January 3, 2016
The Wall Street Journal has reported that e-cigarette marketers — including Relativity honcho Ron Kavanaugh — boast publicly about exploiting product placement in Hollywood movies.
That’s the opposite of Big Tobacco’s longtime habit of keeping smoking deals secret or at least deniable.
Has blatancy paid off? Or back-fired?
2015 saw more movies with e-cigs than ever. Yet e-cigs have gone decidedly downscale since their 2010 premiere in the hands of Johnny Depp. E-cigs now show up in the hands of actors with lower buzz and in movies with smaller budgets (see table of top-grossing US movies shoing e-cigarettes).
The good news? All the major studios have kept e-cigs out of their kid-rated movies since 2011.
Not so good? E-cigs are showing up in movies marketed to young adults, potentially crossing over to teen audiences on video.
December 30, 2015
My UCSF colleagues and I just published “Impairment of Endothelial Function by Little Cigar Secondhand Smoke” in Tobacco Regulatory Science that showed that secondhand smoke from little cigars had the same kind of large and immediate adverse effects on the function of blood vessels that cigarette secondhand smoke does.
Here is the abstract:
Objectives: Little cigars and cigarillos are gaining in popularity as cigarette use wanes, mainly due to relaxed regulatory standards that make them cheaper, easier to buy individually, and available in a variety of flavors not allowed in cigarettes. To address whether they should be regulated as strictly as cigarettes, we investigated whether little cigar secondhand smoke (SHS) decreases vascular endothelial function like that of cigarettes.
Methods: We exposed rats to SHS from little cigars, cigarettes, or chamber air, for 10 minutes and measured the resulting acute impairment of arterial flow-mediated dilation (FMD).
December 28, 2015
There is an important indication that the Government of India’s policies designed to get smoking out of movies are having an impact: On December 25, 2015, the Times of India reported that “Bollywood offers to make anti-tobacco short films to go with their movies.”
This means
(1) Bollywood recognizes that the policy is not going away
(2) They are highly motivated to keep the smoking in their movies, perhaps to keep the tobacco companies happy.
(3) We don’t want to turn creation of anti-tobacco messaging to people with a history of working with tobacco
For people who have not been following developments in India, the Government requires Ministry of Health-produced anti-smoking ads before and during the intermission for all films that include smoking. And, any time that tobacco use appears on screen, an anti-smoking (text) message has to appear on the screen at the same time.
December 27, 2015
We just submitted the following public comment to the FTC regarding its proposal to monitor e-cigarette marketing. This is not only valualbe in its own right, but would also provide useful information to the FDA should the Obama Administration actually let the FDA do anything about e-cigarettes. The comment is also available as a PDF here. The FTC tracking number is 00032.
Detailed information and reports on electronic cigarette marketing and sales is essential for understanding the skyrocketing popularity and use of various electronic cigarette products among youth and young adults
FTC File No. P144504
Lauren K. Lempert, JD MPH
Benjamin W. Chaffee, DDS PhD
Lucy Popova, PhD
Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, PhD
Margarete C. Kulik, PhD
Stanton A. Glantz, PhD
UCSF Tobacco Center for Regulatory Science
Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education
University of California, San Francisco
FTC proposal is at https://ftcpublic.commentworks.com/FTC/InitiativeDocFiles/750/Notice.pdf