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July 17th, 2017:

ANTI-TOBACCO : THE PR DAUTZENBERG DENOUNCES THE ACTIONS OF BAT

After the revelations from Reuters about the methods of lobbying from Philip Morris International, it is the turn of British American Tobacco (BAT) to suffer the blowback of its business strategy. And it was Professor Bertrand Dautzenberg, pulmonologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in paris and secretary general of the Alliance against tobacco, which denounces the strategy of BAT.

https://sivertimes.com/anti-tobacco-the-pr-dautzenberg-denounces-the-actions-of-bat/54893

In a message posted on Twitter and an article in the Figaro, he denounces the attempt to approach the world leader in tobacco, which has sent a registered letter inviting him to discuss ” new product to reduced harm “, to ” change the software regarding the fight against smoking “.

Disagreement on the substance…

Ploom Japan Tobacco, iQos, Philip Morris, Glo BAT : these new devices are the link between the cigarette and the electronic cigarette. They do not use combustion but still contain tobacco. An electrical resistance heater at a low temperature, which would, inter alia, to delete the inhalation of tar and carbon monoxide, according to the manufacturers.

A statement that the Pr Dautzenberg contests. “The industry we swear that this heated tobacco is less toxic than cigarette smoking, but this is not proven at all, and there must be a little bit of burning still, since they found traces of carbon monoxide in the fumes, he said in Le Figaro. Today, tobacco kills one of its faithful consumers. Even if the tobacco said to be less of a risk” not to kill that one in three or one in ten, or even one in a hundred, it’s still unacceptable. “

The doctor also points out that this type of reflection had been carried out on cigarettes light. A reflection at the time supported by a part of the medical community, before it can be recognized that the risk was ultimately the same. Cigarettes light favored only other cancers of the respiratory tract.

PRISON RIGHTS: SCOTLAND IS ABOUT TO BAN INMATES FROM SMOKING

Scotland is set to ban smoking in its prisons as part of a government drive to slash tobacco use—but an expert has warned it could mean a boom in smuggling, and a greater risk of violence.

http://www.newsweek.com/smoking-scotland-prison-ban-637586

Staff, visitors and contractors are already not allowed to smoke anywhere on Scottish Prison Service (SPS) property. But a 2015 survey found that 72 percent of prisoners smoked, more than three times the proportion of the general population who did so, the BBC reported.

The Scottish government aims at creating a “tobacco-free generation” by 2034. Smoking in enclosed public spaces has been barred since 2006, but prisons have remained an exception.

It aims to end smoking in its prisons by the end of 2018, citing the need to tackle the dangers of secondhand smoke.

Phil Fairlie, chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association Scotland, welcomes the news. “Our members have claimed and argued all along, since the smoking ban was introduced, that they are constantly exposed to very high levels of smoking inside prisons,” he told the BBC.

But stopping smoking in prisons is not without risks and problems.

Alex Cavendish, a former prisoner turned prison expert, tells Newsweek that the demand for contraband tobacco in smoke-free prisoners could lead to a vast black market.

In one prison in Dartmoor, England, which has tested a smoke-free environment, a pack of rolling tobacco could cost as much as £100, Cavendish said. The “huge price differential” between such rates inside the jail compared to shops outside where tobacco was relatively cheap and legal leads to “a temptation to corruption.” A prison officer from the Dartmoor jail was convicted of smuggling tobacco in May this year.

Such markets create new administrative pressures on staff as they become embroiled in a “cat-and-mouse game of trying to stop people doing what is lawful to do on the outside,” Cavendish said.

Black markets also can breed violence when prisoners are punished for not keeping up with debts. Cavendish added: “Prison is a very unforgiving place when it comes to nonpayment of debt.”

Colin McConnell, chief executive of the SPS, said: “This will be a significant challenge. The percentage of people who smoke in prisons is much higher than the community at large,” STV reported.

“I fully understand how difficult it will be for many in our care to give up smoking—that is why we are committed to working alongside our partners in the NHS to provide every support possible to assist them.”

Scottish Health Secretary Shona Robison said, “Smoking remains the biggest single cause of preventable ill-health and premature death in Scotland.

“We have taken wide-ranging action to address this, from our campaigns to take smoking right outside, to measures on tobacco advertising and packaging.

“I endorse this important step by SPS, which will contribute towards our ambition of creating a tobacco-free generation by 2034.”

Why Smoking in Films Harms Children

We want to believe we’re raising our kids to think for themselves, and not to do dumb or unhealthy things just because the cool kids are doing them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/well/family/why-smoking-in-films-harms-children.html

But research shows that when it comes to smoking, children are heavily influenced by some of the folks they consider the coolest of the cool: actors in movies.

“There’s a dose-response relationship: The more smoking kids see onscreen, the more likely they are to smoke,” said Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor and director of the University of California, San Francisco, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. He is one of the authors of a new study that found that popular movies are showing more tobacco use onscreen.

“The evidence shows it’s the largest single stimulus,” for smoking, he said; “it overpowers good parental role modeling, it’s more powerful than peer influence or even cigarette advertising.”

He said that epidemiological studies have shown that if you control for all the other risk factors of smoking (whether parents smoke, attitudes toward risk taking, socioeconomic status, and so on), younger adolescents who are more heavily exposed to smoking on film are two to three times as likely to start smoking, compared with the kids who are more lightly exposed.

Those whose parents smoke are more likely to smoke, he said, but exposure to smoking in movies can overcome the benefit of having nonsmoking parents. In one study, the children of nonsmoking parents with heavy exposure to movie smoking were as likely to smoke as the children of smoking parents with heavy movie exposure.

To Dr. Glantz, and the other people who study this topic, that makes smoking in movies an “environmental toxin,” a factor endangering children.

“There’s no excuse for continuing to have smoking in movies that are rated to be sold to kids, and so the policy objective we have is there should be no smoking in movies that are rated for kids,” said Dr. Glantz, who maintains a website called Smoke Free Movies. “The studios have it in their power to fix this with a phone call.” The rating system needs to start treating smoking like a proscribed obscenity, he said; if it’s in the movie, the movie gets an R rating.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s fact sheet on smoking in the movies estimates that taking smoking out of films rated for children would save 18 percent of the 5.6 million young people alive today who will otherwise die of tobacco-related diseases – a million lives. “There’s nothing you could do that would be so cheap and save so many lives,” Dr. Glantz said.

This has been studied in 17 different countries, he said, and though policies vary widely and cultures are very different, the results are remarkably similar. “You consistently see this two to three times risk in kids who are exposed to a lot of onscreen smoking, all over the world.”

Five years ago, the people who worry about the impact on the young of seeing smoking in the movies thought things were looking good. In movies rated for a young audience (that is, G or PG or PG-13), there had been a steady drop in the number of “onscreen tobacco incidents.” Not only that, but in 2012, convinced by a heavy array of scientific evidence, the Surgeon General issued a report saying explicitly that seeing people smoke in movies caused kids to start smoking: “longitudinal studies have found that adolescents whose favorite movie stars smoke on screen or who are exposed to a large number of movies portraying smokers are at a high risk of smoking initiation.”

But after 2010, despite the accumulating evidence, the rate of cinematic smoking started to rise in those youth-rated movies, according to the new study, published this month in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which looked at incidents of tobacco use in top-grossing movies from 2010 to 2016.

As far as movies rated G, PG, and PG-13, “When we compared 2010 to 2016, there was a slight decrease in the number of movies, but an increase in the number of incidents,” said Michael Tynan, a public health analyst in the office on smoking and health at the C.D.C., and the lead author of the new study. Dr. Glantz is also an author, and he and two of the four other authors have received grants from the Truth Initiative, an antismoking group.

The number of times that an actor used a tobacco product in a top-grossing movie “increased 72 percent among all movies and 43 percent among PG-13 movies,” Mr. Tynan said. In other words, he said, by 2016 there were “more tobacco incidents concentrated in fewer movies.”

One out of every four movies rated for youth today continues to feature tobacco use, Mr. Tynan said, “and we know this is harmful to youth and causes youth to start using tobacco.”

And the policies that the studios have in place, which seemed to be working as of 2012, are clearly not sufficient, Mr. Tynan said. “The frequency of tobacco use in PG-13 movies is a public health concern.” So what should be done? “One change is to rate movies with tobacco use with an R rating,” he suggested. Other steps that might help would be to have studios certify that there was no paid product placement, and to end the use of any actual tobacco brands on the screen. All of these strategies are supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has issued a statement calling the new study “alarming.”

In a study done back in the ’90s, researchers pointed to some of the differences between who smokes on screen and who smokes in the real world. In the real world, smokers are likely to be “poor people, people with mental illness,” Dr. Glantz said. “If you look at the power players, the rich people, people who are in control, they’re not smoking.” But in movies, it tends to be more desirable or powerful characters, even if they’re the bad guys, and in that way, movie images may reinforce images in cigarette advertising.

And movie images are powerful. In one experiment, young people who were smokers were shown montages of clips from recent movies; the participants were randomized so that some saw clips with smoking in them and some did not. Then they were given a 10-minute break, and the people who saw the smoking images were significantly more likely to smoke during the break than the smokers who had not seen the images.

“Keeping smoking onscreen is like putting arsenic in the popcorn,” Dr. Glantz said. The new study “shows they’ve taken half of the arsenic out,” he said. “Now they need to take the rest out.”