June 3, 2015
An important paper (Endothelial disruptive pro-inflammatory effects of nicotine and e-cigarette vapor exposures) has just been published in American Journal of Physiology: Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology that carefully dissects the effects on nicotine and e-cigarette aerosol (both with and without nicotine) on the cells that line the air sacks in the lung. What the authors very carefully show is that nicotine, whether from cigarettes or e-cigarettes, causes a dose-dependent disruption of the functioning of these cells.
The authors do a series of elegant experiments (with both isolated rat lung cells and whole rats) and drill right down to the cellular and molecular pathways through which nicotine damages lung cells in ways that lead to clinical disease. This result is particularly important in light of the common rhetoric that comes out of many harm reduction advocates (and, occasionally, the FDA) that it is the smoke, not the nicotine, that is the problem with tobacco use.
May 22, 2015
Mad Men’s Betty Hofstadt may be one of only four screen characters in more than a decade to suffer serious harm from smoking. The others were on the big screen: Constantine (Keanu Reeves) in Constantine, Tim Donohue (Donald Sumpter) in The Constant Gardener, and Otis Blake (Jeff Bridges) in Crazy Heart.
Four thousand different characters have smoked in 1,100 top-grossing movies since 2002. If only three of these film characters were diagnosed with lung cancer or heart failure, that’s a (potential) on-screen mortality rate of 0.07 percent (less than one-tenth of one percent). This starkly contrasts with the 50 percent tobacco death rate for adult smokers sitting in the audience.
Still, were those occasional, tobacco-induced diagnoses an object-lesson for adolescents, the group most prone to start smoking? No, for a simple reason — all three movies we mentioned were R-rated. Kids were actually restricted from seeing them.
In fact, in 600-plus youth-rated smoking films released since 2002 (55% of all smoking films) — with more than 1,900 smoking characters (48% of all smoking characters) — the catastrophic health consequences of tobacco use were invisible.
May 21, 2015
Japan Tobacco Plans to Acquire Logic Technology – April 30, 2015
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/30/us-japan-tobacco-m-a-logic-idUSKBN0NL0GV20150430
Japan Tobacco Acquires Logic Technology – April 30, 2015
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jt-acquires-logic-the-leading-independent-us-e-cigarette-company-501787281.html
May 21, 2015
Are the studios in the movie or the tobacco advertising business?
The ad is also at http://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/sfm-ads/ad-105
It appears in The Hollywood Reporter on May 26 and Variety on May 27, 2015.
May 21, 2015
The CDC just released its annual update of its fact sheet on studio performance on smoking in movies; you can read it at http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/youth_data/movies....
Here is their overview: