December 17, 2014
In September, shareholder advocacy organizations announced that they were filing shareholder resolutions with the major movie studios regarding the portrayal of tobacco in youth-rated films (covered by the New York Times). Shareholder concerns stem from publication of the 2012 US Surgeon General report, Preventing Tobacco Use among Youth and Young Adults, which concluded that “there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in the movies and the initiation of smoking among young people.”
Shareholders were concerned that this data, and the publicity it has received, reflected a reputational risk to the company, and could hurt the company’s long-term profitability. Citing data from the Surgeon General’s report, in 2014 the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wrote that: “Giving an R rating to future movies with smoking would be expected to reduce the number of teen smokers by nearly one in five (18%) and prevent one million [1,000,000] deaths from smoking among children alive today.”
December 15, 2014
Lauren Lempert, Rachel Grana, and I just published "The importance of product definitions in US e-cigarette laws and regulations" in Tobacco Control.
This paper provides a detailed analysis of state e-cigarette legislation (including on online appendix with details on every law) that describes how the tobacco and e-cigarette companies (which are increasingly the same) are using laws that nominally restrict sales of e-cigarettes to kids as a Trojan Horse to enact changes to how e-cigarettes are defined that make it more difficult to regulate them, tex them, and include them in clean indoor air laws.
In the face of rapidly mounting evidence that e-cigarettes are prolonging and worsening the nicotine epidemic, including by supporting smoking of conventional cigarettes, it is important that health advocates understand and these technical details and ensure that the industy cannot continue to get these damaging laws passed.
Here is the abstract of the paper.
December 15, 2014
The CDC published a "State Laws Prohibiting Sales to Minors and Indoor Use of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems — United States, November 2014," in MMWR that makes the point (consistent with our paper) that prohibiting sales of e-cigs to youth is a necessary, but not sufficient, step in controlling use and mentions industry interference. It comments on how industry-favored youth access laws are passing but not state laws integrating e-cigarettes into clean indoor air laws.
The CDC makes several important statements (quoted verbatim below, but broken into bullets) that public health authorities can cite to support including e-cigarettes in clean indoor air laws:
December 14, 2014
Thomas Wills and colleagues just published "Risk factors for exclusive e-cigarette use and dual e-cigarette use and tobacco use in adolescents" in Pediatrics. This large (1941 high school students, mean age 14.6 years, conducted in 2013) found:
December 13, 2014
Check it out here.
One of Stossel's staff had called me a few days before he made the statement and tried to get me to agree with him and say that the CDC conclusions were wrong. I spend about an hour explaining how people get risk estimates and compute attributable risks ... and that the CDC is bases toward underestimating risks.