Clear The Air News Tobacco Blog Rotating Header Image

April 21st, 2016:

Forum: Raising tobacco sales age will save future generations

Apr 21st, 2016
by Editor.
No comments yet

http://www.nhregister.com/opinion/20160421/forum-raising-tobacco-sales-age-will-save-future-generations

In Connecticut, about 4,900 adults die each year because of tobacco. The fact is that tobacco kills more people than alcohol, AIDS, car crashes, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined. (he omitted malaria) We see the effects of tobacco in heart disease, lung disease, and many other chronic conditions we treat. We see the devastation wrought, and despite the success of programs we’ve put in place to detect and treat lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases sooner, we’re not addressing the root problem: preventing people from smoking in the first place.

Now Connecticut, like many states, is considering increasing the tobacco purchase age to 21, and for good reason. Ninety-nine percent of all adult smokers report that they started smoking before age 25. Tobacco use is a pediatric epidemic because most users start in high school. Eighty percent of youth smokers will become adult smokers, and one-half of adult smokers will die prematurely from tobacco-related diseases. One half!

Specific to Connecticut, this means 56,000 kids who are now under the age of 18 will ultimately die prematurely from smoking. Currently, 13 percent of Connecticut high school students smoke, and 2,100 kids under the age of 18 become new daily smokers in Connecticut each year.

The developing brain is particularly vulnerable to nicotine exposure. Smoking during adolescence increases the risk of long-term addiction to nicotine and other drugs, and makes quitting more difficult. Most teens who smoke and use tobacco report getting cigarettes and other products from their friends; 90 percent of those who provide cigarettes to younger teens are under the age of 21. Increasing the sales age will limit high school and middle school youths’ access to addictive products from older teens.

Needham, Massachusetts, became the first town in the country to raise its tobacco sales age to 21, in 2005. A recent study of the town’s smoking rate among high school students showed a 47 percent reduction as well as a reported decline in area retail tobacco purchases. To date, Hawaii and at least 125 localities in nine additional states have followed Needham’s lead. As a state that prides itself in our health status and focus on prevention, Connecticut should be the next state to take the lead in this fight, and for more than public health reasons alone.

Not only is tobacco killing us and our kids, but it is also associated with some staggering monetary impacts. More than $2 billion in annual health care costs in Connecticut are directly caused by smoking. Whether or not you smoke, you should know that you are literally paying for those who do. Per household, Connecticut residents incur a $916 federal and state tax burden from smoking-caused government expenditures.

During Connecticut’s current legislative session, there was a bill proposing this age increase. The tobacco industry submitted testimony against the bill and reminded legislators that a similar New Jersey bill, if passed, would reduce cigarette and tobacco excise tax and sales tax revenue by $19 million annually. This, in part, led some to believe that passing such a law in Connecticut would result in a bigger state budget deficit which, in the current budget climate, was more than enough to prevent the bill from seeing the light of day. It is unfortunate that legislators failed to recognize that should lower tobacco tax revenue materialize, it would be the result of fewer Connecticut residents smoking and therefore reduce the state’s burden of smoking related healthcare costs and create a healthier future for our children.

This conversation needs to continue and be taken seriously by our elected lawmakers who faithfully serve the best interests of their constituents. Make no mistake, beyond possibly losing a valued customer, the tobacco industry does not care about the lives lost from smoking or the quality of life and well being of the people in our state. They do not care about those 56,000 kids in Connecticut now under the age of 18 who will eventually die prematurely as a result of the use of their product. Raising the tobacco purchase age to 21 makes good sense and is the right thing to do — now, before more tax dollars are wasted and more lives are lost.

Patrick Charmel is president and CEO of Griffin Hospital and a member of the board of directors of the American Heart Association of Connecticut and Western Massachusetts.

Cigarette sales get a boost from TV commercials for e-cigs, says study

Apr 21st, 2016
by Editor.
No comments yet

http://www.campaignlive.com/article/cigarette-sales-boost-tv-commercials-e-cigs-says-study/1392249

It’s been nearly 50 years since Congress banned cigarette commercials from the airwaves. But a new study suggests the rapid proliferation of e-cigarette commercials may be lifting the sales of cigarettes, too, offering an unexpected path back to TV for the tobacco industry.

According to the study, Advertising, Habit Formation and U.S. Tobacco Product Demand, funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, TV advertisements for e-cigarettes create a “spillover effect” that also increases demand for cigarettes. “If you increase e-cigarette advertisement, then cigarette demand is going to increase slightly,” said Yuqing Zheng, an agricultural economist the University of Kentucky and lead author of the study.

Researchers compared advertising data from Kantar Media with point-of-sale data at outlets that sold five different kinds of tobacco or nicotine products between 2009 and 2013. What they found was that for every increase in e-cigarette advertising on television, there was an accompanying lift — however small — of cigarette sales.

That rise in cigarette sales is small but statistically significant: one-one hundredth of 1% whenever e-cigarette advertising doubles. But e-cigarette advertising increased 17-fold between 2011 and 2014, so it could be contributing to tens of millions of dollars in cigarette sales.

Though the FDA has petitioned for regulatory control of the e-cigarette market, there are currently no restrictions on e-cigarette advertising, the bulk of which take the form of TV commercials. The findings of the study, which was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, could renew calls for e-such oversight, said the authors. “Such results may lend support to those who advocate that more regulations on e-cigarette marketing are needed,” they wrote.

The study found that the spillover effect was restricted to TV. E-cigarette magazine ads did not have the same positive effect on cigarette sales. “We consistently find that TV advertising is the most effective way to enhance demand,” said Zheng.

Why e-cigarette ads increase cigarette demand is unclear, though Zheng speculated there could be an “umbrella” effect at work. “A lot of the cigarette and e-cigarette brands belong to the same parent company, so when you do advertise for e-cigarettes, it’s probably going to enhance the image of the parent company which owns the cigarette brand, so that might stimulate some cigarette smoking as well,” he said. Intentionally or not, cigarette manufacturers may have found a way to boost sales by advertising a different product in their inventories.

These could be problematic numbers for e-cigarette manufacturers, who have been resisting calls for the regulation of either their products or their advertising. If further research supports the study’s finding that e-cigarette advertising increases cigarette sales, then continuing to allow unregulated e-cigarette advertising “might undermine the efforts to reduce cigarette smoking,” the study said. “If a new policy were to prohibit e-cigarette television ads, similar to what is imposed for cigarettes, the model predicts a small drop in consumer demand for e-cigarettes, and a minor decrease in cigarette demand.”

Whether the prospect of that minor decrease helps anti-smoking advocates win regulatory controls for e-cigarettes and their ads remains to be seen.

Judge, Big Three tobacco manufacturers reach deal on corrective statements – Winston-Salem Journal: Local Business

Apr 21st, 2016
by Editor.
No comments yet

http://www.journalnow.com/business/business_news/local/judge-big-three-tobacco-manufacturers-reach-deal-on-corrective-statements/article_82ff0b0d-c941-5f6a-9911-b03dad623827.html?mode=print

A federal judge and the Big Three tobacco manufacturers have reached an agreement on five “here is the truth” corrective statements for cigarette marketing.

Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in November 2012 that cigarette marketing should carry the overarching preamble: “A federal court has ruled that the defendant tobacco companies deliberately deceived the American public about the health effects of smoking, and has ordered those companies to make this statement.”

In May 2015, a U.S. Appeals Court ruling found that Kessler’s preamble exceeded, in part, the District Court’s authority, saying the preamble “reveals nothing about cigarettes. Instead, they disclose defendants’ prior deceptive conduct.”

“After all … the statute reads ‘prevent and restrain,’ not ‘prevent, restrain and discourage.’”

The consent order, approved Tuesday, strips that preamble and replaces it with “a federal court has ordered Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard and Philip Morris USA to make this statement about the addictiveness of smoking and nicotine.” The ruling affects ITG Brands LLC, the successor to Lorillard Inc.

The compromise did not include a “trigger date” for when the ads would start. Altria Group Inc. spokesman Brian May said Friday that the trigger date is the date on which all appeals are exhausted.

The manufacturers filed their latest appeal with the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia on April 8.

“We continue to object to the content of the corrective communications, including the language in the preamble, and intend to pursue the appeal, May said.

Kessler said the order “is the complete agreement of the parties as to corrective statements and supersedes any prior negotiations, agreements or understandings of the parties.”

Kessler ordered the corrective statements appear on company websites, cigarette packages, prime-time network television ads and in newspaper ads in the front section of Sunday editions. The ad will not appear in the Winston-Salem Journal, but it will in The Charlotte Observer. Each newspaper ad will feature one of the five corrective statements. The 260 TV spots will run over a 52-week period

The manufacturers filed a joint appeal of Kessler’s ruling in January 2013. They have tried to persuade Kessler to reject the statements, calling them “forced public confessions” in legal filings.

The compromise does not include Reynolds’ complaint that it should not have to run additional ads related to its 2004 purchase of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp.

The manufacturers have said the 2009 Tobacco Control Act eliminated any reasonable likelihood the companies would commit future violations, thus making the need for corrective statements moot.

Responding to the May 2015 appellate ruling, Kessler said the federal government has agreed to remove “deliberately deceived the American public” from the preamble. But Kessler said the phrase “Here is the truth” remains appropriate to begin each corrective statement.

The U.S. government filed a lawsuit in 1999 against the nation’s largest tobacco manufacturers.

The initial ban on labels — such as “low tar,” “light” and “mild” — was part of Kessler’s landmark 2006 ruling that found the manufacturers guilty of racketeering and fraud for deceiving the public about the dangers of smoking, in particular whether certain products were marketed with an expressed or implied lower-risk health message or descriptor.

Kessler ruled that cigarettes marketed as low tar, light and mild have been found to be no safer than others.

In May 2009, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel unanimously upheld requirements that manufacturers change the way they market cigarettes. The Food and Drug Administration banned the use of the labels in June 2010.

Corrective statements

The order from federal Judge Gladys Kessler specifies “truth” statements for five categories:

* Adverse health effects of smoking, such as “more people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes and alcohol combined; ”
* Addictiveness of smoking and nicotine;
* Lack of significant health benefit from smoking low-tar, light, ultra-light, mild and natural cigarettes;
* Manipulation of cigarette design and composition to ensure optimum nicotine delivery, such as “when you smoke, the nicotine actually changes the brain – that’s why quitting is so hard; ” and,
* Adverse health effects of exposure to secondhand smoke, such as “secondhand smoke kills over 3,000 Americans each year.”

Tobacco company’s tactics scrutinised

Apr 21st, 2016
by Editor.
No comments yet

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.

Govt should ensure smoking ban is being properly implemented

Apr 21st, 2016
by Editor.
No comments yet

http://www.chinadailyasia.com/opinion/2016-04/21/content_15420749.html

Over recent years, great strides have been made in the fight to limit smoking in public places in Hong Kong. This fight is being conducted to reduce the opportunities for smokers to light up, and thereby perhaps save their lives from constantly indulging their deadly addiction. It is also conducted to protect those people located nearby, who may not smoke, from the harmful — indeed from the life-threatening — effects of cigarette smoke reaching them from others.

It is heartening to note from recent reports that the incidence of smoking is generally being reduced — meaning that there are apparently somewhat fewer smokers in Hong Kong than there were a decade or more ago. That reduction, of course, must include the sad statistic of the many regular smokers who have since died from serious illnesses caused by their regular tobacco intake.

There is little to feel complacent about however, as many Hong Kong people continue to damage their own health and that of others near them, by lighting up. An especially lamentable sight is that of youngsters, even schoolchildren, taking up the deadly addiction, which will more than likely kill them before they die from national causes.

The advent of e-cigarettes has provided an alternative to smoking the more dangerous real tobacco products. The jury is still out, however, on whether or not e-cigarettes themselves present a danger to health. They are a comparatively new invention, so it is too early to be able to judge what a lifetime’s intake of e-cigarette smoke might or might not do to harm a person’s lungs and health. Let’s remember that it took many years of research before a confirmed link was established between smoking tobacco in cigarettes and severe damage to a smoker’s health. These days, everyone knows that smoking can kill you; yet many people continue to smoke and others take up the habit — which soon leads to a lifetime’s nicotine addiction.

It is now against the law for people to smoke inside a bar, restaurant or coffee shop in Hong Kong. However, you may commonly see customers sitting near the open frontage of such places, puffing away. Some are located actually within the establishment as they do so, meaning they are seated inside the place. The noxious smoke they emit thus blows in and poisons those customers seated within, as well as polluting the air just outside the place.

Others are technically outside, but positioned so near the place as to make little difference. They are facilitated in doing so by the establishment providing tables and ash trays just outside their open frontages. The prohibition needs to be extended, to outlaw smoking within five meters of a place’s entrance or frontage. Large and clear NO SMOKING signs should be required to be placed near the entrances of all bars and restaurants — preferably showing graphic pictures of diseased lungs and the other horrors that smoking causes.

Some others brazenly indulge their smoking habit well inside the place and, to their shame, some bars and other establishments provide ashtrays on every internal table, to facilitate (and really to encourage) breaking the law by having their customers smoke inside the place. The law needs to be strengthened by prescribing hefty fines for both the smoker and the establishment’s owner for such infringements. Presently, too few prosecutions are initiated against smokers and none against owners.

It is said that the price of freedom is constant vigilance. Similarly, the eradication of smoking inside Hong Kong’s bars and restaurants will happen only if firmer steps are taken to enforce the laws prohibiting it. That means that there need to be more governmental staff assigned as Tobacco Control Office inspectors; many more spot-checks need to be conducted on bars and restaurants; no verbal warnings should be given. Instead each infringement should be prosecuted, according to the law. Only a zero-tolerance approach, prosecuting every offender who so breaks the law and landing him with a hefty fine — and that includes the place’s owner — would have the desired deterrent effect.

For those frequent offenders among bar and restaurant owners, consideration should be made to rescinding their license to operate. That danger to their business would turn the tide, obliging them to do everything possible to stop people smoking on their premises, rather than — as now — some of them turning a blind eye to, or even encouraging, smoking on their premises.

Only through uncompromising law enforcement can smoking inside (or too near) a bar or restaurant really be brought to an end.

The writer is a seasoned Hong Kong commentator, who has lost close family members to the deadly effects of cigarette smoking.

Cigarette sales get a boost from TV commercials for e-cigs, says study

Apr 21st, 2016
by Editor.
No comments yet

Discovery of “spillover effect” may provide new ammunition for calls for regulatory oversight

http://www.campaignlive.com/article/cigarette-sales-boost-tv-commercials-e-cigs-says-study/1392249

It’s been nearly 50 years since Congress banned cigarette commercials from the airwaves. But a new study suggests the rapid proliferation of e-cigarette commercials may be lifting the sales of cigarettes, too, offering an unexpected path back to TV for the tobacco industry.

According to the study, Advertising, Habit Formation and U.S. Tobacco Product Demand, funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, TV advertisements for e-cigarettes create a “spillover effect” that also increases demand for cigarettes. “If you increase e-cigarette advertisement, then cigarette demand is going to increase slightly,” said Yuqing Zheng, an agricultural economist the University of Kentucky and lead author of the study.

Researchers compared advertising data from Kantar Media with point-of-sale data at outlets that sold five different kinds of tobacco or nicotine products between 2009 and 2013. What they found was that for every increase in e-cigarette advertising on television, there was an accompanying lift — however small — of cigarette sales.

That rise in cigarette sales is small but statistically significant: one-one hundredth of 1% whenever e-cigarette advertising doubles. But e-cigarette advertising increased 17-fold between 2011 and 2014, so it could be contributing to tens of millions of dollars in cigarette sales.

Though the FDA has petitioned for regulatory control of the e-cigarette market, there are currently no restrictions on e-cigarette advertising, the bulk of which take the form of TV commercials. The findings of the study, which was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, could renew calls for e-such oversight, said the authors. “Such results may lend support to those who advocate that more regulations on e-cigarette marketing are needed,” they wrote.

The study found that the spillover effect was restricted to TV. E-cigarette magazine ads did not have the same positive effect on cigarette sales. “We consistently find that TV advertising is the most effective way to enhance demand,” said Zheng.

Why e-cigarette ads increase cigarette demand is unclear, though Zheng speculated there could be an “umbrella” effect at work. “A lot of the cigarette and e-cigarette brands belong to the same parent company, so when you do advertise for e-cigarettes, it’s probably going to enhance the image of the parent company which owns the cigarette brand, so that might stimulate some cigarette smoking as well,” he said. Intentionally or not, cigarette manufacturers may have found a way to boost sales by advertising a different product in their inventories.

These could be problematic numbers for e-cigarette manufacturers, who have been resisting calls for the regulation of either their products or their advertising. If further research supports the study’s finding that e-cigarette advertising increases cigarette sales, then continuing to allow unregulated e-cigarette advertising “might undermine the efforts to reduce cigarette smoking,” the study said. “If a new policy were to prohibit e-cigarette television ads, similar to what is imposed for cigarettes, the model predicts a small drop in consumer demand for e-cigarettes, and a minor decrease in cigarette demand.”

Whether the prospect of that minor decrease helps anti-smoking advocates win regulatory controls for e-cigarettes and their ads remains to be seen.

Big Tobacco Shaped Smoking Laws, Policies

Apr 21st, 2016
by Editor.
No comments yet

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.