USA

Curbing teen smoking ‘must go beyond raising minimum age’

Mar 14th, 2017

http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/curbing-teen-smoking-must-go-beyond-raising-minimum-age

Teens below the age of 18 have been barred from smoking legally since 1993 – but the data two decades later tells a different story.

In 2013, the average age when smokers took their first puff was just 16, according to the National Health Surveillance Survey.

Said Mr Vincent Tng, 21, a non-smoker serving full-time national service: “I have friends who started smoking as young as 14 or 15 – they just got their friends to buy cigarettes for them. There are contraband cigarettes around, so you don’t even have to go to a proper shop.”

Experts said the discrepancy shows that efforts to curb teen smoking must go beyond raising the minimum legal age. Issues such as raising awareness and enforcement cannot be sidelined.

Said Sata CommHealth chief executive and anti-smoking advocate K. Thomas Abraham: “We should have a slew of measures that go concurrently with raising the minimum age. How are these young people able to get cigarettes? How do we plug the existing loopholes?”

Last week, the Ministry of Health (MOH) said it plans to raise the minimum legal smoking age from 18 to 21. In Singapore, these are the years when nearly half of smokers become regular smokers. The idea is to put cigarettes out of the reach of underage smokers, who tend to obtain them through their social circles.

A town in the United States known as Needham is often held up as a success story of how this measure can reduce smoking rates.

In 2005, it increased the legal smoking age from 18 to 21. Smoking rates among under-18s dropped by nearly half within five years – from 13 per cent in 2006 to 7 per cent in 2010. At least 215 other locales in the US have followed suit in recent years, including New York City, Boston and California.

Dr Chia Shi-Lu, who chairs the Government Parliamentary Committee for Health, said: “I don’t think that in itself will be enough… but raising the age would help interdict further access to cigarettes amongst the young.”

To complement the move, experts suggested increasing the size of graphic health warnings on cigarette packets, introducing plain packaging to make cigarettes look as nondescript as possible and even raising the tobacco tax.

According to the World Health Organisation, increasing tobacco prices in high-income countries by 10 per cent is estimated to reduce consumption by 4 per cent, said Professor Chia Kee Seng, dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore.

Tobacco taxes were last raised in 2014, from $352 per kg to S$388 per kg of tobacco, or 1,000 cigarettes.(+import tax + GST) It was reported that out of the $12 (HKD66) for an average pack of cigarettes, $8.50 (HKD 47) goes to the Government as tax.

Prof Chia said tobacco taxes should be raised further if smoking remains a serious issue, even after the age limit is raised.

At the same time, said Dr Abraham, even more work needs to be done to drive home the anti-smoking message among young people, as “the long-term effects of smoking are not always immediately apparent to a young smoker”.

Nee Soon MP Louis Ng, who used to smoke, said enforcement needs to be stepped up to ensure cigarettes are not sold to underage teens, and more has to be done to change the image of smoking.

“They think it’s cool to smoke and we need to tackle that mindset with a series of public awareness campaigns,” he said.

Management executive Catherine Ruth Jeyaseelan, 34, suggested involving parents too. “Sometimes parents smoke at home and kids will get curious, they might try it when their parents are out.”

Anti-Smoking Ads Call Out the Racial Profiling Used by Big Tobacco

Mar 6th, 2017

by Editor.

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https://www.iagreetosee.com/portfolio/truth-racial-profiling-anti-smoking-ads/

Did you know that tobacco companies tend to advertise up to ten times more in black neighborhoods? It’s this fact and a few others that are driving Truth’s new ad campaign.

You probably remember the Truth anti-smoking PSAs of years past – which usually stuck to the Reaganite “just say no” method of preventing teenagers from getting hooked on cigarettes. But these days Truth is reaching beyond the tired D.A.R.E.-style messaging and are focusing more on the social justice issues behind smoking.
Amanda Seals Calls Out Big Tobacco for Racial Profiling…

Truth teamed up with Insecure and Greatest Ever’s Amanda Seals call out big tobacco’s not-so-subtle racial profiling in their advertising choices. In the ad, we follow Seals through neighborhoods in Washington D.C., where she interviews residents in a traditional man-on-the-street fashion.

“Big Tobacco must love diversity,” she sarcastically starts. “They must love it so much,” she continues from the corner of a black D.C. neighborhood, “that here, they advertise up to ten times more in black neighborhoods than in other neighborhoods.” That fact is echoed by the second ad in the series, which points out that in black neighborhoods, tobacco retailers are much more likely to be located close to schools.

“How is that O.K.?” she asks. “IT’S NOT” flashes across the screen.

“Big Tobacco is really trying to be friends with black folks… I see you,” she continues. “So much so that in the past, they called us a ‘market priority.’ It’s not a coincidence, it’s profiling. Don’t let it go unseen.”

How Smoking Became a Social Justice Issue

In an interview with Essence, Seals explained why she wanted to join up with Truth to shine a light on the shady sales tactics employed by Big Tobacco. “I honestly was just generally frustrated at the continued efforts I feel like are put in place to harm the Black community in a deleterious way,” she said. “It was just another element that I honestly didn’t know about. It was very surprising that I didn’t know about it. That was actually the most shocking part, like ‘How did I not know about this,’ Because the numbers are just staggering, which is of course what made me say ‘I need to be a part of this, if I can be.’”

Ads like this might have been hard for Truth to make in the 90s when the advocacy group was most active. But conversations about topics like institutional racism have been forced into the spotlight much more in the past few years – driven in part by the fresh resistance style of Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements that are mainly pushed by millennials.

In comparison to other generations, many studies show that millennials are less likely to take up smoking – a positive outcome for the “just say no” mentality than many millennials grew up with.

On the other hand, that just makes Big Tobacco get more creative. Investigations into the same studies that show smoking rates down for millennials, also have bad news – social smoking skews the data, for one.

So maybe by turning smoking into a social justice issue, Truth will be able to get a head start stomping out social smoking – especially among social justice-minded millennials.

Jeff Sessions, Anti-Weed Crusader, Was a Shill For Big Tobacco

Mar 1st, 2017

by Editor.

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The new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is concerned about marijuana. Yesterday he said that he doesn’t want it to be “sold at every corner grocery store.” You can’t get weed at many corner stores just yet, but there is a product at those stores that kills about 400,000 Americans each year. And Sessions has vigorously defended the interests of that product. I’m talking, of course, about tobacco.

http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/jeff-sessions-anti-weed-crusader-was-a-shill-for-big-1792831457

With more states legalizing marijuana for both medicinal and recreational use, the newly confirmed Attorney General says that he’s concerned about the drug. Sessions says it’s about health. But back in the 1990s and 2000s, he wasn’t so concerned about the real health epidemic of cigarettes.

“States can pass whatever laws they choose,” Sessions told a crowd at the National Association of Attorneys General meeting yesterday. “But I’m not sure we’re going to be a better, healthier nation if we have marijuana being sold at every corner grocery store.”

Oh gosh golly! Marijuana being sold at every corner grocery store! But what about all those corner stores that have a much deadlier product called cigarettes?

Funny you should ask. Because the tobacco industry helped get Jeff Sessions elected to the Senate in 1996. In fact, Session got a bit too much money from R. J. Reyonlds, the makers of Camel cigarettes, during his 1996 campaign. In October of 1997 his staff had to send money back to the company because they had donated more than was legally allowed.

Letter from the US Senate campaign for Jeff Sessions sending back money in October of 1997 that it had received in October of 1996 to get elected (UC-SF Tobacco Industry Documents archive)

Sessions would go on to rail against the lawsuits that the tobacco industry was facing in the late 1990s. During a private dinner, Sessions called the lawsuits “extortion” and said that it would lead to “shake downs” of other industries.

“If we let them get by with this extortion of the tobacco industry, then they’ll start shaking down other industries, one after the other,” Sessions said at a private dinner in July of 1997 with Bill Orzechowski, Chief Economist for the Tobacco Institute, a tobacco industry front group that tried to advocate against tobacco control policies.

How do we know Sessions said this? Thankfully, we have an archive of documents at the University of California-San Francisco that came out of a settlement with the Big Tobacco companies in the late 1990s, known as the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). The Sessions quote about shakedowns comes from an email from tobacco industry insiders that was reporting back to R. J. Reynolds about how legislators would deal with the threats to their industry.

Back in the 1990s, states were pissed that they were paying for healthcare costs from smoking related diseases, and they started suing the tobacco companies one by one. Mississippi was the first to sue in 1994, and by 1997 had won, something nobody had ever done successfully against the tobacco industry before. Other states started to sue, and pretty soon enough states were emboldened that they lumped it all up into one big settlement.

The Master Settlement Agreement included handing over decades of documents showing that the tobacco industry knew tobacco was addictive (contradicting sworn testimony by every major tobacco exec in 1994), that tobacco was harmful to health (another thing that the industry denied for decades), and that the tobacco industry was explicitly targeting kids with their advertising.

Sessions also introduced a pro-tobacco industry amendment in 1997 that would cap how much money lawyers could make from suing tobacco companies. The goal was evidently to hamper legal efforts to go after the tobacco industry, which was spending millions to fight regulation of its product. The Sessions amendment was narrowly defeated.

From a September 11, 1997 Associated Press report:

A chastened Senate voted emphatically Wednesday to undo a $50 billion tobacco-industry break that had been slipped into a tax-cut bill signed into law just last month.

Voting 95-3 to repeal the provision, senators rather contritely agreed to an amendment that unraveled what sponsor Richard Durbin, D-Ill., called a “sweetheart deal” for the industry.

But the repeal was nearly derailed by an amendment from Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who tried—and nearly succeeded—in limiting the fees that can be collected by attorneys hired by the states to press damage claims against the tobacco industry.

Sessions argued that the legal fees could amount to billions of dollars and are “too generous, too much of a windfall, and cannot be defended.”

Durbin and his allies defeated the Sessions amendment on a 50-48 vote by arguing that it would put states at a big financial disadvantage in their long and expensive legal jousting with the tobacco industry.

As late as 2004, Sessions was still opposed to FDA regulation of tobacco. And no, that’s not a typo. The tobacco industry fought regulation of its product for decades and FDA was only granted regulatory authority over it in 2009. Again, that’s not a typo.

When the Senate passed a compromise bill on regulation of tobacco by the FDA in 2004, Sessions was disgusted. He fought against regulation of tobacco as a drug using everything from free speech arguments to boilerplate pro-business language.

“One bad bill that couldn’t pass on its own attached to another bad bill that can’t be passed on its own,” Sessions said at the time, referring to the part of the proposed 2004 bill that also provided $12 billion to tobacco farmers who pledged to stop growing the product.

By 2009 he had finally come around and voted to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco as a drug—something that Philip Morris, an enormous tobacco company, was also supporting by 2009—because it was clear that the ridiculous fight against it had been lost.

The tobacco document archive (which is searchable online here) really is fascinating, and a search for “Jeff Sessions” or “Senator Sessions” gives hundreds of responsive documents about how the legislative and lobbying sausage gets made.

If we’ve learn anything about Sessions from the documents, it’s that he’s much less concerned about health than he is about maintaining the disastrous “war on drugs” of the bad old days. That is, as long as those drugs don’t include tobacco, the one that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.

Business groups, once tobacco friendly, switch sides in fight

Feb 28th, 2017

by Editor.

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The local chamber of commerce is usually a reliable ally in battles against regulation. But when it comes to smoking rules, many business groups have decided they would rather switch than fight.

Even in states where tobacco has played an important role in the economy – including North Carolina, Kentucky and Missouri -chambers have endorsed cigarette tax hikes, raising the smoking age and other efforts to curb tobacco habits.

The shift has accelerated since 2016, driven by a growing awareness that smoking drives up healthcare costs for employers, business groups said.

Smoking restrictions often are part of broader wellness initiatives, such as promoting exercise and nutrition, aimed at improving health – and business.

“Smoking isn’t just killing us, it’s bankrupting us,” said Ashli Watts, a spokeswoman with the Chamber of Commerce for Kentucky, where one in four adults uses tobacco, the lung cancer rate is the nation’s highest and related healthcare and lost productivity costs nearly $5 billion a year.

“Companies do look at the health of a workforce,” Watts said. An unhealthy workforce “is a deterrent.”

In Kansas City, Missouri, the chamber joined the local Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurer in 2015 in launching a smoking cessation effort.

They hoped to persuade five communities to raise the legal tobacco age to 21 by 2018.

Within a month, two of the largest cities in the area had signed on, and now more than 20 communities with 1.4 million people have raised the age.

Pam Whiting, a spokeswoman for the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce with members in Kansas and Missouri, said the group was “happily stunned” by the results.

“It is a real concern for our business members, for their employees and their bottom line,” she said.

In Indiana, where smoking costs an estimated $7 billion in healthcare and lost productivity, the state chamber is pushing for a $1-a-pack increase in the state cigarette tax, to raise the smoking age to 21 and for more spending on cessation.

“It’s not typical for a chamber to advocate for a tax increase,” said Kevin Brinegar, president and chief executive of the Indiana chamber. But, he added, the cost of smoking
“gives us a black eye.”

TOBACCO FIGHTS BACK

Cigarette makers are spending tens of millions to fight the efforts, according to a Reuters review of campaign spending data and interviews, healthcare groups and the
companies.

Brittany Adams, a spokeswoman for Camel cigarette maker Reynolds American Inc, said the local chambers’ efforts go against their core mission and could hurt businesses outside the tobacco industry.

“Chambers of commerce are supposed to protect the interests of businesses in their communities, and supporting these kinds of bills may negatively impact local wholesalers and retailers,” Adams said.

Last fall, the industry spent almost $100 million to fight cigarette tax ballot measures in several states. More than $70 million of that was spent in California, where voters approved Proposition 56, raising state taxes by $2 to $2.87 per pack.

Business groups in San Francisco and Los Angeles supported the measure. Tax increases failed in Colorado and North Dakota.

Although adult smoking rates in California are the second lowest in the country, its large population makes it the single biggest U.S. market with 8.5 percent of cigarette sales.

Marlboro cigarette maker Altria estimated tax hikes enacted in Pennsylvania and California would hurt industry sales volumes by about 1 percent this year.

Wall Street analysts say the bigger risk is that more states follow suit.

At least 215 states and municipalities – including Hawaii and California, as well as New York City, Chicago and Boston – have raised the age to 21, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

A spokesman said Altria wants to see the battle return to Congress, where it believes it has gotten a better hearing. With the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, Congress set a national minimum smoking age of 18.

In 2015, an Institute of Medicine study concluded that raising the national minimum to 21 would prevent about 223,000 premature deaths among people born between 2000 and 2019.

A group of Democratic senators introduced a bill to raise the age nationally to 21, but it never got a vote.

“This is a complex issue, and Congress has established a thoughtful process to better understand it,” Altria spokesman David Sutton said.

Tobacco products already “are very heavily taxed,” Sutton said. He also said sales taxes were a particular burden on the poor and created incentives “for criminals to engage in contrabrand.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has not taken a position on the bill in Congress to raise the smoking age, and, as a rule, it leaves local issues to local chambers, said chamber representative Blair Latoff Holmes.

In Kentucky, a recent survey found more than 90 percent of the state’s chamber members support bans on smoking in the workplace. But the chamber decided against pushing for a statewide ban because it believes the politics are stacked against it.

The industry has spent more than $3.7 million the last five years lobbying Kentucky state legislators, records show. And, in November, Republicans won control of the legislature with the support of many constituents who consider smoking a personal prerogative.

For now, the Kentucky chamber is putting its clout behind a doctor-sponsered bill that would ban tobacco products from schools. Currently, less than 40 percent of Kentucky school districts ban tobacco.

“Generation after generation of people in Kentucky have smoked,” said Watts, the chamber spokeswoman. “There are people who don’t know anyone who has ever quit.”

For graphic on rising taxes on tobacco products, click: bit.ly/2m0MMpr

(Reporting By Jilian Mincer; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Lisa Girion)

Business groups, once tobaccofriendly, switch sides in fight