January 10, 2020
Amit Yadav, Pam Ling and I just published “Smokeless tobacco industry’s brand stretching in India“ in Tobacco Control. This paper, published in the journal’s Industry Watch section, shows how the smokeless tobacco companies introduced look-alike non-tobacco products that they then promoted as a way to get around India’s ban on tobacco advertising and promotion. It points to the need for a clear and uniform policy against brand stretching of tobacco products that harmonizes different laws and regulations to mitigate the problem permanently.
January 9, 2020
Thomas Eissenberg, Aruni Bhatnagar, Simon Chapman, Sven-Eric Jordt, Alan Shihadeh, and Eric. Soule just published an excellent commentary in American Journal of Public Health, “Invalidity of an Oft-Cited Estimate of the Relative Harms of Electronic Cigarettes” that shows, once and for all, how silly the claim – which is still being promoted by Public Health England and others – that e-cigarettes are “95% safer” than conventional cigarettes.
They note that the original 95% estimate was not based on any actual evidence and summarize some of the evidence that e-cigarette damage cells, harm users, and have a gateway effect on youth. They have a nice online appendix that lists some of the relevant research to back up these conclusions. (A full list would likely include hundreds, if not thousands, of studies.)
Eissenberg and colleagues also treated the original Nutt et al paper gently; they did not talk about all the industry ties and conflicts of interest among the people who came up with the 95% number.
January 8, 2020
The evidence of substantial health risks for e-cigarettes just continues to grow. Tarang Parekh and colleagues’ paper “Risk of Stroke With E-Cigarette and Combustible Cigarette Use in Young Adults” in American Journal of Preventive Medicine reports elevated risk of stroke in dual cigarette smokers and e-cigarette users beyond the risks of smoking. Significantly, they also show no benefit of “complete switching.”
They do find that people who just use e-cigarettes (and never smoked cigarettes) have a lower risk of stroke than people who just smoke, but most adult e-cigarette users are dual users or switchers.
Here is the abstract:
Introduction. Rising trends in stroke incidence and hospitalizations because of combustible cigarette smoking have been noted among younger adults. However, the association between e-cigarette use and stroke in this population remains largely unknown. This study examines the association between e-cigarette use with or without a history of previous or concurrent combustible cigarette use and stroke among young adults.
January 6, 2020
I just published "Net Effect of Young Adult Dual Combusted Cigarette and E-Cigarette Users’ Anticipated Responses to Hypothetical E-Cigarette Marketing Restrictions" in Substance Use and Abuse. This paper is an additional analysis of a previously reported experimental study on how getting rid of flavored e-cigs would affect e-cig and cigarette use, considering both changes in consumption and quitting. The earlier analysis considered separate effects, but did not look at the net effect of quitting or reducing vs. incraeses in consumption of both products.
The net analysis I did showed positive effects (in terms of health) on both outcomes.
Here is the abstract:
Stan Glantz will step down as UCSF Tobacco Center director June 30, 2020 and continue as a professor
January 6, 2020
I have notified Dean Talmadge King that I will be stepping down as Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education effective June 30, 2020.
I will be continuing as an active member of the faculty, including as Principal Investigator of the UCSF Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science (TCORS) and my other research grants, working with the UCSF Library to continue to build the tobacco and other industry documents collections, posting to the Tobacco Center blog, and will be continuing efforts to expand the UCSF Smokefree Movies campaign to a Smokefree media campaign. I will also be continuing my mentoring work and teaching.
We have built an amazing program in the nearly 20 years since we started building the Tobacco Center. We are probably the leading center for tobacco control research and education in the world and have recently added a group of faculty members working on cannabis. We have trained nearly 100 postdocs who have moved into leadership positions in academia, as well as government and nongovernmental organizations around the world.