November 16, 2012
The Department of Health and Human Services just launched BeTobaccoFree.gov, to provide be a "one-stop shop" for information on smoking and other products. While it has a reasonable description of the health effects of smoking and secondhand smoke, it completely ignores two central conclusions of the 2012 Surgeon General's report, Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults on why kids start smoking:
- Advertising and promotional activities by tobacco companies have been shown to cause the onset and continuation of smoking among adolescents and young adults.
- The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in the movies and the initiation of smoking among young people.
All the site says on these important issues is the rather lame "Although you may see people using tobacco in movies, tv, and advertisements, most teens, adults, and athletes don’t use it."
November 9, 2012
We worked with the CDC to report the amount of smoking in movies in 2009 and 2010 in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, then for 2011 in Preventing Chronic Disease. The first two reports showed that consistent drops in the amount of onscreen smoking between 2005 and 2010. The 2011 showed that this improving trend reversed and there was an increase in onscreen smoking in 2011.
November 6, 2012
Laws that end smoking at work and other public places result in significantly fewer hospitalizations for heart attacks, strokes, asthma and other respiratory conditions, a new UCSF analysis has found.
The research provides evidence that smoke-free laws that cover workplaces, restaurants and bars have the biggest impacts on hospitalizations, reduce health care costs and also raise quality of life, the researchers said.
The research is published in the current issue of the American Heart Association journal Circulation. http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/126/18/2177
“The public, health professionals, and policy makers need to understand that including exemptions and loopholes in legislation – such as exempting casinos – condemns more people to end up in emergency rooms,’’ said senior author Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, UCSF professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UCSF.
“These unnecessary hospitalizations are the real cost of failing to enact comprehensive smoke-free legislation,’’ he said.
For decades, Glantz and his colleagues at UCSF have been pioneers in tobacco research, disclosing how the tobacco industry manipulated its products and led the public into cigarette addiction.
New paper showing how the tobacco companies manipulated the American Law Institute to shape tort law
November 4, 2012
We just published a new paper, "Tobacco Industry Influence on the American Law Institute’s Restatements of Torts and Implications for Its Conflict of Interest Policies," in the Iowa Law Review showing how the tobacco companies quietly shaped influential policy documents to win sympathetic legal interpretations in products liability cases for decades. Many of these policies are still in force today.
Here is a summary of the paper: