June 6, 2018
With 68.4% voting “yes” San Francisco voters crushed RJ Reynolds (US subsidiary of British American Tobacco) $12 million effort to overturn San Francisco’s ban on flavored tobacco products.
RJR’s last-ditch effort to roll back this law illustrates just how important flavors are to the tobacco industry’s efforts to hook kids and keep adults smoking, a lesson that public health advocates should take seriously and prioritize passing the same legislation (right behind comprehensive smokefree laws) around the country and the world.
This is also the best empirical evidence that the FDA needs to warrant getting rid of flavors in all tobacco products.
As I wrote earlier, this year’s Proposition E is, in many ways, a replay of 1983’s Proposition P, when the tobacco companies unsuccessfully sought to overturn San Francisco’s (by today mild) restrictions on smoking in the workplace. The industry’s loss then lit the afterburners on the smokefree movement; this loss should do the same for flavors.
June 4, 2018
Washington (June 4, 2018) – Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, was today joined by Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) in calling on the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to take action to reduce youth exposure to smoking imagery, including e-cigarette depictions, in youth-rated movies and ensure responsible and consistent practices in rating youth movies with tobacco imagery. Although tobacco impressions in youth-rated movies declined from 18.2 billion in 2002 to 2.9 billion in 2015, they have increased over the past two years to 4.6 billion in 2017.
“Although the evidence connecting smoking imagery to youth smoking initiation is strong, MPAA has yet to take meaningful action to discourage tobacco imagery in films or effectively warn viewers and parents of tobacco’s presence in a movie,” write the Senators in their letter to MPAA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin. “Our nation’s dramatic decline in youth tobacco use is a tremendous achievement, but on-screen depictions remain a threat to this progress and threaten to re-normalize tobacco use in our society. We cannot afford to lose any ground in this area.”
June 4, 2018
Sarah Aleyan and her colleagues from the University of Waterloo just published “Risky business: a longitudinal study examining cigarette smoking initiation among susceptible and non-susceptible e-cigarette users in Canada” in BMJ Open. This longitudinal study followed Canadian high school students for two years and found that never cigarette smoking kids who used e-cigarettes at baseline were much more likely to be smoking cigarettes two years later.
Most important, the gateway effect was nearly twice as big for low risk kids (adjusted odds ratio of 5.28 for the low risk kids compared to 2.78 for kids who were susceptible to smoking at baseline). In addition, never smoking kids who used e-cigarettes who had not started smoking yet because became susceptible to future smoking. These findings, which are consistent with all the earlier studies that looked at this question, shows that the argument by e-cig enthusiasts that “kids who use e-cigs would smoke anyway” is wrong. E-cigarettes are supporting and expanding the nicotine addiction and smoking epidemics.
May 31, 2018
I live in San Francisco, so am getting buried in mail supporting (health groups) and opposing (RJ Reynolds tobacco) Proposition E, which would end the sale of flavored tobacco products in San Francisco.
RJR’s earlier advertising was all about prohibition, but the latest mailer I got (which is also on the No on E website; reproduced below), is more nuanced. It admits that Prop E does not ban all tobacco products, just flavored tobacco products. That is correct.
If the voters uphold Prop E, people will still be allowed to sell and buy tobacco products in San Francisco, just not the flavored products that are so important to hooking kids. Not only is that not a flaw, it's the whole point of Prop E. (There are, of course, people advocating to prohibit the sale of all tobacco products; Prop E specifically does not do that.)
May 31, 2018
The best measure of the effectiveness of a tobacco control policy is how hard the tobacco companies fight it. This is an even better measure than fancy statistical analysis by people like me because, after all, nobody knows the tobacco business better than the tobacco companies.
The importance of local flavor bans like San Francisco Proposition E (supported by health groups, opposed by RJ Reynolds Tobacco) was reinforced in Illinois when the tobacco industry agreed to drop its opposition to a state Tobacco 21 law in exchange for preempting local flavor bans (and also prohibiting local governments from setting the tobacco age above 21, which is also remarkable).
The tobacco companies absolutely hate Tobacco 21 laws because they make it harder for them to market to kids. Their last minute compromise offer in Illinois says that they know that ending the sale of flavored tobacco products will make it even harder for them to recruit kids to nicotine addiction (and sustain industry profits).