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EU’s highest court upholds new restrictive law on cigarettes

May 4th, 2016
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http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/world-news/155936/eu-s-highest-court-upholds-new-restrictive-law-on-cigarettes.html

Europe’s highest court on Wednesday upheld a tough EU law on standardizing cigarette packaging and banning advertising of e-cigarettes, paving the way for its adoption later this month.

The court rejected a legal challenge brought by Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco, with Japan Tobacco International and Imperial Brands acting as interested parties.

“The court finds that, in providing that each unit packet and the outside packaging must carry health warnings…. the EU legislature did not go beyond the limits of what is appropriate and necessary,” the court said.

Investigate and sanction BAT appropriately – ERA/FoEN tells FG

May 2nd, 2016
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https://www.today.ng/news/national/115159/sanction-bat-appropriately-erafoen

As the British American Tobacco (BAT) celebrates another year of deadly profits on Wednesday, April 28, the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) joined other anti-tobacco groups from Africa, United Kingdom and Latin America to demand government’s action to hold the corporation accountable.

Also on the heels of revelations of widespread bribery in Africa, the anti-tobacco group demanded that BAT be probed for the East African bribery scandal.

Speaking at a press briefing on Wednesday organised by ERA/FoEN in Lagos, Deputy Director, Akinbode Oluwafemi said, “As we speak today, British American Tobacco (BAT) is holding its Annual General Meeting (AGM) at Milton Court Concert Hall, Silk Street, in London, where it will announce huge profits from mortgaging the lungs of underage and mostly under-informed cigarette addicts.”

Catalogue of BAT Infractions

In 2015 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired an investigation on its Panorama, which detailed a host of bribery and espionage activities perpetrated by BAT on the African continent. In the expose a whistleblower and former staff of the company revealed a shameful bribery scam contrived and carefully implemented to thwart life-saving legislations in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Comoros Islands.

Paul Hopkins, who had worked for BAT in Kenya for 13 years described how BAT funded illegal corporate espionage and how its contractors bribed politicians and policymakers in the listed countries.

Emails Hopkins shared revealed the corporation made illegal payments running into thousands of dollars to compromise policy makers and in one case even demanded a draft copy of Burundi’s Tobacco Control Bill from its contact person in that country’s government to “accommodate.. amendments before the president signs.”

A Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) representative from Burundi, Godefroid Kamwenubusa, and a representative from the Comoros Islands, Chaibou Bedja Abdou, were alleged to have also received $3,000 while former representative from Rwanda, Bonaventure Nzeyimana, was paid $20,000. In return for the illegal payment to Kamwenubusa, a Burundian senior civil servant, BAT also wanted a draft copy of the country’s Tobacco Control Bill with an e-mail to the government official asking to “accommodate any amendments before the president signs.”

During the airing of the investigation on BBC Panorama, experts from the University of Bath’s leading Tobacco Control Research Group (TCRG) were available for media comment and interviews.

The report drew global condemnation on BAT with Dr. Vera Da Costa e Silva, from the WHO, saying BAT was irresponsible for using bribery to profit at the cost of people’s lives. She recommended that the corporation be investigated by the government and punished accordingly.

Undermining legislation

In April 2015 BAT Kenya Limited filed a petition at the Constitutional Court in the High Court of Kenya, Nairobi asking the court to declare the Tobacco Control Regulations which had been developed by the Kenyan Ministry of Health to facilitate the implementation of Tobacco Control Act 2007 as null and void either in its entirety or some particular sections of the regulation.

In the petition, BAT argued that the due process was not followed in the making of the regulations and that particular sections of the regulations contravened their rights as outlined in the Bill of Rights and other Articles of the Constitution of Kenya 2010 and that they were therefore unconstitutional.

Before the suit, the regulations had been tabled in Parliament on 5th December 2014 and gazette as is required and were to take effect on 5 June 2015.

On 4th June 2015, a day before the Tobacco Control Regulations could take effect, a Judge issued conservatory orders suspending the implementation of the regulations (at the request of BAT) until the case is heard and determined

Among others, BAT wanted a regulation limiting interaction between the tobacco industry and public officers declared unconstitutional. That section of the regulation is in consonance with Article 5.3 of the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO-FCTC) which recommends that Parties “Prohibit government partnership or collaboration with the tobacco industry”

In the final ruling, the court ruled among others, that, according to the documents presented to it, there were various meetings during the framing of the regulations that BAT was represented in, and consulted.

Reports of public forums and other consultations were shared and the regulations were presented to Parliament which offered another platform for public participation through the Parliamentary process. It noted that in effect, there was sufficient public participation, hence, the Tobacco Control Regulations 2014 cannot be declared null and void on the basis of lack of sufficient public participation, among others.

Blackmail

In Uganda BAT, in conjunction with other leading tobacco companies, used considerable financial clout to oppose Dr. Chris Baryomunsi’s private member’s bill in 2014 aimed at curbing smoking in Uganda.

In a letter to Baryomunsi, BAT Uganda said that it will no longer do business with the 709 farmers in his Kihihi constituency that it normally buys from because the legislation he sponsored – and a related plan to raise tobacco taxes – has rendered the arrangement “increasingly less economically viable”.

BAT aim for writing Baryomunsi was to instigate farmers against him.

Bayormunsi’s bill recommends large health warnings covering 75% of the face of cigarette packets, prohibits smoking within 100 metres of public buildings, prohibit advertising, ban point of sale display marketing, raises the smoking age from 18 to 21 and limits interaction between the government and tobacco lobby.

Tobacco farmers’ groups, obviously backed by BAT lobbyists, claim the measures will put them out of business.

Oluwafemi however said, the above findings show that the company works openly and behind the scenes to thwart the WHO-FCTC.

“We therefore stand in full solidarity with our allies across the globe demanding BAT be probed for the East African bribery scandal. The probe must go beyond East Africa.

“The findings hitherto mentioned challenge governments on the continent, and particularly the Nigerian government to wake up and take action. We will not forget in a hurry, the torturous process of getting the National Tobacco Control Bill (now Tobacco Control Act) into law just as we will not forget the tens of hurriedly-formed BAT front groups deployed to fight taxation, ban on Tobacco Advertising Promotion and Sponsorships (TAPS) and other life-saving provisions from getting into the final document.”

ERA/FoEN also debunked the myth that a tobacco bill with strong provisions as recommended by the WHO-FCTC will lead to job and revenue losses.

The group demand that the federal government should. beam searchlight on BAT operations in West Africa and particularly in Nigeria where the corporation is involved in so-called anti-smuggling campaign and lobby to thwart increase in taxes.

“Government agencies should investigate all tax waivers or grants that were granted to BAT by past governments.

That government investigate all past dealings between BAT and government agencies with a view to prosecute any infraction against our laws. The Nigerian government, particularly the Ministry of Health remain unintimidated as it comes up with resolutions for the effective implementation of the National Tobacco Control Act.

“We also recommend a speedy drafting of the recommendations. BAT infractions and that of Philip Morris International which is identified to have illicitly imported cigarettes into Nigeria from Senegal be investigated and sanctioned appropriately,” Oluwafemi said.

Also speaking at the briefing, Head, Media & Communication, Mr Philip Jakpor said, when the NGO visited one of the villages tobacco is planted, “the farmers said they were not meant to speak with strangers. It shows that the truth about their dealings is not known by the public.

“Action must be taken and the more there is delay, the more they are allowed to take people’s lives for granted.”

Adding, Oluwafemi said, “one issue we cannot tire talking about is the menace of tobacco which continues to claim lives at an alarming rate globally.”

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), about six million people die annually from tobacco –induced illnesses and what we know as second hand smoke is responsible for over 600,000 yearly deaths in non-smokers.

“Increasing deaths from tobacco correspond with huge profits the tobacco corporation make from marketing their deadly ware,” Oluwafemi said.

We ban tobacco sponsorship of sport in the UK. Let’s stub it out in the arts, too

May 1st, 2016
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Medical professionals call for a smoke-free approach to arts sponsorship

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/commentisfree/2016/may/01/we-ban-tobacco-sponsorship-of-sport-in-the-uk-lets-stub-it-out-in-the-arts-too

Smoking is a leading preventable cause of ill health and premature death, and a major contributor to health inequality. Current estimates are that the tobacco industry will kill one billion people in the 21st century.

Tobacco advertising has now been banned, along with sponsorship of sport. However, tobacco companies continue to use sponsorship of some high-profile arts organisations to promote the spurious idea that they are responsible corporate citizens. We suspect that most members of the Royal Academy in London will be appalled to learn that Japan Tobacco International (JTI) has been a premier sponsor for its exhibitions. British American Tobacco is also a sponsor, a position it shares with, among others, the Marie Curie cancer charity and Bloomberg. The latter is of note given Michael Bloomberg’s passionate tobacco control stance while mayor of New York.

These sponsorship arrangements are morally unacceptable and must be brought to an end. As healthcare professionals who deal daily with the harm caused by the tobacco industry, we call on arts, cultural and heritage organisations to sign the smoke-free arts declaration (smokefreearts.org.uk) to affirm that tobacco sponsorship is unacceptable. We also call on sponsors of the arts to undertake that they will no longer support organisations that accept tobacco sponsorship.

Dr Nicholas Hopkinson

Reader in respiratory medicine, Imperial College, London on behalf of 1,104 other healthcare professionals

Ditch tobacco sponsors, health experts warn cultural institutions

Apr 30th, 2016
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1,000 experts sign open letter to London’s leading cultural bodies, including British Museum and Royal Academy, over ‘morally unacceptable’ sponsorship

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/30/arts-institutions-ditch-tobacco-sponsors-health-experts-letter

More than 1,000 healthcare experts, including 57 professors, have signed an open letter calling on some of London’s most respected cultural institutions to abandon their financial links with big tobacco.

The British Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts, the South Bank Centre and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, have long-standing lucrative corporate membership and sponsorship deals with two leading cigarette manufacturers, which are banned from advertising in the UK.

The links have dismayed many in the medical community. “As a doctor specialising in the care of people with emphysema, I see the harm smoking causes every day,” said Dr Nick Hopkinson, reader in respiratory medicine and honorary consultant physician at the National Heart and Lung Institute, who is leading a campaign against the tie-ups.

“Tobacco companies, which rely on getting people addicted to products, which maim and kill, must not be allowed to use arts sponsorship as a way to present [themselves] as respectable.”

Tobacco giant JTI has corporate membership deals with the British Museum, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Academy of Arts. JTI pays almost £40,000 a year to the Royal Academy for a premier membership package that sees the company listed in all exhibition catalogues. The company is also a corporate supporter of the Southbank Centre on whose website its logo appears.

British American Tobacco is an associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a corporate sponsor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

The Framework convention on tobacco control – to which the UK is a signatory – states that tobacco companies’ investment in corporate social responsibility initiatives should be treated as a form of advertising.

In 2007, Philip Morris International Inc, manufacturer of Marlboro, stopped funding a number of New York art institutions.

In their letter, published in Sunday’s Observer, health experts, including John Moxham, professor of respiratory medicine at King’s College London; Richard Ashcroft, professor of bioethics, Queen Mary University of London; and John Britton, director, UK centre for tobacco and alcohol studies, University of Nottingham; call on cultural organisations to rethink their relationship with big tobacco.

They warn: “Tobacco advertising has now been banned along with sponsorship of sport. However, tobacco companies continue to use sponsorship of some high-profile arts organisations to promote the spurious idea that they are responsible corporate citizens.”

Hopkinson added: “People can’t believe that the galleries, museums, orchestras they love could do this.”

Pressure on the likes of the Royal Academy to drop their links with big tobacco companies comes after BP ended its sponsorship of the Tate after 26 years following anger from environmental groups. The British Museum, National Portrait Gallery and other institutions have also been forced to defend themselves against claims that they accommodated the demands of the oil company, a major sponsor.

In a statement to Hopkinson, Will Dallimore, director of public engagement at the Royal Academy of Arts, said that JTI’s support had “indisputably helped the academy fulfil its endeavours to contribute to the artistic life of the country”.

A spokesman for the London Philharmonic said: “The LPO is grateful to JTI for its support and for providing our organisation with many platforms for us to make classical music more accessible and widen access to the arts.”

A spokesman for the British Museum said: “JTI supports an acquisition fund at the British Museum, which allows us to acquire objects for the museum’s modern Japanese collection. JTI have supported the Museum since 2010. The British Museum is grateful to JTI for their long-term support.”

A spokesman for JTI said: “It seems illogical that in a democratic society like the UK and at a time when funding for cultural and artistic institutions is under pressure, people would want to prevent a legitimate company like JTI from making a contribution to good causes.”

A British American Tobacco spokesman: “Like many other businesses we support art and cultural institutions throughout the UK through corporate memberships. The small amount of corporate memberships we have do not result in our brands being featured anywhere but simply provide the opportunity for our staff, customers and business partners to attend events, concerts and exhibitions alongside other corporate members.”

But Hopkinson suggested that the tobacco firms were using their support for the arts to retain key staff to give themselves a commercial advantage.

“In its annual report, British American Tobacco identifies the difficulty recruiting people because of the industry’s poor reputation, as a risk to its future profits,” Hopkinson said. “Arts sponsorship is one way that the tobacco industry can enable its own employees to deceive themselves about the true nature of what they are doing.”

Tobacco company’s tactics scrutinised

Apr 21st, 2016
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http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/tobacco-companys-tactics-scrutinised

Cambodia’s top-selling cigarette firm achieved dominance by courting senior political figures and vigorously opposing public health legislation, according to a study published this month in medical journal Global Public Health.

Twenty years after moving into Cambodia, British American Tobacco Cambodia (BATC) controls 40.3 per cent of the cigarette market.

Through analysis of internal industry documents available through the global Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, by Drs Ross MacKenzie and Jeff Collin examined the strategies employed by BATC to reach the top spot.

The documents from the mid-1990s revealed a strategy focused on “handling government officials both at provincial and national levels on a variety of topics”.

Mac-Kenzie and Collin found that BATC’s greatest asset in managing those relationships was its chairman, Oknha Kong Triv, whose real value, they assert, was “his connections to the inner circle around the CPP”.

Related strategies involved funding the Hun Sen Forestation Nursery and BAT’s regional marketing director thanking the prime minister for his “vision, wisdom and leadership”.

MacKenzie and Collin believe BATC’s lobbying paid off. The government, they report, gave the company generous preferential tax treatment and a willing ear to listen to its concerns on policy matters.

Cambodia’s 2005 ratification of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control should have made further exploitation of those relationships impossible.

Article 5.3 of the convention requires signatory nations to protect health policy from the “vested interests of the tobacco industry”.

Yet in a 2010 conversation with the Post, Kun Lim, BATC’s head of corporate and regulatory affairs, praised government officials for their “commitment to listen” and a 2007 internal document spoke of the “culture of partnership” between the company and state.

Yel Daravuth, who heads the WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative in Cambodia, believes that while Article 5.3 has been adopted by Cambodia on paper, there is a lack of proper guidelines.

“It’s very important [to have specific guidelines] because it will tell the government what they should do, what they should not do and how restricted they are. If they want to [meet with tobacco executives], they have to be very transparent,” said Daravuth.

Cambodia Movement for Health executive director Dr Kong Mom said in an email the tobacco industry persistently attempts to railroad policies that would curb their position.

“Recently, the tobacco industry in Cambodia established an alliance called Association of Tobacco Industry of Cambodia aiming at interfering in the development and implementation of the law on tobacco control and its regulations. It is not the matter of which company is more or less aggressive than other companies, but they work together to protect their vested interest,” Mom wrote.

The Ministry of Health’s vice chief of tobacco and health, Kong Sam An, could not be reached yesterday. A BATC representative hung up when a Post reporter called for comment.

Big Tobacco Shaped Smoking Laws, Policies

Apr 21st, 2016
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https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/big-tobacco-shaped-smoking-laws-policies-111556/

In 2008, British American Tobacco (BAT) was awarded its third straight “Gold Medal” from Prime Minister Hun Sen in recognition of good corporate stewardship, according to the company’s July newsletter.

As a “corporate citizen of Cambodia, we consider it our responsibility to assist in the development of this country and the people,” BAT’s Asia-Pacific marketing director Dale Mclean was quoted as saying in the newsletter. Mr. Mclean went on to express his “deep gratitude” to Mr. Hun Sen for “his vision, wisdom and leadership.”

It might have seemed an odd moment for the largest cigarette maker by market share in a country where the World Health Organization estimates 10,000 people die of tobacco-related causes every year. But the goodwill between BAT and the Cambodian government was by then nothing new, according to a new paper by a pair of foreign academics.

Since the mid-1990s, BAT aggressively sought to establish close connections with those at the highest levels of government in order to shape industry-friendly tobacco taxes and regulations, write Ross MacKenzie, a health sciences lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, and Jeff Colin, a professor of global health policy at the University of Edinburgh, in the latest issue of the journal Global Public Health.

Citing internal industry documents made public through litigation, the company’s newsletter, news articles and marketing reports, the authors conclude that connections with political elites were “both widely acknowledged and beyond public criticism,” allowing BAT to “dilute tobacco control regulation.”

British American Tobacco did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Wednesday.

The company’s influence may help explain why the Cambodian government has taken so long to implement a series of regulations on advertising, taxation and other smoking-related measures it ratified in 2005 as a signatory to the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

As early as 1995, BAT’s “Indo-China” plan noted the importance of “handling government officials at both the provincial and national levels.”

“It is imperative that anti-tobacco marketing restrictions are pre-empted by a balanced counter view presented at the highest levels in government and the media,” BAT wrote.

Seeking to position itself as the voice of calm in an unruly industry, BAT repeatedly touted its role in supporting economic development while simultaneously courting key government officials through its Cambodian partners, the paper says.

By partnering with businessman Kong Triv’s Cambodia Tobacco Company and courting fellow tycoon Kok An—both of whom have served in the Senate—the authors say BAT gained conduits to advocate for its policy position at Cambodia’s Government-Private Sector Forum.

According to the website of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the Forum’s industry-specific working groups “provided a platform for business representatives to offer expertise on a range of policy and regulatory reforms” to government officials.

Statements from the company suggest its tactics have paid dividends.

In an August 2007 newsletter, BAT general manager Arend Ng praised the company’s success in lowering a proposed excise tax as “a shining example of what can be achieved when industry and Government work together.”

The group also aggressively lobbied members of a Health Ministry group charged with making recommendations about a 2010 law that ultimately banned tobacco ads in certain settings. At the time, Kun Lim, head of BAT’s corporate and regulatory affairs, praised officials in an interview with The Phnom Penh Post for their “commitment to listen” and to ensure that “no unnecessary burdens are placed on business.”

Another prong of BAT’s strategies entailed corporate social responsibility programs, including supporting family tobacco growers, hosting workshops on child labor and supporting government reforestation with four large nurseries, two of which were named after Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Many of these overtures appear to be in direct violation of Article 5.3 of WHO’s Tobacco Control framework, which states that “parties shall act to protect [tobacco] policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry in accordance with national law.”

Judith Mackay, a senior adviser with health advocacy group Vital Strategies, said on Wednesday that BAT’s strategies were typical in the developing world.

“Their objective is to bolster their global revenues and profits by winning customers, especially in the low and middle income markets because smoking rates have declined in many high-income countries where consumers have been educated about the harms of tobacco,” she said in an email.

Mark Schwisow, country director for the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, agreed.

“The trend internationally is for policymakers to make the law as weak as possible,” he said.

Spokesmen for the ministries of commerce and finance declined to comment on the findings published by Mr. MacKenzie and Mr. Colin.

Given’s BAT’s recent history of engaging with authoritarian governments in Uzbekistan, Burma, and even North Korea, the academics say they doubt the company will back down from its engagement with the Cambodian government.

“BAT’s perceptibly close relationship with the Cambodian government raises…questions regarding corporate operations in countries where national governments engage in large-scale human rights violations,” they write.

Tobacco firm ‘paid bribes’ to wreck health treaty

Mar 27th, 2016
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http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Health/article1682252.ece

THE Serious Fraud Office is investigating British American Tobacco (BAT) over alleged corruption after documents and secret tape recordings were passed to its staff in Kenya and South Africa.

The company, whose brands include Benson & Hedges, Dunhill and Lucky Strike, was allegedly involved in bribing politicians and government officials from at least five African nations in a covert campaign to undermine a United Nations public health treaty.

Kenya’s anti-corruption commission said last week it was working with the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and Britain’s National Crime Agency to investigate alleged “bribery and tax evasion”.

It is understood that officials are also examining claims that payments were made by a BAT intelligence unit in London to a network of people in Africa, including police officers, to disrupt the activities of commercial rivals

E-Cigarettes May Be Safer Than Tobacco Cigarettes When It Comes To Formaldehyde; Should We Be Skeptical?

Mar 3rd, 2016
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http://www.medicaldaily.com/formaldehyde-e-cigarettes-tobacco-company-376229

New preliminary research presented today at the annual conference of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco in Chicago, IL, is sure to further stoke an ongoing debate on the actual harms of electronic cigarettes.

The study claims to have found that even the heavy use of e-cigarettes, roughly equivalent to 350 puffs a day, leaves little formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, behind. To further bolster their point, the authors compared their measured levels of daily formaldehyde exposure from three vaping products to several safety benchmarks, including one designed by the World Health Organization (WHO), finding they fell dramatically short. And when compared to a conventional tobacco cigarette, a readily available source of formaldehyde, they found the level of e-cigarette exposure was over ten times less, again indicating their relative safety.

“The results from this study show that even heavy use of these products still only results in daily formaldehyde exposure that is less than one sixth of the exposure from breathing indoor air that complies with WHO air quality standards,” said lead author Dr. Sandra Costigan in a statement.

Tobacco-Funded

Despite these impressive results, the list of caveats that come attached with the study should be enough to make anyone cautiously skeptical.

For one, the study was funded and conducted by British American Tobacco (BAT), a company that in 2013 trumpeted its status as the “first international tobacco company to launch an e-cigarette, Vype, in the UK.” In 2014, it developed two additional e-cigarette products, the Vype eStick and Vype ePen, and 2015 saw the arrival of the Vype eTank (the study appears to have tested the Vype, Vype ePen, and Vype eTank). Costigan, in addition to being the lead author, is also BAT’s Principal Toxicologist for electronic cigarettes.

Without casting aspersions on BAT personally, it’s worth emphasizing the long history of tobacco industry-funded studies that concluded their “reduced risk” products, such as low-tar cigarettes, did just that, only to be eventually debunked by independent scientists afterwards. For one of many examples, while medium tar, filtered cigarettes, the type most smokers use today, are safer than the high-tar cigarettes of the past, there doesn’t appear to be any difference in mortality when switching to low-tar cigarettes, namely because low-tar users simply take longer puffs or smoke more cigarettes to get the same nicotine high.

Secondly, as mentioned at the very beginning, the study has yet to be published in a peer reviewed journal. Meanwhile, a study that was peer reviewed and published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) last year also sought to measure levels of formaldehyde from the heavy use of e-cigarettes and came to very different conclusions. Testing a device similar to the Vype eTank at a high voltage level, they estimated that the levels of formaldehyde they measured could, over the long term, amount to an “incremental lifetime cancer risk” five to fifteen times higher than conventional cigarettes.

The ‘Dry Puff’ Problem

Of course, the plot only thickens from here. As Costigan explains, how formaldehyde is produced differs between the two products. “In cigarette smoke, most formaldehyde is produced as the result of burning sugars naturally present in tobacco as well as added sugars and glycerol, whereas in vaping products, it is generally produced as a thermal breakdown product of glycerol and propylene glycol (PG).”

In the simplest terms, that means tobacco cigarettes produce a gaseous form of formaldehyde, whose effect on cancer risk we’ve studied extensively. However, vaping products produce formaldehyde-releasing agents, and as the NEJM authors admit, we don’t really know how these agents affect our body when inhaled.

That ambiguity aside, other researchers have criticized the NEJM study and those similar to it for cherry-picking their findings by choosing to focus on a high-voltage setting that few consumers would typically use, since it would purportedly create an unpleasant-tasting “dry puff.” Indeed, at lower voltages, the NEJM researchers found negligible amounts of formaldehyde production.

In a response, the authors acknowledged these criticisms, but also claimed there was “a lack of objective data with which to judge whether these devices are being used as safely as possible.” They further remarked that while some cigar smokers actively avoid inhaling cigar smoke, there are plenty who do, and that the same could be true for some e-cigarette users who enjoy the dry puff, especially if the vast variety of flavored vaping products successfully masks the taste.

In short, the fight over formaldehyde comes down to what we should consider typical heavy use, one that likely won’t be settled by any one study (the current study relied on “vaping robots” to produce their vapor)

“We believe e-cigarettes hold great potential for reducing tobacco-related disease. For this reason, we continue to strive to better define and further reduce any residual risks that there may be, to as low a level as possible,” said Costigan.

Much of that touted potential is believed to come from the notion that tobacco users can and will switch over to less harmful e-cigarettes and eventually wean themselves off nicotine completely.

Unfortunately, as with formaldehyde, the evidence for that actually happening in the real world is decidedly mixed.

“It is true that cigarettes are known to contain many toxicants at relatively higher concentrations than electronic nicotine-delivery systems (ENDS),” the NEJM authors wrote at the end of their response. “What is unknown are the overall toxicologic effects of ENDS. It will probably take at least a decade for the public health consequences of long-term vaping to be even partially understood.”

In other words, buckle your seatbelts, folks. It’s gonna be a long ride.

Source: Costigan S, Sommarstrom J. Formaldehyde from different format electronic cigarettes compared to the WHO air guideline. Annual Conference of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco. 2016.

British American Tobacco accused of corporate espionage in South Africa

Feb 28th, 2016
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/british-american-tobacco-accused-of-corporate-espionage-in-south-africa-a6900731.html

Fresh international accusations emerge against tobacco giant

Lawyers investigating bribery and corruption allegations against one of the world’s leading tobacco firms have been urged to expand their investigation after fresh international accusations emerged.

British American Tobacco, BAT, has been accused of corporate espionage against rival cigarette makers in South Africa.

According to court documents seen by The Independent on Sunday, two former police officers who went to work for private corporate investigation companies paid cash to South African law enforcement officials to disrupt BAT’s competitors’ business operations.

The accusations have been made in court documents filed by a body representing small local tobacco producers in a complaint to the South African government’s Competition Commission. The affidavits say BAT officials instructed the men to disrupt rivals’ trade by falsely suggesting they were marketing and selling cigarettes unlawfully. The aim, often successful, was to get rivals’ stock impounded and discourage wholesalers from dealing with rival firms.

The South African claims follow bribery allegations, first revealed by the IoS and the BBC, in a dossier of claims passed to the UK’s Serious Fraud Office by Paul Hopkins, a BAT whistleblower who worked in Africa for BAT for 13 years before being made redundant.

Mr Hopkins – responsible for stopping the illicit tobacco trade in East and Central Africa – said he facilitated payments on BAT’s account to cripple anti-smoking laws in several East African countries, payments to officials to undermine efforts by the World Health Organisation to reduce deaths from smoking, ran a corporate spying operation, and conducted “black ops” to put rivals out of business.

After his claims, members of the US Congress called for a Department of Justice investigation.

Last week Nicandro Durante, head of BAT, announced that the lawyers Linklaters had been appointed by the firm to investigate the corruption allegations in East Africa. BAT’s critics said last night that this investigation should be extended to cover the fresh South African claims as well.

BAT insists the company does not “tolerate corruption in our business anywhere in the world” and says its policy “is to take all appropriate action” on any allegation.

Exclusive: Legal fight looms for government over plain tobacco packaging

Feb 17th, 2016
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https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/exclusive-legal-fight-looms-for-government-over-plain-tobacco-packaging.html

British American Tobacco has confirmed to ONE News that it will explore “all possible legal avenues” to fight the legislation, which will be debated later this year after a delay due to legal action against Australia’s government by another tobacco company.

However, Prime Minister John Key says he is not worried about the impending legal fight.

The case against Australia, brought by Philip Morris, failed, but there is still a World Trade Organisation case pending.

Both British American Tobacco and Philip Morris say forcing them to adopt plain packaging on their products breaches copyright.

ONE News also understands that the government is waiting for the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement to be ratified, because it contains a clause that allows the government to make any changes to public health law it pleases without fear of reprisals like this.

Neither of the companies would comment on the issue, but they claim there is no evidence plain packaging reduces smoking rates, and say the government should be cracking down on home-grown tobacco instead.

The government is working towards the goal of New Zealand being smokefree by 2025.

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