December 29, 2019
Several people have commented on this blog asking how to get involved in class action lawsuits against Juul and other e-cigarette companies.
These two blog posts have links to the complaints, which have the lawyers' contact information in them. If you are interested, you can contact them.
In making this information available, I am simply answering questions, not urging any particular action or endorsing any particular lawyer.
https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/class-action-lawsuit-against-juul-moves-forward-san-francisco
https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/class-action-lawsuit-filed-against-juul-and-altriaphilip-morris-builds-past-litigation-against-big-tobacco
If there are other cases I missed, please send them and I will post them.
For completeness, here is California's case: https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/californias-lawsuit-against-juul-details-how-online-age-verification-joke
December 28, 2019
Jane Steinberg and colleagues recently published “A Tobacco Control Framework for Regulating Public Consumption of Cannabis: Multistate Analysis and Policy Implications” in American Journal of Public Health. They did a comprehensive review of how the first eleven states that legalized adult use cannabis are dealing with public usage. Seven of the states allow some form of public use, which has the potential to undermine nonsmoking norms and protections from secondhand smoke.
They provide a good summary of the state of affairs, but don’t have any good solutions to the knotty problem of how to allow use of legal cannabis outside the home. This is a particular problem for people who live in multi-unit housing, where smoking is increasingly restricted. In public housing, using cannabis (which is still federally illegal) raises concerns about eviction.
One thing that they don’t address directly is that, unlike tobacco smoking, many state governments are still looking for ways to promote cannabis use as a cash cow. I don’t think that this will materialize because as time passes we will get a better understanding of the adverse effects of cannabis.
December 20, 2019
As part of the $1.4 trillion spending bill Congress raised the national minim age for selling tobacco products from 18 to 21. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced his T21 proposal last summer, I expressed concern that it was a trap set on behalf of Big Tobacco (including Juul and other e-cig interests) to pass a bill that would support the industry blitzkrieg at the state level to pass weak and unenforceable T21 legislation that the industry could then use as an excuse not to enact flavor bans, smokefree laws, and taxes.
But, thanks to efforts of pro-health members of Congress and work by health advocates, Congress passed and the President signed a bill that will promote public health while only giving a little bit to the tobacco companies.
December 16, 2019
Dharma Bhatta and I just published "Association of E-Cigarette Use With Respiratory Disease Among Adults: A Longitudinal Analysis" in American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Here is the press release that UCSF put out summarizing the study:
E-Cigarettes Significantly Raise Risk of Chronic Lung Disease, First Long-Term Study Finds
‘Dual Use’ of Both E-Cigarettes and Smoked Tobacco is Riskiest, Say Authors
December 13, 2019
This ad is being published in The Hollywood Reporter (December 13) and Variety (December 17) weekly editions.
The data show we've made substantial progress in reducing kids’ exposure from big-budget, all-fiction PG-13 movies. However, smoking by fictional characters in biographical dramas and smoking on popular streaming platforms pose substantial new risks.