November 30, 2017
Reuters has reported that “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday it is considering measures to speed development of products that help people quit smoking, including easing requirements for approval of over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapies... The new measures could enable e-cigarette companies to get the devices approved as medical products, which could offer consumers greater reassurance that they perform as advertised and also open the possibility of being covered under health insurance.”
While developing better ways to help smokers quit is always a good thing, there is a good chance that this FDA initiative will end up helping the tobacco companies keep people smoking.
As Dorie Apollonio and I reported last October in our paper “Tobacco Industry Research on Nicotine Replacement Therapy: ‘If Anyone Is Going to Take Away Our Business It Should Be Us,’" the tobacco companies figured out back in the 1990s that, while NRT is very effective when used with proper medical management, few physicians ensure that their patients will use it correctly and OTC NTR was associated with less not more quitting.
November 29, 2017
The UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) is excited to announce our stellar lineup
of featured speakers for our "It's About a Billion Lives" Symposium which will be held on Friday, February 2, 2018.
November 29, 2017
My colleagues at the UCSF TCOS just put this public comment in on Phlilip Morris' MRTP application for IQOS. The tracking number is 1k1-902j-m8kv. A PDF of the comment is available here.
Because PMI application did not report the full range of HPHCs in IQOS aerosol, characterize HPHCs in sidestream emissions, include a non-targeted analysis of chemicals in emissions, or conduct clinical studies to describe exposure to toxicants during dual use with other tobacco products, FDA must deny PMI’s application
Gideon St.Helen, PhD1,2; Peyton Jacob III, PhD1,2; Natalie Nardone, PhD1,2;
Neal L. Benowitz, MD1,2,3
1Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco; 2UCSF Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science; 3Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California San Francisco
Docket Number: FDA-2017-D-3001
November 29, 2017
November 28, 2017
November 28, 2017
I just published this article on The Conversation.
For as long as smoking has been known to cause cancer and other diseases, Big Tobacco has worked to avoid the truth about its deadly and highly addictive products.
Nicotine is the addictive drug in tobacco. Burning the tobacco generates an aerosol of ultrafine particles that carries nicotine deep into smokers’ lungs, where it is absorbed and rapidly reaches the brain. That burning yields toxic chemicals that cause disease.
Ever since people started understanding in the 1950s that smoking kills, millions have struggled to stop smoking. The tobacco companies, desperate to keep and expand their customers, have been trying to make “safer cigarettes” since the 1960s.