Harm Reduction

According to a new report from several public health organizations, including the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Society, in 2013 states will spend less than two percent of their annual tobacco tax and revenues from the Master Settlement Agreement to combat smoking. The report states that from the approximately 25.7 billion dollars states collected from the 1998 MSA, only 460 million dollars will go to smoking prevention and treatment programs.
Get ready to hear more about electronic cigarettes except about how they can possibly help people quit smoking. Some e-cig manufacturers are gearing up for an expensive ad campaign, the New York Times reports. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based NJoy Inc. is spending $12 to $14 million to promote its NJoy King, while Lorillard s BlueCigs has hired actor Stephen Dorff to promote their product. There have even been ads on cable stations, although no network has agreed to run the spots.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has just unveiled a new website, BeTobaccoFree.Gov, and as usual those in charge have chosen to keep on demonizing reduced risk tobacco products such as smokeless, and electronic cigarettes. E-Cigarettes may contain ingredients that are known to be toxic to humans. Because clinical studies about the safety of e-cigarettes have not been submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), you have no way of knowing ¦ if they are safe [or] which chemicals they contain, the website says.
Maybe public health researchers should have to apply for a permit before spouting bad ideas? A professor in Australia has proposed requiring smoking licenses that would force addicted smokers to seek permission from the government and get educated about the dangers of smoking before they could legally buy cigarettes no more than 50 sticks a day. It s crazy to think we should continue to allow cigarettes, which kill one in two of their users, to be sold just anywhere to anyone, Simon Chapman of the University of Sydney wrote in the online journal PLoS Medicine.
It s the American Cancer Society-sponsored 37th annual Great American Smokeout today an appropriate day to take a moment to spare a thought for the 44 million Americans in the grip of a deadly addiction, ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross writes in the pages of the American Spectator. Over half of all smokers tried to quit last year, and an estimated 443,000 died from cigarette-related illness.
We re normally fans of New York Times science writer Jane Brody but her latest column on quitting smoking is incorrect and irresponsible. To begin with, she claims that, People ages 18 to 25 now have the nation s highest smoking rate: 40 percent. Um, no. (Maybe she s thinking of Lithuania?) According to figures the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released just last week, 18.9 percent of young people aged 18 to 24 were smokers in 2011; the highest rate 22.1 percent was among 25 to 44-year-olds.
As public health delegates from around the world begin meeting in Seoul, South Korea, for a meeting to discuss revisions of the World Health Organization s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control treaty, a public policy expert is warning them against a dangerous group-think with regard to tobacco harm reduction.
The nation s smoking cessation programs just aren t working but health officials are stubbornly refusing to admit it. Statistics released yesterday from the Centers for Disease Control show that 19 percent of U.S. adults smoked in 2011, a rate little changed from the 19.3 percent that did in 2010 and the 20.9 percent who puffed in 2005. Smoking rates in our country went down fairly impressively, dating from the landmark Surgeon General s report in February 1964 which pinned lung cancer on smoking, up to 2005, but total smoking rates since then have basically stagnated, says ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross.
Sixty years after health reports started tallying the deadly toll of cigarettes, millions of people are still addicted to tobacco. Writing in Examiner.com, ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross uses the release of a Million Women Study in Britain to examine the damage women have sustained, and continue to sustain to their bodies, thanks to the scourge of addiction to cigarettes:
It s been 60 years since the first solid reports of the causal effects of cigarettes and premature death and disease made the news, and almost 50 since the Surgeon General s report made believers out of almost everyone: Cigarettes are killers.
University of California at Los Angeles chancellor Gene Block yesterday announced that the campus will go tobacco-free on April 22, 2013, which is Earth Day. Recommended by UCLA s Tobacco-Free Steering Committee, the ban will include all tobacco products, including electronic cigarettes and oral tobacco. UCLA Health Sciences had implemented a smoke-free policy last November, but now University of California President Mark Yudof has asked all UC campuses to follow suit by January 2014.
We've seen it before reports of reports of near-immediate reductions in heart attacks after smoking bans were enacted indoors. Now a new report in the Archives of Internal Medicine repeats the same errors of statistical analysis in an even more egregious manner.