August 17, 2017
Dorie Apollonio and I just published “Tobacco Industry Research on Nicotine Replacement Therapy: “If Anyone Is Going to Take Away Our Business It Should Be Us” in American Journal of Public Health. This paper uses previously secret tobacco industry documents to show that the cigarette companies were originally afraid that nicotine replacement therapy, combined with counselling, would cost them customers.
But they were relieved when they figured out that most physicians did not use it properly and that, when used over the counter without counselling, they actually inhibited quitting. The companies developed their own NRT products as complements to cigarettes, but originally did not take them to market for fear that doing so would trigger FDA regulation of cigarettes.
Now that the FDA has jurisdiction over cigarettes, Big Tobacco is getting into the NRT marker (sans counselling or even quitting). As Phillip Morris concluded in 1992
August 17, 2017
Dorie Apollonio and I just published “Tobacco Industry Research on Nicotine Replacement Therapy: “If Anyone Is Going to Take Away Our Business It Should Be Us” in American Journal of Public Health. This paper uses previously secret tobacco industry documents to show that the cigarette companies were originally afraid that nicotine replacement therapy, combined with counselling, would cost them customers.
But they were relieved when they figured out that most physicians did not use it properly and that, when used over the counter without counselling, they actually inhibited quitting. The companies developed their own NRT products as complements to cigarettes, but originally did not take them to market for fear that doing so would trigger FDA regulation of cigarettes.
Now that the FDA has jurisdiction over cigarettes, Big Tobacco is getting into the NRT marker (sans counselling or even quitting). As Phillip Morris concluded in 1992
August 17, 2017
Two recent papers demonstrate that flavors are an important reason that kids use cigarettes and e-cigarettes, supporting the importance of the kind of comprehensive ban on selling all flavored tobacco products, including menthol, that San Francisco passed and this is under assault by RJ Reynolds.
Charles J. Courtemanche and colleagues published “ Influence of the Flavored Cigarette Ban on Adolescent Tobacco Use” in American Journal of Preventive Medicine in which they analyzed data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey between 1999 and 2013. They found that following the ban on characterizing flavors in cigarettes included in the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was followed by a substantial drop in the probability of youth being smokers and the number of cigarettes smoked.
August 13, 2017
The evidence that marijuana imposes important cardiovascular disease risks continued to grow with the recent publication of “Effect of marijuana use on cardiovascular and cerebrovascular mortality: A study using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey linked mortality file” by Barbara A Yankey and colleagues in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. It found that marijuana use was associated with more than a tripling of risk of death from hypertension.
These effects are likely moderated by the same kinds of effects on blood vessels that tobacco smoking and e-cigarettes have; marijuana appears to be even worse than tobacco in terms of adverse vascular effects.
Science Daily has a good news story about the paper.
Here is the abstract:
August 13, 2017
On August 11, 2017, the Washington Post ran a detailed story, “Big Tobacco’s new cigarette is sleek, smokeless — but is it any better for you?” that highlighted Philip Morris’ sensitivity to a paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine highlighting the fact that, while IQOS produced a lower toxic load than conventional cigarettes, the level of toxins are a lot higher than Philip Morris has claimed, a replay of the e-cigarette debate. In an accompanying editorial, Mitch Katz, on of JAMA Internal Medicine’s editors sensibly wrote: