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:
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.