April 25, 2015
On April 22, 2015, Vivek H. Murthy took the oath of office to serve as US Surgeon General for the next four years. His wide-ranging speech dealt with several aspects of tobacco control, including announcing that, “I want 100% tobacco-free campuses at every college and university in America. We’re already one-quarter of the way there. We in the federal government should lead by example, making our federal campuses – and over one million units of public housing – tobacco-free, too.”
He also addressed the problem of smoking in movies. Referring to Disney CEO Robert Iger’s public announcement that there would no longer be any smoking in any films Disney distributed, Murthy said, “In the great American community, more companies will follow the example of Disney, which has committed to eliminating smoking from all its movies watched by children. We could save over a million children from premature death if every film studio followed suit.”
We are all, of course, waiting to see what the Disney policy actually is – the company has not yet posted the actual policy on its web site – to see if there any loopholes. But having this kind of recognition from the new Surgeon General ought to make it harder for Disney to include loopholes.
April 23, 2015
Jonathan R. Polansky, Kori Titus, Renata Atayeva, and I just released our analysis of smoking in 2014 films. The full report is available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5d5348rs.
SUMMARY of FINDINGS
From 2002 to 2014, the share of youth-rated (G/PG/PG-13) films with tobacco imagery fell by nearly half, from 68% to 36%. However, almost half of PG-13 films still featured tobacco imagery in 2014. There has been no substantial decline in the percentage of all youth-rated films with smoking since 2010.
Films rated G or PG comprise about 20 percent of all top-grossing films. Tobacco presence in these films continued to be very low, less than a single incident per film on average. PG-13 films comprise 45 percent of top-grossing films. On average, there were 19 tobacco incidents per PG-13 film in 2014, near the top of the range observed between 2002 and 2014.
April 22, 2015
Two well-done new studies, one from the USA by Wael Al-Delaimy and colleagues at UC San Diego and another from Sara Hitchman and colleagues at Kings College London, have reported that smokers who use e-cigarettes are less likely to quit smoking cigarettes.
Both are longitudinal studies (i.e., studies that followed the same people forward in time) that compared quitting cigarettes among smokers who did and did not use e-cigarettes at the beginning of the study. Both also accounted for level of addiction as well as other demographic factors.
The drop was statistically significant in the Al-Delaimy study (OR=0.42, 95% CI 0.18 to 0.93) but not the Hitchman study (OR=0.83; CI 0.52 to 1.30). Hitchman did find significant reductions in quitting among non-daily users of “cigalike” e-cigarettes – the most common use pattern (55% of e-cigarette users at follow-up in the UK) and the kind of e-cigarettes that the big cigarette companies are promoting) -- with an OR of 0.35 (CI 0.20 to 0.60). Hitchman also found drops (albeit not significant) in quitting for daily cigalikes (OR 0.74) and nondaily tank systems (OR 0.70). These three groups comprise 88% of e-cigarette users in the UK.
April 19, 2015
Mitch Zeller will be a featured speaker at the Smoke Free Alternatives Trade Association meeting in May.
While I suppose that he is doing this as part of the FDA's policy of "engaging stakeholders," he and the FDA should reconsider his participation, since SFATA is actively trying to undermine the CDC's Tips for Former Smokers campaign by posting this ad, which looks exacly like the Tips ads, except that it endorses e-cigarettes as a cessation device. (The Setfan in the ad is Stefan Didak, Northern California SFATA.)
These kind of look-alike campaigns (as they are also running against California with this campaign) may seem funny, but, as explained in the film Merchants of Doubt, are used to confuse the public and public policy makers.
April 16, 2015
Yesterday (April 16, 2015), the CDC and FDA released the 2014 data on youth smoking in the MMWR.
Consistent with earlier results from the Monitoring the Future and several state studies, e-cigarettes are now the leading form of recreational nicotine use among kids. Hookahs also increased. (Some of this may be e-cigarettes because some kids call e-cigarettes “e-hookahs’.) Use of conventional cigarettes dropped.
E-cigarette advocates are making a big deal about the drop in cigarette use, claiming that this shows that e-cigarettes are a good thing because they are keeping kids from smoking.
A close look at the data, however, shows that: