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:
April 13, 2015
In mid-June, Time Warner (who owns Warner Bros) will become the first major movie studio to hold a shareholder vote on a Smoke Free Movies proposal. As soon as Time Warner’s proxy ballot is released in late April, every share of stock in the company becomes one vote. At Time Warner’s annual meeting of shareholders in mid-June, there will be a presentation about the proposal, and the company will announce preliminary vote totals. This historic vote comes in the wake of Disney’s announcement that it will become the first movie studio to eliminate smoking in youth-rated films.
The full proposal is available here; the operative language is
April 13, 2015
There has been an aggressive move to legalize recreational marijuana through ballot initiative by national marijuana advocacy groups after four states, Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and Oregon, legalized retail sales in 2012 and 2014 respectively.
Several states, including California, likely will consider similar legislation for the 2016 presidential election. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and their local chapters, among others, are pushing legislation that would preempt local jurisdictions from taxing and regulating the sales, production, and cultivation of marijuana. Health groups in California (and, perhaps, elsewhere) have been absent from these early policy discussions.
In order to ensure a ballot initiative that promotes public health standards, including granting local authority to cities and counties to regulate marijuana, the health groups must get engaged now rather than wait until November 2016.
Despite the significance of local control of marijuana, little attention has been paid to the issue. Policy discussions in California have been centered on how to appropriately tax marijuana in order to prevent fueling the black market.