January 20, 2014
In another Dilbert meets Kafka moment, the FDA, both directly and indirectly through NIH/NIDA, has been telling researches that they will are planning to require researchers to get an "Investigational New Drug" (IND) approval for any studies of e-cigarettes.
What this means is that, at the same time that the FDA is sitting quietly while e-cigarettes are being aggressively marketed, including with unsupported claims that they are effective smoking cessation aids (which allows, even in the current legal environment, to regulate them as drugs right now), and in the face of skyrocketing use by kids, the FDA is poised to throw up roadblocks to independent research on the effects of e-cigarettes.
Not only will this substantially slow down research, but it will limit the scope of what is studied. What we need is to understand the effects of e-cigarettes as used in the real world, not some highly stylized "research" e-cigarettes function.
January 16, 2014
I am in DC for the press conference where the report will be presented. Here are some quick reactions, based on the Executive Summary:
It highlights the importance of smoking in the movies as a cause of smoking and concludes that “Actions [i.e., R rating onscreen smoking] that would eliminate the depiction of tobacco use in movies, which are produces and rated as appropriate for children and adolescents, could have a significant effect on preventing youth from becoming tobacco users.”
January 12, 2014
Ken Johnson and I just published a paper, "The Surgeon General Report on Smoking and Health 50 Years Later: Breast Cancer and the Cost of Increasing Caution," in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention highlighting the fact that the evidence linking both active and passive smoking continues to pile up.
Here is the abstract:
January 11, 2014
Rong Zablocki and colleagues recently published a nice paper that followed 1718 California smokers from 2009 to 2011 to see what effect smokefree homes and percieving laws requiring smokefree outdoors had on their smoking behavior.
Living in a smokefree home more than doubled the odds of smoking less (adjusted odds ratio 2.4) and making a quit attempt (AOR 2.3). Perceived smokefree outdoor policies nearly doubled the odds of smoking less (AOR 1.9) and making a quit attempt (AOR 1.8).
This paper adds to the growing evidence that smokefree policies not only protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke, but also help smokers quit.
The full paper, "Smoking ban policies and their influence on smoking behaviors among current California smokers: A population-based study," was published in Preventive Medicine and is available here.
January 11, 2014
Kelvin Choi and Jean Forester just published a well-done longitudinal study of young adults that followed young adults in Minnesota for one year and examined how attitudes about e-cigarettes affected behavior.
They report that one year after entering the study 7.4% of the young adults reported ever using e-cigarettes (21.6% among baseline current smokers, 11.9% among baseline former smokers, and 2.9% among baseline nonsmokers). Put another way, 11.9% of people who had quit smoking before the study started were using e-cigarettes at the end as were 2.9% of people who had never smoked. For these people, e-cigarettes were a pathway to renewed or new nicotine addiction.