September 12, 2017
Derek Yach will lead Philip Morris International’s new Foundation for a Smoke Free World, the latest in PM’s corporate social responsibility PR efforts. It is also part of the company’s effort to promote its new heat-not-burn IQOS product.
Initial funding of $80 million a year (with a 12 year commitment) comes from Philip Morris, with the goal of engaging other nonprofits. (This is about .1% of PMI’s revenues and 1% of its profits.)
Like all past industry front groups, the foundation claims “PMI and the tobacco industry are precluded from having any influence over how the Foundation spends its funds or focuses its activities.”
If PMI was serious about achieving a smoke free world, it could stop aggressively lobbying against proper implementation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control or stop selling Marlboros and other cigarettes.
That’s what Derek would have said in response to this ruse back when he was a public health leader at WHO.
August 20, 2017
Our e-cigarette enthusiast colleagues in England have generally taken the position that England was different from the USA, so that evidence from America showing that ecigs were bringing low (of starting nicotine with cigarettes) risk kids were being drawn into the nicotine market by e-cigs than progressing to cigarettes was not happening in England.
Now a well-done longitudinal study from England (which includes among its coauthors some of the people who had been claiming e-cigarettes were not a problem for kids there) “Do electronic cigarettes increase cigarette smoking in UK adolescents? Evidence from a 12-month prospective study,” by Mark Conner and colleagues shows that, as in the USA
These results are quantitatively similar to the results of the US studies. These are big effects.
They also found evidence, consistent with the earlier cross-sectional study that Lauren Dutra and I published in 2014 that kids who used e-cigarettes and cigarettes at baseline were more likely to be smoking more cigarettes a year later. (Correcting for covariates reduced the magnitude of the association, but the direction did not change.)
August 20, 2017
The new paper by Daniel Giovenco and Christine Delnevo, “Prevalence of population smoking cessation by electronic cigarette use status in a national sample of recent smokers,” contributes to the emerging picture that intensive users of e-cigarettes are more likely to have stopped smoking while incidental users quit less.
The cross-sectional study (snapshot in time) uses the 2014 and 2015 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to examine the association between e-cigarette use and being a former smoker. The found that daily e-cigarette users were about 3 times more likely to be former cigarette smokers than non-e-cigarette users. (The e-cigarette advocates have been making a big deal about this finding.)
August 18, 2017
I was saddened to learn that Father Michael Crosby recently passed away from cancer. Mike was an early leader in the movement to put shareholder pressure on the tobacco companies over their unethical marketing practices and for more than a decade was a leader among shareholder groups to put pressure on the media companies to get smoking out of youth-rated films. As the CDC MMWR recently noted, this investor pressure has been an important element in the progress, albeit incomplete, that we have made to date.
Mike’s upbeat attitude and faith in humanity was always an inspiration to me.
Mike’s brother circulated this remembrance recently, which captures Mike’s spirit:
August 17, 2017
Randy Uang, Eric Crosbie, and I just published Tobacco control law implementation in a middle-income country: Transnational tobacco control network overcoming tobacco industry opposition in Colombia in Global Public Health This paper shows how, with strategic assistance from the global tobacco control community, Colombia was able to defend and implement strong legislation restricting advertising, promotion, and sponsorship as well as strong health warning labels, consistent with the FCTC.
This is a companion paper to the one were recently published on how health advocates secured implementation of the law’s smokefree provisions, which is available here. Interestingly, the industry fought much harder against the ad ban and warning labels than they did the smokefree provisions, perhaps because the smokefree provisions, while strong, did not break new ground in the region, whereas the other provisions did.
Here is the abstract of the new paper: