October 19, 2013
No spooky chemicals or other foreign ingredients in e-cigs.
Just pure nicotine.
For beginners, it's the perfect starter kit in candy counter flavors.
No burning, choking hard-to-get-used-to smoke.
For longtime cigarette smokers guaranteed nicotine dependency.
e-cigs. Pure Addiction.
(Paul Keye developed the original California anti-tobacco ad campaign.)
Of course, ecigs are not just pure nicotine. But a little artistic license is ok (since Paul is not selling them).
October 16, 2013
October 15, 2013
Kai-Wen Cheng, Cassandra Okechuskwu, Robert McMillen, and I just published "Association between clean indoor air laws and voluntary smokefree rules in homes and cars" in Tobacco Control.
Here is the abstract (with a couple technical terms replaced with plain English):
Objectives This study examines the influence that smokefree workplaces, restaurants and bars have on the adoption of smokefree rules in homes and cars, and whether there is an association with adopting smokefree rules in homes and cars.
Methods [Statistical analysis was] used to jointly estimate the likelihood of living in a smokefree home and having a smokefree car as a function of law coverage and other variables. Household data were obtained from the nationally representative Social Climate Survey of Tobacco Control 2001, 2002 and 2004–2009; clean indoor air law data were from the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation Tobacco Control Laws Database.
October 12, 2013
Woody Allen has blocked release of his new film , Blue Jasmine, in India because the Indian government requires an anti-smoking ad to run concurrently with the smoking on screen while the film is running.
This policy response was developed after years of negotiation and litigation with Bollywood over the issue of smoking in the movies, in part as an alterative to giving smoking movies an mature audience rating (what Smoke Free Movies recommends).
Blue Jasmine,' a PG-13 film with echoes of A Streetcar Named Desire, is the first of Allen's films released since India began enforcing movie-smoking rules last year. These rules aim to discourage the tobacco industry from exploiting Indian film and to lessen the harm to young audiences from tobacco imagery, no matter where it originates.
Mr. Allen's specifically objected to the warning text under smoking scenes that India requires. Of course, he could avoid the crawl by omitting the smoking. The choice he made should be respected.
At the same time we should applaud India for implementing policies to protect its youth from the effects of onscreen smoking and applying its policies to all films.
October 9, 2013
Ling and Popova recently published "Alternative Tobacco Product Use and Smoking Cessation: A National Study" in American Journal of Public Health that , like earlier research, found that an important reason that adults tried e-cigarettes (as well as smokeless products) was because they through they would help them quit smoking conventional cigarettes.
Ever use of e-cigarettes was not associated with being a successful quitter (OR 1.09; 95% CI 0.72-1.65) but was associated with being an unsuccessful quitter (OR=1.78, 95% CI 1.25-2.53) compared to people who had never tried to quit.
This evidence is from a cross-sectional study (i.e., a snapshot in time) rather than following the same people over time (a longitudinal study), so by itself does not allow making causal conclusions. Taken with the two published longitudinal studies, one of which found that e-cig use had no effect on quitting and the other of which showed lower quit rates for e-cig users, it does add to the case that the loudly made claims that e-cigs help smokers quit are wrong.