stopping were 20-30% less likely to succeed in quitting smoking.
While the paper did not consider e-cigarette use, it may help explain why e-cigarettes are associated with less quitting, since they are generally used as part of a “taper down” strategy, which is less effective than cold turkey (although the people in the Lindson-Hawley study were getting NRT).
Here is the abstract:
Background: Most smoking cessation guidelines advise quitting abruptly. However, many quit attempts involve gradual cessation. If gradual cessation is as successful, smokers can be advised to quit either way.
Objective: To examine the success of quitting smoking by gradual compared with abrupt quitting.
March 14, 2016
Philip Gendall, Janet Hoek, Richard Edwards, and I just published "Effect of Exposure to Smoking in Movies on Young Adult Smoking in New Zealand" in PLOS One. This paper showed that 18-25 year olds in New Zealand were affected by exposure to on-screen smoking just as youth around the world are, with people who saw more smoking being more likely to smoke.
Interestingly, the population attributable risk for smoking among the New Aealand young adults was 54%, higher than the 37% observed in the USA. This is not surprising because traditional cigarette advertising is banned in New Zealand, so the movie smoking is competiting with fewer other pro-tobacco influences as the reason people start smoking.
Here is the abstract:
March 8, 2016
Jun Ho Cho and Samuel Y Pak just published an excellent paper, “Association between electronic cigarette use and asthma among high school students in South Korea,” which convincingly demonstrates that high school students (around 16 years old) who use e-cigarettes are much more likely to develop asthma (diagnosed by a doctor) and miss more days of school.
They did a very careful analysis that controlled for a wide variety of risk factors for asthma accounted for whether or not the youth were or had used cigarettes in the past. Youth who already had asthma were excluded.
While they consider all the different patterns of cigarette and e-cigarette use, the most compelling results are from youth who that never smoked a cigarette. Among this group, youth who used e-cigarettes were