Author: GTNF Trust Staff

Former smokers are nearly three times more likely to abstain from cigarette smoking if they puff on an electronic cigarette two out of every three days a month, according to a story by Dennis Thompson for HealthDay, citing a new study that analysed a US federal survey on smoking.

The study was published on August 31 in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

“E-cigarettes are an effective way to get cigarette smokers to quit, but you really need to use those e-cigarettes,” said lead researcher Professor David Levy.

“Using them a couple days a month isn’t going to be anywhere near as effective as if you use them most, if not all, days in a month.”

The odds of a smoker successfully quitting increases by 10 percent with each additional day of e-cigarette use, said Levy, a professor with Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, in Washington, D.C.

However, pulmonologist Dr. Louis De Palo was said to be concerned that e-cigarettes did too good a job replacing traditional tobacco cigarettes.

“People don’t get addicted to the other forms of nicotine replacement because they aren’t fun,” said De Palo, who’s an associate professor of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

“Gum doesn’t taste very good. The nose inhaler burns a little bit. The patches are irritating. And none of them give you the psychological satisfaction of holding something in your hand and smoking,” he explained.

“E-cigarettes are highly addictive, easy to use, and fun,” De Palo continued. “This study doesn’t address the strategy for eventually weaning people off e-cigarettes.”

For this study, Levy and his colleagues reviewed data from more than 24,000 participants in the 2014/2015 Tobacco Use Supplement-Current Population Survey, a regular survey on smoking administered by the US Census Bureau.

The full text of Thompson’s piece is at: https://consumer.healthday.com/cancer-information-5/electronic-cigarettes-970/e-cigs-may-help-smokers-quit-but-hellip-726072.html.

Banning electronic cigarettes could deprive Indian smokers of a substantially-less-harmful alternative to traditional tobacco-cigarettes and cause adverse public-health consequences, according to an Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) story.

Some states in India, including Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Punjab, Maharashtra and Kerala have prohibited the sale of e-cigarettes, though the sale of tobacco cigarettes remains legal.

At the same time, the Union Health Ministry has reportedly ruled that e-cigarettes are unacceptable in the light of what it sees as the findings of expert research concluding that these devices have cancer-causing properties, are highly addictive and do not offer a safer alternative to tobacco-based smoking products.

However, some health experts argue that such a stance creates a paradox because the government is allowing the sale of ‘lethal’ tobacco cigarettes while banning a substantially less harmful alternative.

Konstantinos E. Farsalinos, a research fellow at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre in Athens, Greece, and a renowned expert on e-cigarettes, said that in his opinion banning these devices would be detrimental to the cause of public health. Farsalinos said such a ban would have adverse consequences because it would deprive Indian smokers of a substantially-less-harmful alternative to tobacco cigarettes.

Meanwhile, R.N. Sharan, professor at North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya, said banning e-cigarettes was a hasty decision that could be counter-productive because the extent of e-cigarette use or its harm in India were not known.

If the US city of San Francisco ultimately implements its recently adopted ordinance to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products, it will do more harm than good, according to an op-ed by Dr. Joel Nitzkin published on the R Street website.

In fact, the ban would increase rates of tobacco-related addiction, illness and death across the city.

‘There are two major issues with this ordinance,’ Nitzkin said. ‘The first is the ease with which persons who want these products can simply get them in neighboring communities, or from a thriving black market sure to develop within the city.

‘The second, and more important, is the fact that this ban will virtually eliminate local on-site access to less addictive and remarkably low-risk nicotine vapor products.

‘While barring access to most e-cigarettes, the ordinance will do nothing to reduce access to non-menthol cigarettes, which remain the deadliest and most addictive tobacco products.’

The full text of Nitzkin’s piece is at: http://www.rstreet.org/op-ed/flavored-tobacco-ordinance-sure-to-backfire/.

A major study conducted across the UK has concluded that regular use of electronic cigarettes among people 11–16 years of age ‘remains very low, at three percent or less, and remains largely confined to regular smokers’.

The study, led by professor Linda Bauld of the University of Stirling and the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, examined data from five large scale surveys with different designs and sampling strategies conducted between 2015 and 2017: The Youth Tobacco Policy Survey; the Schools Health Research Network Wales survey; two Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Smokefree Great Britain-Youth Surveys; and the Scottish Schools Adolescent Lifestyle and Substance Use Survey. Cumulatively these surveys were said to have collected data from more than 60,000 young people.

In their conclusion, the researchers said that their paper highlighted the current rates of e-cigarette use among young people in the UK, where e-cigarettes formed a part of a tobacco harm reduction policy landscape.

While it was estimated that there were 2.9 million e-cigarette current users among adults in Great Britain, regular use among people 11–16 years of age remained at three percent or lower, and remained largely confined to regular smokers.

Regular e-cigarette use among never smokers was very rare.

These low rates of regular use suggested that youth experimentation was not currently leading to greater frequency of use; however, comparing youth e-cigarette data and trends across surveys and countries was crucial to better understand youth trends.

Survey measures had to be designed to assess frequency of use, rather than just ever- or past-30-day use.

The full study is available at: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/9/973/htm. 

Philip Morris Singapore (PMS) said recently that about three million smokers had switched to its IQOS device, according to a story on The Online Citizen, which Wikipedia describes, in part, as a community blogging platform involved in political activism in Singapore.

The company, an affiliate of Philip Morris International said that more than 232,000 smokers converted to IQOS globally in July 2017 alone.

‘The number of smokers who switched to IQOS to date is equivalent to about five times the number of people who smoke in Singapore,’ the story said. ‘This proves that a smoke-free future is a concrete possibility.’

Lawrence Chew, general manager of PMS, was quoted as saying the company’s ambition was that all the people who would otherwise continue smoking switch to scientifically-substantiated smoke-free alternatives as soon as possible.

“But we cannot achieve this mammoth task alone,” he said. “All stakeholders of the industry have a role to play. We are encouraged by the growing number of experts and governments that are taking steps to support the role that science and innovation can have for public health, and hope Singapore will too.”

The story said that, recently, the UK, the US and New Zealand had joined a growing number of countries who recognized the need to review the evidence of the potential benefits of smoke-free products for public health, and announced steps to leverage their potential in their plans for a future without smoke.

The California Northern District Court dismissed a complaint by Jerod Harris, who had filed a lawsuit against R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co. in September 2015, claiming that the company had failed to include a potential carcinogen risk warning in its marketing and labels of Vuse.

Judge James Donato argued that Harris could not prove that Reynolds Vapor had “exclusive knowledge of the negative health effects of its vaping products.”

He also noted that Vuse warning labels include the statement, “no tobacco product is safe or without risk.” Donato said although Reynolds Vapor did not spell out all the chemicals in Vuse vapor, “its identification of Vuse as a tobacco product that was neither safe nor risk free hardly amounts to a misleading partial statement.”

This was the second time Harris’ complaint had been rejected. Donato allowed him to file a third amended complaint by Sept. 22 but cautioned that it would be the last he would allow.

The government of South Korea looks set to raise the tax on heat-not-burn (HNB) products such as Phillip Morris’ IQOS and British American Tobacco’s Glo, according to a story in The Korea Times.

Three lawmakers proposed the tax revision and the National Assembly Strategy and Finance Committee (SFC) said on Monday it would discuss the matter with relevant government agencies.

SFC members reportedly agreed with the lawmakers that the tax on IQOS and Glo was too low because of the absence of a tax code for HNB products.

They will seek to pass a relevant tax-code revision during a plenary session of the National Assembly on August 31 with the aim of its going into effect in September.

The government has asked for the National Assembly’s co-operation in passing the revision during the upcoming plenary session because, otherwise, the revision will have to wait until the next plenary session in December, which, the government said, would be ‘too late’.

Currently, a pack of Heets, the consumable item of the IQOS system, is sold at 4,300 won ($3.78) per pack, which includes 1,739.6 won in tax. A pack of traditional tobacco cigarettes meanwhile, sells for 4,500 won, which includes 3,323.4 won in tax.

Two of the lawmakers who proposed the revision believe that the tax on HNB products should be the same as that on traditional cigarettes, while the other proposer believes the former should be less than the latter.

Members of the strategy and finance committee are said to be trying to find middle ground.

The story quoted an unspecified ‘official’ as saying that the tax rate was only a matter of how much.

“Some said in other countries that the HNB e-cigarette is less harmful than general cigarette products so less tax should be imposed,” the official was quoted as saying. “But it’s not a decisive factor.

“The National Assembly will eventually pass the revision.”

Russia’s Health Ministry is preparing a bill that, if passed, would regulate vaping and hookah smoking in the country, according to a Pravda Online story.

The bill, which is set to be drafted by February, is expected to include a ban on vaping and hookah smoking in bars and restaurants throughout Russia.

Ministry officials were quoted as saying that the general idea behind the bill was that vaping should be regulated in the same way that tobacco smoking was regulated.

The officials said that, currently, a lot of adolescents used both hookahs and vaping devices, and that these products were not regulated.

Reportedly, the bill will limit the sale of hookah and vaping devices to people over the age of 18.

The story said – though it wasn’t clear whether this had come from the officials or not – that it was worthy of note that ‘US scientists found deadly toxins in vaping smoke, where the concentration of dangerous substances exceeds maximum permissible indicators’.

‘Those making up to 250 puffs per day with 3.8-4.8-volt devices, inhale acrolein, formaldehyde and diacetyl in above the mark quantities,’ the story said.

‘The concentration of harmful substances in the rooms where vaping is allowed exceeds admissible indicators as well.’

Despite the fact that e-cigarettes have a much lower risk profile than their combustible cousins, governments around the world increasingly are banning e-vapor products in ways that appear to violate World Trade Organization rules against discriminatory treatment, a new R Street Institute policy study concludes.

R Street Associate Fellow Maria Foltea examines the legality of such bans under international trade law and concludes that prohibition of “like” products—in this case, e-cigarettes—is illegal and should be reversed.

“Currently, tobacco-heated products that contain tobacco are classified as tobacco products and therefore do not face discrimination issues,” notes Foltea. “However, e-cigarettes, which do not contain tobacco, can be classified either as ‘recreational’ or ‘medical products and devices.’ This broader classification opens the door for their prohibition, because nicotine is a drug that also has medicinal uses. Such classification can subject products that contain nicotine to a different set of classifications in ways that appear arbitrary.”

Foltea notes that prohibitions of e-cigarettes may be found to violate both domestic and international rules of law. In order to avoid conflicting policy outcomes, she suggests three steps regulators can take with these emerging products.

1. The regulator’s home country agencies must double-check the consistency of their proposed regulations with pre-existing legislation;
2. They must regularly consult with e-vapor producers and retailers as sources of information and seek out scientific data relevant to proposed legislation; and
3. WTO member governments should report any proposed measure to the WTO secretariat and allow a time period for interested parties to comment in order to test the limits of their regulations before their adoption. This would allow interested parties to convey their best knowledge, and would ultimately result in regulation that is fairer, sounder and more consistent.

“Although e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes do not carry ‘like’ risk, these products are in competition with one another in the marketplace, writes Foltea. “There is therefore good reason to believe that, as long as traditional cigarettes are freely traded, a ban on e-cigarettes will be found discriminatory under WTO rules. Accordingly, regulators must consider such issues of legality before enacting any such prohibitive laws.”

R Street is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization whose mission is to promote free markets and limited, effective government. It has headquarters in Washington, D.C. and five regional offices across the country. Its website is www.rstreet.org.

For many people, removing vaping scenes from movies is like removing scenes where people take a bus. Smoking, vaping or taking a bus are three of the things that people do and therefore in showing these actions film makers are merely depicting life. The trouble is that the evidence indicates that showing teenagers such scenes makes them start to smoke or vape and, presumably, take buses. But in an opinion piece on the washingtonexaminer.com website, Guy Bentley, who is a consumer freedom research associate at the Reason Foundation, disputes that there is any such evidence.

Some public health myths, he writes, no matter how absurd or consistently refuted, just refuse to die a dignified death.

One of the most pervasive is the claim that the more teens see tobacco in movies the more likely they are to pick up smoking. Every time a new study comes out documenting tobacco use on the big screen, a minor panic ensues.

Such a report, released last month, showed the use or implied use of tobacco in top-grossing movies rose 72 percent from 2010 to 2016. In PG-13 movies these “tobacco incidents” rose 43 percent, and there was a 90 percent increase for R-rated movies. (It should be noted the researchers decided to include e-cigarettes in their category of tobacco incidents, despite e-cigarettes containing zero tobacco).

The study garnered extensive media coverage, with almost all outlets taking it as gospel that this was an issue of public concern. Claims there is a wealth of strong evidence suggesting scenes featuring tobacco in movies actually cause teens to smoke went repeated without question.

Later in his piece, Bentley says that the fundamental problem with the research underpinning this evidence is that it is impossible to establish a causal relationship between seeing tobacco on screen and smoking while controlling for other factors.

Bentley’s piece is at: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/a-myth-that-wont-die-movies-cause-teen-smoking/article/2631562.