March 14, 2012
Sharon Eubanks, the lawyer who led the Department of Justice team that won the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act case against the tobacco industry, and I are publishing a book,. Bad Acts, that tells the behind-the scenes story of the case.
Here is a description of the book:
On January 20, 1999, President Bill Clinton announced in his State of the Union address that the Justice Department was planning
to sue the tobacco industry and assigned the task to Attorney General Jane Reno and the Justice Department. This book is the story of that case - the politics, the litigation, the behavior of the industry and its lawyers, the efforts by the Bush Administration to gut the case, and the ultimate victory in court.
March 11, 2012
Daniel Mackay, Scott Nelson, Sally Haw and Jill Pell just published a very nice paper that looked at the effect of the Scottish smokefree law on complications of pregnancy (small for gestational age, preterm delivery and spontaneous preterm labor, among other outcomes). They found a 5-12% drop in these conditions for women who got pregnant beginning shortly before the law too effect. This is not only another high-quality study demonstrating large and clinically meaningful benefits of smokefree laws in terms of health, but also shows that the real economic effect of smokefree laws is to substantially reduce medical costs. The full paper is available for free at www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001175 Check it out.
March 9, 2012
March 7, 2012
The new Surgeon General's report, Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults, contains an extensive discussion of the effects of smoking in movies on young people. The bottom line: "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." (Page 6)
Significantly, the 36 page long section, "Images of Smoking in Movies and Adolescent Smoking," is in Chapter 5, "The Tobacco Industry's Influences on the Use of Tobacco Among Youth." The Surgeon General is effectively putting smoking in the movies in the same category as conventional cigarette marketing activities. Indeed, the summary of Chapter 7, "A Vision for Ending the Tobacco Epidemic," concludes, "Greater consideration of further restrictions on advertising and promotional activities as well as efforts to decrease depictions of smoking in the movies is warranted, given the gravity of the epidemic and the need to protect young people now and in the future (page 7).
March 5, 2012
Sungkyu Lee, Pam Ling, and I just published "The vector of the tobacco epidemic: tobacco industry practices in low and middle-income countries" in Cancer Causes and Control. This paper reviews the available literature -- largely based on previously secret tobacco industry documents available at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, to show that the multinational tobacco companies use essentially the same strategies and tactics in low and middle income countries as they have used in richer countries.