We all deserve to live long, healthy lives that are free from preventable diseases and addiction. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the significant gaps in our state’s health care access, particularly when it comes to mental health and addiction services.
The city of Bloomington took a large step toward ending the sale of all tobacco products on Monday night.
The Bloomington City Council voted 4-2 to end the sale of all flavored tobacco products, including menthol. That ban will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2022.
Read more here.
The Food and Drug Administration appears likely to move to ban menthol in cigarettes this week — a step, experts say, that has been years in the making and that could have a significant positive impact on the health of Black Americans.
SSee the full article here.
New research suggests it’s possible, after finding that a ban on menthol cigarettes in Canada was linked to a large increase in the number of smokers who quit.
The impact of the menthol ban in Canada suggests that a similar ban in the United States would have even greater benefits since menthol cigarettes are much more popular among
Americans, the researchers said.
On December 27, 2020, the federal government passed an omnibus spending package and coronavirus relief law. The bill contained legislation that includes an amendment to the definition of “cigarette” in existing laws covering delivery sales and shipments of cigarettes (including roll-your-own tobacco), and smokeless tobacco.
In his proposed budget, Gov. Tim Walz increases the tax on cigarettes and puts a new tax on vaping devices.
The DFL governor concedes that taxes aimed at smoking and vaping are regressive, meaning that they disproportionately hit low-income earners, but Walz made it clear last week that his proposed increases on smoking and vaping are all about public health.
Minnesota received an F in the category in the American Lung Association’s latest state of tobacco control grades. Another F rating was for the state’s lack of restrictions on flavored tobacco products. The state did receive an A for other smoking restrictions, a B in tobacco taxes and another B for access to cessation services. The problem, according to the association, is funding for the cessation programs falls woefully short of recommendations. More funding is needed to counteract what tobacco companies spend to attract new smokers, said Pat McKone, the Lung Association’s senior director of health promotions.
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Using Big Tobacco’s own money against the industry, the stop-smoking group ClearWay Minnesota was created in 1998. Fueled with a slice of the $6.1 billion the tobacco industry paid the state to settle a suit claiming it deceived Minnesotans about the harmful nature of its products, ClearWay, for more than 20 years, has been a leader in the fight against deadly, cancer-causing tobacco products and against unscrupulous tobacco-industry marketing, including to vulnerable and minority communities and even to children, attempting to get them hooked on nicotine.
Minnesota has maintained its moxy in the ongoing bid to reverse youth nicotine addiction and to hold Big Tobacco accountable for “aggressive, predatory behavior.”
Those were the words of Janelle Waldock, senior director of policy for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota and co-chair of Minnesotans for a Smoke-Free Generation, in a statement late last week praising the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. A state lawsuit against Big Tobacco, accusing it of illegally marketing to youngsters, had just been expanded to include Altria and four of its subsidiaries. Two Decembers ago, Altria bought a 35% stake in JUUL, the e-cigarette brand concerningly so popular amongst college, high school, and even middle school students.
How popular? “In 2019, 26 percent of Minnesota 11th-graders and 11 percent of 8th-graders said they vaped in the past month,” as Waldock said in the statement. “Minnesota needs to take urgent action to protect youth from lifelong tobacco addiction — and this lawsuit is an important part of that.”
Minnesota has long been a leader in the decades-long crusade to curb cancer-causing nicotine use. In 2007, the state expanded its Clean Indoor Air Act, and smoking is now prohibited pretty much everywhere the public can go, inside and outside, including worksites, schools, restaurants, bars, parks, and bowling alleys. Penalties are enforced in Minnesota, too, with no local opt-outs allowed. Recognizing that the more expensive tobacco products are the less likely they are to be purchased, especially among young people, Minnesota aggressively enacted the nation’s eighth-highest state cigarette tax at $3.04 per pack. And, on Aug. 1, the legal age to buy tobacco products was raised to 21 in the Gopher State.
Last session, the Minnesota Legislature took on flavored tobacco, which, like vaping, has proven popular among young people after being marketed to them by a tobacco industry eager to get them hooked early and for life.
This coming year in St. Paul, lawmakers will be urged to pass “bold policies to stem youth tobacco addiction, including clearing the market of menthol and all flavored tobacco products and investing in youth prevention,” said Minnesotans for a Smoke-Free Generation, a coalition of more than 60 organizations.
With leadership in St. Paul, our state must maintain its momentum in countering youth-focused marketing and other health-harming tricks and strategies employed by Big Tobacco. Minnesota can continue to lead, urging and allowing other states to also take action — just as the Minnesota attorney general’s office did last week.
The devices have diversified into a dizzying array of vape pens, tank systems, “mods,” and more, mass-marketed and sold to the public. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is in the midst of considering whether to approve thousands of pre-market applications for the sale of e-cigarettes as consumer products.
In these applications and related advertisements, the owners of e-cigarette brands claim that their products help smokers quit and can therefore be considered “appropriate for the protection of public health,” as stipulated by law. But a new systematic review by UC San Francisco researchers of the scientific literature on this topic puts those claims to the test.
In the new study, published Dec. 22, 2020, in the American Journal of Public Health, a team led by UCSF’s Richard Wang, MD, MAS, surveyed the scientific community’s understanding of e-cigarettes and found that, in the form of mass-marketed consumer products, they do not lead smokers to quit.
In their paper, the authors write, “If e-cigarette consumer product use is not associated with more smoking cessation, there is no population-level health benefit for allowing them to be marketed to adults who smoke, regardless of the relative harm of e-cigarettes compared with conventional cigarettes. Moreover, to the extent that people who smoke simply add e-cigarettes to their cigarette smoking (becoming so-called dual users), their risk of heart disease, lung disease, and cancer could increase compared with smoking alone.”
“The question we explored is of both scientific interest and public health interest,” said Wang, assistant professor of medicine, “and we hope that the FDA will pay attention to our study as they try to make these decisions.” Wang was joined in the study by co–first author Sudhamayi Bhadriraju, MD, a former UCSF postdoctoral fellow who is now a pulmonologist at Kaiser Permanente in Redwood City, Calif., and senior author Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, professor of medicine.
The authors searched the literature, compiling results from 64 studies to answer this question. The studies selected for formal analysis encompassed observational studies, in which participants were surveyed, but not directed, about their use of e-cigarettes, as well as clinical trials in which smokers who were trying to quit were given free e-cigarettes under medical supervision.
This distinction mattered for their analysis, Wang noted. “In observational studies, you’re basically asking people ‘out in the wild’ about their use of e-cigarettes that they’ve purchased themselves from a corner store, without specific guidance to quit. But in a randomized trial you’re testing a product, treating it like a therapy – a medicine – to see if an e-cigarette or some other product is more conducive to quitting.”
In their analysis of observational studies that involved groups of people who already smoked and used e-cigarettes, whether or not they wanted to quit, the team found no appreciable effect of e-cigarettes on participants’ ability to quit. In the next group of studies, which surveyed smokers using e-cigarettes who did indicate a desire to quit, the researchers also found no effect.
Then the team tried to tease apart the effects of frequency of use – whether people who used e-cigarettes daily might quit at different rates than people who used them less often. The researchers found that daily users quit at a higher rate than more infrequent users, although they cautioned that most participants in U.S. studies fall into the second category.
Finally, they examined nine clinical trials, which provided some type of e-cigarette, for free, to participants who were specifically encouraged to use the devices to help them quit. Though the devices and the controls employed in the studies differed, Wang concluded that being provided with certain e-cigarette products in a clinical trial context led to more quitting than some other therapies.
The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (TCA) charges the FDA with only allowing e-cigarettes on the market when manufacturers can prove their tobacco-based products are “appropriate for the protection of public health.” But the FDA delayed enforcing the law until a federal court order required companies to submit pre-market approval applications to the agency before September 2020 in order to continue selling e-cigarettes to consumers. The FDA is now evaluating thousands of such applications to sell e-cigarettes.
“It’s important to recognize that in clinical trials, when certain e-cigarette devices are treated more like medicine, there may actually be an effect on quitting smoking,” said Wang. “But that needs to be balanced against the risks of using these devices. Also, only seven e-cigarette devices were studied in the clinical trials. Whether the effect observed with these seven devices is the same or different than that of the thousands of different e-cigarette products available for sale is unknown.”
In addition, he said, the new study does not analyze the increase in youth and teen smoking as a result of e-cigarette marketing and availability, nor does it compare the negative health effects of e-cigarettes to traditional tobacco products.
With regard to the current decision before the FDA, Wang said, “The standards that the FDA has to apply to approve e-cigarettes as consumer products or therapeutic devices are fundamentally different.”
Read the full Article here: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/12/419441/e-cigarettes-consumer-products-do-not-help-people-quit-smoking-study-finds?fbclid=IwAR1aYwr3mTFOkwD-RVusNQiKVehmKmBdMmhpcUKUsOQG85a-FKuRo4WJmA0
