January 8, 2014
I have been getting many press calls for my assessment of the importance of the 1964 Surgeon General's report. There is no question that the report was a landmark event that provided the weight of government behind the conclusion, already reached by the scientific community 10 years earlier, that smoking caused lung cancer. The issuance of the report and the attendant public discussion did seem to stop the growth in per capita cigarette consumption (graph).
While stopping the growth in smoking, it is worth considering what the tobacco companies were afraid would happen when the report came out.
Fortunately, we know, thanks to the millions of previously secret tobacco industry documents in the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. In a word, the companies were terrified.
In June 1963, the major tobacco companies and their public relations agency, Hill and Knowlton, held discussions about the then-anticipated Surgeon General's report. Here is a summary of the meeting:
January 2, 2014
The Utah State Department of Health just published the results of their state survey on tobacco product use, which showed skyrocketing e-cigarette use among kids, reaching much higher levels than adults. Here are their conclusions:
- The percentage of Utah students in • grades 8, 10, and 12 who reported that they had tried electronic cigarettes more than doubled from 2011 to 2013.
- Despite having no legal access to e-• cigarettes, Utah youth are three times more likely to report current use than adults.
- Nearly one third of Utah youth who • used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days report that they never tried conventional cigarettes.
- Due to candy-like flavors, aggressive • marketing, and lack of data regarding safety, monitoring the increasing use of e-cigarettes among youth is a public health priority.
The full report is available here.
December 29, 2013
Hadii Mamudu and I with several others just published "Multiple Streams Approach to Tobacco Control Policymaking in a Tobacco-Growing State" in Journal of Community Health. Here is the abstract:
Smokefree policies (SFPs) have diffused throughout theUS and worldwide. However, the development of SFPs in the difficult policy environment of tobacco-producing
states and economies worldwide has not been well explored. In 2007, Tennessee, the third largest tobacco producer in the US, enacted the Non-Smoker Protection Act
December 29, 2013
I was recently asked to put together one page on this issue to help with discussions with the USTR. In case it is useful to others, here is what I said. (PDF version)
BARRIERS TO IMPROVING GLOBAL HEALTH IN THE PROPOSED TRANSPACIFIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT
· Noncommunicable diseases are the dominant health problem of the 21st Century and most of these diseases are the result of promotion and consumption of unhealthy products (tobacco, obesity-inducing foods, alcohol to excess)
· These products are profitable to sell, especially for transnational corporations
· Reducing the health impacts (and attendant impacts on health costs and the economy) requires regulating these products
o Such regulation will almost certainly reduce profits of these companies
o There is little dispute that public health officials, and state and national officials, have the power to enact and implement such regulations generally, though particular measures can be contested.
o Trade agreements toss an exogenous barrier into the mix, requiring that regulations avoid even inadvertent “discrimination” against businesses, based on their country of origin.
December 19, 2013
There is no question that e-cigarettes pollute the air, so it makes complete sense that they be included in clean indoor air laws, as New York City did yesterday.
In response, there is a lot of overheated rhetoric coming out of ecig advocates that doing so is banning ecigs and depriving them of these "life saving" devices that helped them quit smoking cigarettes.
Leaving aside the fact that population-based studies of ecigarettes consistently show that adults and kids who use smoke ecigs are less (not more) likely to quit cigarettes, there is nothing in the New York or any of the other clean indoor air laws that prohibit people who want to use ecigarettes because they think they will help them quit smoking. All these laws require is that that vapers use their ecigs in ways that do not hurt anyone else.