City looks at e-cigarettes

By: Eric Killelea, Williston Herald
The Upper Missouri District Health Unit wants the Williston City Commission to amend its codes to include restrictions on the purchase of electronic cigarettes to anyone under the age of 18 years old.
On Tuesday, Chelsea Bryant, tobacco prevention specialist, requested support from the commission.
North Dakota currently lacks a law or ordinance to restrict purchase of e-cigarettes, Bryant said. Fargo is the only city to have changed its codes in similar efforts to that of Upper Missouri District, having done so Jan. 7.
To read more, visit http://www.willistonherald.com/news/city-looks-at-e-cigarettes/article_35168482-7ec7-11e3-b508-0019bb2963f4.html

U.S. senators slam 'glamorization' of e-cigarettes at Golden Globes

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group of U.S. senators is taking the Golden Globes to task for showing celebrities puffing on electronic cigarettes at this year’s awards show, complaining such depictions glamorize smoking.
“The Golden Globes celebrates entertainers who are an influence on young fans,” the four Democratic senators wrote on Tuesday. “We ask the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC Universal to take actions to ensure that future broadcasts of the Golden Globes do not intentionally feature images of e-cigarettes.”
“Such action would help to avoid the glamorization of smoking and protect the health of young fans,” said the letter signed by Dick Durbin of Illinois, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Edward Markey of Massachusetts.”
The Golden Globes ceremony that aired on Comcast Corp-owned NBC on Sunday night showed actor Leonardo DiCaprio smoking an e-cigarette during the broadcast, as well as nominee Julia Louis-Dreyfus puffing on one as part of an opening skit.
The Golden Globes, which honor achievement in film and television, are handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The show drew its best television audience in a decade.
E-cigarettes are battery-powered metal tubes that turn nicotine-laced liquid into vapor. Some analysts predict that the fast-growing market for the product could outpace that of conventional cigarettes within a decade.
Regulators are agonizing over whether to restrict the product as a “gateway” to nicotine addiction and tobacco smoking, or to embrace them as treatments for would-be quitters.
NBC Universal and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
(Writing by Peter Cooney; Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sns-rt-us-goldenglobes-ecigarettes-20140114,0,981972.story

Cigarette ads from the 20th century

Fifty years ago, on January 11, 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a landmark report on the negative health risks caused by smoking tobacco.
To view cigarette ads from the 20th century, click on the link below:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/10/health/gallery/historic-cigarette-ads/

Tobacco companies will say they lied, via advertising

Liz Szabo, USA TODAY

The nation’s tobacco companies and the Justice Department have reached an agreement on publishing corrective statements that say the companies lied about the dangers of smoking.

Tobacco companies are a step closer today to putting out “corrective statements” about their history of defrauding the American public by hiding the dangers of smoking, according to an agreement reached Friday with the Department of Justice.
The agreement was reached the day before the 50th anniversary of the Surgeon General warning on tobacco and lung cancer, released Jan. 11, 1964.
The long-awaited advertising campaign was ordered in 2006 by U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler, who found tobacco companies guilty of violating civil racketeering laws and lying to the public about the dangers of smoking and their marketing to children. Kessler must approve the agreement.
That verdict was the culmination of a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice in 1999, when it sued tobacco companies under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
Kessler made five key “findings of fact,” detailing how tobacco makers defrauded the public, including lying about the health damage caused by smoking; the addictive nature of nicotine; their marketing and promotion of “low tar” and “light” cigarettes as healthier when there are no clear health benefits; designing tobacco products to be as addictive as possible; and engaging in a massive effort to hide the dangers of secondhand smoke. The corrective statements must address each of these five areas.
Kessler found that the RICO statute did not allow for monetary damages. But she did order tobacco companies to make “corrective statements” about their history of fraud.
According to the agreement, the campaign will include online and full-page print ads in the Sunday editions of the top 35 newspapers in the country, including USA TODAY, as well as prime-time TV spots on the three major networks for one year. The corrective statements also must be attached to packages of cigarettes in what marketers call an “outsert.”
Spokesmen for the leading tobacco companies — Philip Morris USA and RJ Reynolds Tobacco — declined to comment.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has rejected two industry appeals. Tobacco companies are still suing over Kessler’s order to include the corrective statements in “point of sale” displays at retail stores.
In a statement, leading anti-smoking groups said, “Tobacco companies have filed time-consuming appeals at every stage . . . We urge them to end their delay tactics and finally tell the truth.” The statement was signed by the Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights and the National African-American Tobacco Prevention Network. The groups joined the case as intervenors in 2005.
The corrective statements “are necessary reminders that tobacco’s devastating toll over the past 50-plus years is no accident,” the group statement says. “It stems directly from the tobacco industry’s deceptive and even illegal practices.”
In her 2006 verdict, Kessler described the tobacco industry as one that “survives, and profits, from selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to a staggering number of deaths per year, an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national health care system. . . (Tobacco companies) have consistently, repeatedly and with enormous skill and sophistication, denied these facts to the public.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/10/tobacco-corrective-statements/4409501/

The 50-year war on smoking

By The Times editorial board, Los Angeles Times
The 1964 U.S. Surgeon General’s report on smoking — the first official acknowledgment by the federal government that smoking kills — was an extraordinarily progressive document for its time. It swiftly led to a federal law that restricted tobacco advertising and required the now-familiar warning label on each pack of cigarettes.
Yet there was nothing truly surprising about the conclusion of the report. Throughout the 1950s, scientists had been discovering various ways in which smoking took a toll on people’s health. Britain issued its own report, with the same findings, two years before ours. Intense lobbying by the tobacco industry slowed the U.S. attack on smoking. And even when then-Surgeon General Luther Terry convened a panel before the report was issued to make sure its findings were unimpeachable, he felt compelled to allow tobacco companies to rule out any members of whom they disapproved.
Saturday marks the report’s 50th anniversary. The intervening decades have seen remarkable progress against smoking in the United States, despite the stubborn efforts of the tobacco industry, which lobbied, obfuscated and sometimes lied outright to the public about the dangers of its products. During those years, though, independent research tied smoking and secondhand smoke to an ever-wider range of ailments. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking causes cancer of the lungs, larynx, bladder, bone marrow, blood, esophagus, kidneys and several other organs. It increases the risk of stroke, heart disease and cataracts. It can damage fetuses, weaken bones and harm teeth and gums. The list goes on.
The growing body of evidence bolstered important policies to combat tobacco use and the injury to nonsmokers barraged by the damaging effects of secondhand smoke. It can be hard for young Californians today to fathom that smoking was once practically ubiquitous throughout government buildings, restaurants and workplaces. In the 1970s, during hearings on legislation to curb smoking in public buildings, some legislators puffed away even as speakers described the asthma attacks they sometimes suffered from secondhand smoke. New restrictions helped smokers as well; if they could do without a cigarette for hours at a time at their jobs, many discovered, they could do without them entirely.
Limits on cigarette advertisements, rules that prevented sales to minors and new taxes on cigarettes helped bring smoking rates down.
In 1964, 42% of Americans smoked. Half the people on the panel that produced the surgeon general’s report smoked. Today, the U.S. smoking rate is 18%. Teen smoking rates fell to below 10% after the federal tax on cigarettes was increased by 62 cents a pack in 2009.
As smoking rates have declined, lung cancer rates have fallen as well. According to a report this week from the CDC, the rate among men ages 35 to 41 dropped by 6.5% per year from 2005 to 2009. One study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. estimated that 8 million premature deaths from all smoking-related causes have been prevented since the surgeon general’s report was issued in 1964.
Despite the good news, smoking is still the No. 1 cause of preventable death in this country. Smoking-related disease costs $183 billion a year in medical expenses and lost productivity.
We know what works against this: research, education, limits on secondhand smoke and higher cigarette taxes. But the tactics of tobacco companies continue to hold the nation back.
Knowing how heedless of our well-being they have been all along, we should ignore their ads and their lobbyists and take the following steps:
• Raise tobacco taxes, preferably at the federal level to avoid black-market sales across state lines. According to a 2012 report by the U.S. Surgeon General, every 10% increase in the cost of smoking leads to a 4% drop in smoking rates.
President Obama has proposed increasing the federal excise tax by 94 cents a pack, nearly doubling it from the current $1.01, and using the resulting revenue stream — an estimated $78 billion over the next decade — to fund pre-kindergarten education. The tax is a good idea, but we have concerns about using the money for preschool. If smokers are paying the tax, the revenue ideally should go toward education, research, affordable cessation programs, enforcement of existing laws and healthcare costs related to tobacco use.
• Place increased emphasis on reducing teen smoking. If there’s one thing all Americans, including staunch defenders of the right to smoke, should agree on, it’s that minors should be protected from smoking. According to the American Lung Assn., more than two-thirds of adult smokers developed the habit as teenagers. Studies have shown that many retailers don’t check identification and sell even when the ID shows the buyer to be underage.
In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should immediately impose a ban on sales and marketing of e-cigarettes to minors, including Internet sales. E-cigarettes, which allow users to inhale nicotine-laced vapor rather than tobacco smoke, may turn out to be significantly more healthful than regular cigarettes, but studies are still underway about their long-term effects, and there’s no question that they encourage nicotine addiction. They have been heavily marketed to minors, who are allowed to buy them without restriction in most states. Further research is necessary as the e-cigarette market expands dramatically.
• Push for indoor-smoking restrictions in all states. It may surprise Californians, who now face smoking bans in parks, open eating areas and beaches, to learn that some states lack smoking bans even in workplaces, bars and restaurants. Kentucky, for example, restricts smoking only in government and university buildings.
Smoking is and should remain a personal choice among adults, but the nonsmokers around them have the right not to be sickened by the choices of others.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-smoking-50th-anniversary-of-surgeon-general–20140110,0,3302586.story#ixzz2q27cKUYc

Tobacco Companies Agree on Ads Admitting Smoking Lies

By Andrew Zajac, Bloomberg News
Altria Group Inc. (MO), Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) and other tobacco companies agreed with the U.S. on how they will publicize admissions that they deceived the American public on the dangers of smoking.
The companies and the Justice Department resolved that “corrective statements” will appear in the print and online editions of newspapers and on television as well as on the companies’ websites. Expanded information on the adverse health effects of smoking will appear on cigarette packages, according to the agreement filed yesterday in federal court in Washington.
The plan for the statements is another stage in a 15-year-old civil racketeering case against the tobacco companies brought by the U.S.
The ads, fought over in court for more than two years, were ordered by U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, who in 2006 found the tobacco companies violated anti-racketeering laws by conspiring to hide cigarettes’ risks. The defendants in the case include Lorillard Inc. (LO)
Kessler also ordered the companies to stop marketing cigarettes as “light” and “low-tar.”
She later approved the text of corrective messages. The tobacco companies lost their bid to overturn Kessler’s decisions on the statements at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington in 2012.

Judge’s Approval

The agreement on the dissemination of the ads, which covers details such as the size of lettering and schedules of publication, is subject to Kessler’s approval.
Negotiations are continuing on whether the corrective ads will be required in retail locations, according to the agreement.
The consent order was filed the day before the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Surgeon General’s watershed Jan. 11, 1964, report warning of the health consequences of smoking.
Each of the ads begins by declaring that a federal court found that the four companies “deliberately deceived the American public” and goes on to state “here is the truth.” A description of companies’ wrongdoing follows, along with correct public health information in five areas including the dangers of smoking and its addictiveness, second-hand smoke and false advertising about low-tar and light cigarettes.

Appeals Pending

The ads are scheduled to begin after companies’ appeals connected to Kessler’s order have run their course.
The “agreement ensures that when all potential appeals are exhausted, the corrective statements will be ready to run without further delay,” according to a statement by Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund and five other public health groups that joined the case.
Brian May, a spokesman for Richmond, Virginia-based Altria and its Philip Morris USA unit, declined to comment on the agreement
Bryan Hatchell, a spokesman for Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based Reynolds American, didn’t immediately respond after regular business hours yesterday to a phone message seeking comment on the agreement. No one responded to an e-mail to Lorillard’s press contact address after regular business hours yesterday.
The case is U.S. v. Philip Morris USA Inc., 99-cv-2496, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-10/tobacco-companies-u-s-agree-on-ads-admitting-smoking-lies-1-.html

The war on smoking is working — and should continue

By , Washington Post

FIFTY YEARS on, the war on smoking can look back and claim a huge victory. Nearly half of the country used to smoke. Now less than a fifth of the country does. Some say that public health advocates have done enough; let those who still choose to light up, disproportionately from poor and vulnerable communities, smoke away their lives in peace. We disagree. It’s time for more taxes, more regulation and more outreach.
“Cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men; the magnitude of the effect of cigarette smoking outweighs all other factors; and the risk of developing lung cancer increases with the duration of smoking and number of cigarettes smoked per day, and diminishes by discontinuing smoking.”
Today, we know that smoking and secondhand smoke cause so many health problems across so much of the body that the benefits from the drop in use, accumulated across so many lives, are incalculable. Millions who quit or never started smoking breathe easier, suffer fewer strokes, get fewer cases of lung cancer, pass on fewer birth defects and take fewer sick days.
A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association attempts at least to calculate the number of premature deaths prevented since 1964 by changing the public’s view of the habit. Based on the assumption that smoking patterns would have continued without a decades-long public health push, the researchers estimated that tobacco-control programs have saved 8 million lives in the past five decades. Should the country forgo the opportunity to save millions more?
Of course not. Plenty of sensible measures that stop short of banning cigarettes but effectively discourage their use are not consistently applied in the United States. The most obvious is taxing cigarettes. Rates vary drastically by state , leading to interstate smuggling. The federal government should raise its excise tax, bringing laggard states closer to those that do the right thing, reducing the opportunity for criminals and increasing incentives not to smoke. If Congress doesn’t act, individual states with low taxes, such as Virginia, should. Similarly, states and localities without strong indoor smoking restrictions should bring them in line with others’ stronger rules.
The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, has a range of authorities over tobacco products that it should exercise with ambition. Perhaps the most promising is the possibility that requiring tobacco companies to reduce the amount of nicotine in their products will usefully cut their addictive quality.
Consumer choice might help, too. Electronic cigarettes appear to offer the hopelessly addicted a safer alternative to combustible tobacco products, and smokers’ increasing use of these indicates significant demand for this sort of product. If federal regulation, public education and other efforts combine smartly with smokers’ desire to stop lighting up, e-cigarettes might be a useful tool to reduce harm rather than a gateway to a life of smoking.
Editorials represent the views of The Washington Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the editorial board. News reporters and editors never contribute to editorial board discussions, and editorial board members don’t have any role in news coverage.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-war-on-smoking-is-working–and-should-continue/2014/01/10/7af7d9e4-797a-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html

Deal reached on tobacco firm corrective statements

By MICHAEL FELBERBAUM, AP Tobacco Writer
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The nation’s tobacco companies and the federal government have reached an agreement on publishing corrective statements that say the companies lied about the dangers of smoking and requires them to disclose smoking’s health effects, including the death on average of 1,200 people a day.
The agreement filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., follows a 2012 ruling ordering the industry to pay for corrective statements in various advertisements. The judge in the case ordered the parties to meet to discuss how to implement the statements, including whether they would be put in inserts with cigarette packs and on websites, TV and newspaper ads.
The court must still approve the agreement and the parties are discussing whether retailers will be required to post large displays with the industry’s admissions.
The corrective statements are part of a case the government brought in 1999 under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in that case in 2006 that the nation’s largest cigarette makers concealed the dangers of smoking for decades. The companies involved in the case include Richmond, Va.-based Altria Group Inc., owner of the biggest U.S. tobacco company, Philip Morris USA; No. 2 cigarette maker, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., owned by Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Reynolds American Inc.; and No. 3 cigarette maker Lorillard Inc., based in Greensboro, N.C.
Under the agreement with the Justice Department, each of the companies must publish full-page ads in the Sunday editions of 35 newspapers and on the newspapers’ websites, as well as air prime-time TV spots on CBS, ABC or NBC five times per week for a year. The companies also must publish the statements on their websites and affix them to a certain number of cigarette packs three times per year for two years.
Each corrective ad is to be prefaced by a statement that a federal court has concluded that the defendant tobacco companies “deliberately deceived the American public.” Among the required statements are that smoking kills more people than murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes and alcohol combined, and that “secondhand smoke kills over 38,000 Americans a year.”
Tobacco companies had urged Kessler to reject the government’s proposed corrective statements; the companies called them “forced public confessions.” They also said the statements were designed to “shame and humiliate” them. They had argued for statements that include the health effects and addictive qualities of smoking.
A federal appeals court also rejected efforts by the tobacco companies to overrule Kessler’s ruling requiring corrective statements.
Representatives for Altria, R.J. Reynolds and Lorillard each declined to comment.
Several public health groups, including the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association and American Lung Association, intervened in the case. In a statement Friday, the groups said the corrective statements are “necessary reminders that tobacco’s devastating toll over the past 50-plus years is no accident. It stems directly from the tobacco industry’s deceptive and even illegal practices.”
The corrective statements include five categories: adverse health effects of smoking; addictiveness of smoking and nicotine; lack of significant health benefit from smoking cigarettes marked as “low tar,” ”light,” etc.; manipulation of cigarette design and composition to ensure optimum nicotine delivery; and adverse health effects of exposure to secondhand smoke.
Among the statements within those categories:
“Smoking kills, on average, 1,200 Americans. Every day.”
“Philip Morris USA, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Altria intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive.”
“When you smoke, the nicotine actually changes the brain — that’s why quitting is so hard.”
“All cigarettes cause cancer, lung disease, heart attacks, and premature disease, heart attacks, and premature death — lights, low tar, ultra lights, and naturals. There is no safe cigarette.”
“Secondhand smoke causes lung cancer and coronary heart disease in adults who do not smoke.”
“Children exposed to secondhand smoke are at an increased risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), acute respiratory infections, ear problems, severe asthma, and reduced lung function.”
“There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.”
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Deal-reached-on-tobacco-firm-corrective-statements-5131393.php

Fitful Progress in the Antismoking Wars

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD, New York Times
Fifty years ago this Saturday, on Jan. 11, 1964, a myth-shattering surgeon general’s report on smoking and health brushed aside years of obfuscation by tobacco companies and asserted, based on 7,000 scientific articles, that smoking caused lung cancer and was linked to other serious diseases. Those findings expanded as more data was gathered.
Research since then has shown that tobacco can cause or exacerbate a wide range of diseases, including heart disease, stroke, multiple kinds of cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema, asthma and diabetes, and can injure nonsmokers who breathe in the toxic fumes secondhand. The death toll from tobacco remains stubbornly high but can be driven down by using a range of new and proven tactics.
By some measures, the 50-year campaign to rein in tobacco use has been an enormous success. The percentage of American adults who smoke dropped from 42 percent in 1965 to 18 percent in 2012. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week estimated that tobacco control measures adopted since 1964 have saved eight million Americans from premature death and extended their lives by an average of almost 20 years.
Experts attribute the gains to vigorous campaigns to educate people about the dangers of smoking; increases in cigarette taxes; state and local laws that protect half the nation’s population from tobacco fumes in workplaces, bars and restaurants; restrictions on advertising; prohibition of sales to minors; and various prevention and cessation programs financed by states or private insurance.
Despite these gains, nearly 44 million American adults still smoke, more than 440,000 Americans die every year from smoking, and eight million Americans live with at least one serious chronic disease from smoking. Medical costs connected to smoking are nearly $96 billion a year, with an additional $97 billion lost in productivity because of illness.
On Wednesday, several health organizations, including the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the American Cancer Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids called for a new national commitment to drive smoking among adults down to less than 10 percent over the next decade; protect all Americans from secondhand smoke within five years by having every state enact laws against smoking in all workplaces, bars and restaurants; and ultimately eliminate death and disease caused by tobacco.
It won’t be easy. The tobacco industry spends more than $8 billion a year to market cigarettes and other tobacco products in this country, with much of its marketing slyly aimed at young people.
The industry is also invading foreign markets, often in less developed countries, in an effort to make addicts of millions more customers to replace those in industrialized nations. Although smoking rates among adults around the globe have fallen sharply since 1980, the number of smokers has increased significantly along with population growth and will continue to increase as national incomes and populations rise. The United States government must help counter the tobacco industry’s efforts to spread its noxious products around the world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/opinion/fitful-progress-in-the-antismoking-wars.html?_r=0

Local doctor’s view e-cigarettes

By Diane Miller, High Plains Reader, Fargo
Sales of electronic cigarettes are expected to reach $1.7 billion this year. Many smokers are turning to this odor-free, vapor-releasing instrument as a safer alternative to cigarettes, but many health experts are skeptical.
HPR turned to local e-cig expert Dr. Brody Maack from Family HealthCare to answer a few questions this new product.
HPR: Why are the FDA and health experts so concerned about a product that seems like a much safer alternative to cigarettes?
Dr. Brody Maack: The main concern revolves around the fact that e-cigarettes currently have no manufacturing standards and are unregulated. This means that there have been no well done, long term safety studies in which the products are tested to see if there are any harmful effects.
Also, as far back as 2009, the FDA did laboratory analysis of some e-cigarettes, which showed that they contained carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals) as well as diethylene glycol (which is found in anti-freeze).
The FDA also found that quality control in manufacturing the e-cigarettes is either poor or non-existent in laboratory studies.
It is also unknown as to the risks of inhaling the “vapor” which is let off by the products, and we don’t know if there is a risk for second-hand exposure to the vapor. Because e-cigarettes all contain different amounts of their ingredients, including nicotine, in addition to these other safety concerns, we cannot say that they are “safer” than cigarettes.
Another concern is that we are seeing a rapid increase in the use of e-cigarettes in our youth, due to various flavors which are attractive to a younger crowd, and intensive marketing of the products. Also, there is no restriction to e-cigarette sales to minors in North Dakota. Minnesota, however, does prohibit the sale and possession of e-cigarettes to minors.
HPR: What would be your response to this statement made by Craig Youngblood, president of the InLife e-cigarette company:
In our product you have nicotine or no nicotine, PEG, and some flavoring. In cigarettes you have nicotine, PEG, and 4,000 chemicals and 43 carcinogens. There are 45 to 50 million people already addicted to nicotine.
Should they have the choice to satisfy their addiction by other means? … I am a proponent of harm reduction. People have rights and choices and should be allowed to make them.
BM: Mr. Youngblood states that his product contains various ingredients (i.e. “nicotine or no nicotine”), also admitting that his product includes “some flavoring.” As I stated before, there are no e-cigarette manufacturers that are currently being held to any manufacturing standards or regulations, so the InLife product, like other e-cigarette products, may contain various amounts of its stated ingredients.
Also, the fact that InLife is promoting its product as containing flavoring may be increasing exposure of this product with unknown safety to our youth. This is why the FDA has banned flavoring in cigarettes. The CDC released data in October of this year which showed that 40 percent of middle and high schoolers who smoke, smoke flavored tobacco products.
I agree with Mr. Youngblood when he states that “people have rights and choices and should be allowed to make them,” but I believe that people’s decisions should therefore be well-informed, and not subject them, or their children, to potential health risk. Also, the issue of “harm reduction” is typically promoted by tobacco product supporters, however it is felt by most of the tobacco cessation expert community that complete abstinence from tobacco is the only way to reduce the number of people who will die in the next 100 years from tobacco related disease, which is expected to be 1 billion!
HPR: Many community citizens are upset that the city of Fargo banned the use of e-cigs in indoor public places. Do you foresee this rule changing and why?
BM: The banning of e-cigarettes in Fargo is actually a statewide law, which went into effect December 6, 2012. I don’t see this changing, simply because of concerns we have discussed—lack of manufacturing standards, lack of safety proof, potentially harmful ingredients and concerns for turning our youth on to tobacco products. Considering that e-cigarettes look similar to regular cigarettes, prohibiting their use indoors also eliminates any confusion about what’s acceptable under the statewide law.
HPR: In your opinion, what is the best method to quitting smoking?
BM: The best method of quitting smoking has been proven countless times to be a method which includes behavioral counseling along with medications, such as the nicotine patches, gum or lozenges. This method is recommended by the US Public Health Service, and is available in many communities through doctors’ offices, pharmacies and through state telephone quitline services, such as ND Quits (1-800-QUIT-NOW) or internet quit services. Many of these programs are free!
HPR: Anything you’d like to add?
BM: As of right now, e-cigarettes are too much of an “unknown” with regards to safety and whether or not they help people to quit smoking, and with concerns for the products being a gateway to youth tobacco use, they simply cannot be recommended for use. There have been no respectable studies showing that e-cigarettes are better, or safer, than any of our seven FDA-approved medications for quitting smoking.
We have a large amount of safety data and data to show that the FDA-approved options work very well to help people quit tobacco. These options include three over-the-counter options (nicotine patches, gum and lozenges), and four prescription products (Chantix, Zyban, nicotine inhaler and nicotine nasal spray). In fact, the nicotine inhaler is a proven, safe option for people who want to quit in a similar way as e-cigarettes, without the unknown risks of “vapor” exposure and other potentially harmful ingredients.
Also, the nicotine inhaler, along with the other FDA-approved options, is legal to use in any indoor space in North Dakota. I personally recommend this option for patients of mine who show interest in e-cigarette products as a safe alternative to e-cigarettes.
Brody Maack, PharmD, CTTS, is a clinical pharmacist who provides medication management services, including tobacco cessation, at Family HealthCare in Fargo. He also serves as Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice at the NDSU College of Pharmacy, Nursing and Allied Sciences, where he teaches the subjects of heart and lung diseases, which includes tobacco related disease, prevention and cessation.
http://hpr1.com/wellness/article/local_doctors_view_e-cigarettes/