January 12, 2016
Wendy Max, Hai-Yen Sung, and I submitted this public comment on HUD’s regulatory impact analysis of its proposed rule making some public housing smokefree. Like the Obama Administration’s FDA, this cost benefit analysis overstated costs and grossly understated the benefits of the old rule (including ignoring most health benefits of quitting and discounting the few health benefits of quitting HUD did consider for “lost pleasure”, although not as much as the FDA did.)
A PDF version of this comment is here. The tracking number is 1k0-8nct-upuf. HUD's rule is here and the regulatory impact anaysis is here.
Comment on Regulatory Impact Analysis for
HUD Proposed Rule
Instituting Smoke-Free Public Housing
Docket No. FR 5597-P-02
Wendy Max, PhD
Professor of Health Economics
Hai-Yen Sung, PhD
January 12, 2016
January 12, 2016
After rebounding in recent years, 2015 tobacco counts fell across most of the film industry, in some cases approaching or exceeding 2010 lows. (See film list)
Films with tobacco
Overall, 50 percent of all top-grossing US films featured tobacco imagery in 2015, down from 72 percent in 2002, when the Smokefree Movies campaign was launched. Thirteen percent of G/PG films, 47 percent of PG-13 films and 69 percent of R-rated films showed tobacco.
In 2015, 46 percent of all films with tobacco carried a youth-accessible rating from the MPAA (PG or PG-13). There were 31 youth-rated films with tobacco in 2015, half the number in 2002.
Tobacco incidents in films
January 11, 2016
Clayton Velicer and I recently published "Hiding in the Shadows: Philip Morris and the Use of Third Parties to Oppose Ingredient Disclosure Regulations," in PLOS One. This paper details how Philip Morris worked to mobilize popular oppostion to legislation requiring ingredient disclosure in Massachusetts despite the fact that their own polling showed that people wanted ingredient disclosure of what is in cigarettes.
This work is relevant today as countries work to implement the FCTC's ingedient disclosure provisions. It is also relevant to the FDA should it ever decide to start relasing information on what is in tobacco products. (As we described before, the so-called trade secret claims that the cigarette companies make are not valid because all the companies reverse engineer each others' prodcuts. The only people that the ingredients are secret from is the public.)
Here is the abstract for our new paper:
January 3, 2016
Just before the holidays, Truth Initiative released an important report, Played: Smoking in Video Games, that highlights the fact that the movies are not the only entertainment medium that help sell tobacco to kids.
Here are the main conclusions:
• Tobacco use is prevalent in video games played by youth.
• Tobacco use in video games is viewed as making characters “tougher” or “grittier.” In some cases, players can choose to make their characters use tobacco, and in other cases, players have no choice about whether their characters use tobacco.
• Tobacco use in video games is likely to promote youth smoking. The U.S. Surgeon General has concluded that exposure to tobacco use in films promotes youth smoking. Video games are likely to work in similar ways.
• Video game content descriptors often fail to mention tobacco use.
WHAT INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS CAN DO TO ENSURE TOBACCO USE IN VIDEO GAMES IS NOT CONTRIBUTING TO YOUTH TOBACCO USE:
• Monitor the content of games purchased for and used by youth.