Bismarck mulls age limits on e-cigarette users

By LeAnn Eckroth, Bismarck Tribune
BISMARCK, N.D. —The Bismarck City Commission might crack down on the sale of e-cigarettes to minors under age 18. Minors found having or using the products also would be fined under the proposed ordinance.
Commissioners will review the first reading of the proposal today for a possible February hearing, City Attorney Charlie Whitman said.
Those selling or furnishing electronic cigarettes to minors could face up to a $500 fine under the proposed ordinance, Whitman said, and minors possessing or using the devices could pay up to a $70 fine.
E-cigarettes were banned in or near public places by the Legislature. State law also requires no vapors be emitted by e-cigarettes inside or 20 feet from public places.
The Bismarck ordinance would ban minors’ use of electronic oral devices with a heating element — battery or electric circuit — that provides nicotine or any other substance to be inhaled to simulate smoking.
The ordinance states devices marketed and sold as e-cigarettes, e-cigars and e-pipes cannot be sold or provided to minors, and that minors cannot possess or use them.
Pat McGeary, coordinator for the Bismarck Tobacco Free Coalition, said Monday that the group requested that Bismarck include the ordinance because the devices have not been proven safe. She said the electronic cigarettes are not controlled by the Federal Drug Administration. “There is no scientific evidence of the safety of e-cigarettes. The FDA has done preliminary testing that detected cancer-causing material in them and traces of nicotine,” she said.
“Our concern is that American tobacco companies have bought the e-cigarette companies and marketing it ‘kid friendly,'” she said. “They sell it in flavors like chocolate. We also are looking at e-cigarettes as a possible gateway drug.”
She said a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey showed that the use of e-cigarettes by minors has jumped from 4 percent in 2011 to 10 percent in 2012 nationwide.
“These are not FDA-regulated,” McGeary said. “These products have emerged more frequently in the last two years and (their companies) seem to be marketing more aggressively to the youth,” she said.
She said the FDA does not now control the levels of nicotine in the e-cigarette products. “(The levels) are all over the board, according to a preliminary study by the FDA,” she said. “The e-cigarettes have not been found to be safe. It’s not established.”
The Federal Drug Administration found that cartridges labeled as containing no nicotine contained nicotine and that three different electronic cigarette cartridges with the same label emitted a markedly different amount of nicotine, according to the North Dakota Center for Tobacco Prevention and Control Policy.
“I think it’s a natural and reasonable restriction,” Bismarck City Commissioner Josh Askvig said. “If the city won’t allow the sale of tobacco products and nicotine to minors, the same argument stands for this product.
“My personal opinion is this is a loophole into (minors) smoking that we can control before they get hooked on it before they are of legal age,” he added.
“I’m OK with the ordinance,” Bismarck Commissioner Mike Seminary said. “I don’t think we should encourage minors to smoke anything.”
The Tribune contacted some stores Monday that sell e-cigarettes and they assured that they already set limits on who buys the product.
“We only sell to those over 18,” said Chris Pribyl, manager of Tobacco Row.
“Minors cannot come through our doors. We card everyone who looks under age 27,” said Suzanne Willis, manager of Discount Smoke. “It says right on the package: ‘Not for sale for minors.'”
Sara Lang, manager of Red Carpet Car Wash, said employees card buyers of the product to ensure they are eligible. “We treat it like we were selling tobacco,” she said.
The proposed e-cigarette ordinance mirrors two passed by the Fargo City Commission on Jan. 6. The ordinances both prohibit the sale of e-cigarettes to minors and the use and possession by minors. Minors who violate the Fargo law will pay a $25 fine and complete a tobacco education program.
Under the Fargo law, a clerk who sells e-cigarettes to a person under age 18 will pay a $50 fine. A business that sells e-cigarettes to a minor will get a warning for the first sale in 12 months, have its tobacco license suspended for the second violation in a year and have its tobacco license suspended for 10 days for the third illegal sale within 12 months.
Whitman said Bismarck’s ordinance wording does not mention suspension of tobacco licenses because it would not affect stores that do not sell tobacco, but sell e-cigarettes.
http://bismarcktribune.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/bismarck-mulls-age-limits-on-e-cigarette-users/article_201fa2e8-87aa-11e3-9659-001a4bcf887a.html

E-Cigarette Makers Give Public the Finger

Rob Waters, Contributor, Forbes
With Sarah Mittermaier and Lily Swartz
In 1964, smoking was everywhere: on television, on airplanes, in workplaces and movie theatres, college campuses, doctors’ offices, restaurants and bars. In the 50 years since the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health was released, smoking has gradually faded to the margins of public life. TheMarlboro man was bounced from the airwaves, comprehensive smoking bans were passed in hundreds of cities and 28 states, and smoking rates were cut almost in half. The struggle to protect the public’s health is far from over—and shocking disparities in tobacco use and exposure to tobacco marketing remain—but we’re now reaping some rewards, with eight million lives saved over the past half-century.
But now a new threat is emerging. The use of e-cigarettes is rising rapidly, with teenagers a key target of marketing efforts. “Vaping” is making smoking acceptable—even cool—once again as the tobacco industry returns to its old ways, putting e-cigarette commercials back on the airwaves for the first time since the 1970s.

Right now, e-cigarettes exist in what tobacco control researcher Stanton Glanz calls a regulatory “Wild West,” with no federal regulation of the manufacturing, marketing and sales of these products. This regulatory vacuum threatens to undo the hard-won victories of the past 50 years in tobacco control.
E-cigarette companies are taking a page right out of Big Tobacco’s old-school playbook: marketing their products with sex appeal, celebrity endorsements, even cartoons. The companies argue that “vaping” is safer than traditional smoking and that may or may not be true—there are far too few studies to back up that claim or refute it. But it’s also a smokescreen.
The tobacco industry is out to hook kids, and it’s working. E-cigarettes come in an array of kid-friendly flavors, from“Cherry Crush” to “Coca Cola.” And unlike conventional cigarettes, e-cigarettes can legally be sold to kids in most US states. Data released last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that e-cigarette use more than doubled among middle and high school students in the previous year. For 20 percent of the middle schoolers, e-cigarettes were their first experience with smoking, raising concerns that e-cigarettes may act as a gateway to the use of other tobacco products.
E-cigarettes also threaten to reintroduce smoking to workplaces, restaurants, bars and other public spaces where hard-fought public health campaigns have succeeded in banning cigarettes. These policies have changed our communities from the ground up, creating new expectations and norms around smoking. The science is still out on whether e-cigarettes threaten non-smokers with toxic exposure, but their use in public legitimizes their use, making them seem acceptable, even Golden Globes-glamorous. We can’t let e-cigarettes undo the hard work tobacco control advocates have achieved over the past 50 years.
Some cities and states are pushing back against e-cigarettes, taking steps to regulate the sale and public use of e-cigarettes. Over the past few months, New York and Chicago city councils voted to regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products, extending existing smoking bans to cover vaping. The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to regulate the sales of e-cigarettes. Boston has banned e-cigarette smoking in workplaces. States such as Utah, New Jersey, and North Dakota ban the use of e-cigarettes in indoor public spaces.
These local and state efforts should be followed—and strengthened—by federal action. Attorneys general from 40 states have called on the Food and Drug Administration to regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products, a move that would give the FDA the power to impose age restrictions and limit marketing of e-cigarettes. Proposed rules drafted by the agency have not yet been released publicly.
We can’t wait years for scientists to conduct new studies on the health risks of vaping before we take action. We know better than to trust the tobacco industry’s health claims about their products—or to trust the industry with our children’s future. The time for action is now. To paraphrase one anti-cigarette commercial in California: “Some people will say anything to sell (e-) cigarettes.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robwaters/2014/01/27/e-cigarette-makers-give-public-the-finger/

Nicotine Levels In US Cigarettes Went Up 15% Between 1999 And 2011

By: , Business Insider
Nicotine levels in cigarettes went up 15% between 1999 and 2011, according to a study published this week in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
The data were collected from the annual report filed with Massachusetts Department of Public Health by four major manufacturers of cigarettes from 1997 to 2012.
“Young people could have an easier time becoming addicted to cigarettes the first few times they do smoke,” lead author Thomas Land, director of the Office of Health Information Policy and Informatics at the State Health Department, told Deborah Kotz of The Boston Globe.
From The Globe:
Each day, 3800 American teens try their first cigarette and 1000 become hooked, according to a 2012 Surgeon General’s report. Those who are unable to quit as adults will die, on average, 13 years earlier than their peers.
This is not the first study to find rising nicotine levels in cigarettes. In 2007, a Harvard study found nicotine levels had gone up by nearly 11% between 1997 and 2005, the Globe noted. Industry executives disputed the findings and attributed the increase to agricultural and rainfall variations that led to more concentrated levels of nicotine in tobacco crops.
But Land told The Globe that if that were the case, “we would have seen a similar trend of increased nicotine yield for all cigarette makers since they tend to buy their tobacco from the same regions. We did not.”
The study concludes that nicotine levels “are controllable features of cigarettes, and should be monitored and regulated by government agencies.”
While federal law lets the FDA set new regulations to lower nicotine content, according to Kotz, he noted that the agency has not set new limits on the amount of nicotine allowed in each cigarette.
http://www.businessinsider.com/nicotine-levels-up-15-since-1990-2014-1#ixzz2qh357qlT

Surgeon General Sets Tobacco End-Game as Smoking Persists

By Anna Edney, Bloomberg News
A half century after linking smoking to lung cancer, the U.S. is confronting stalled progress in kicking the habit of 42 million Americans with new evidence that many common ailments such as diabetes, arthritis and impotence can be tied to tobacco use.
Acting Surgeon General Boris Lushniak in a report today criticized the “fraudulent campaigns” by cigarette companies, weaknesses in regulation and a rebound in smoking depicted in Hollywood films. He said he’s considering greater restrictions on sales to achieve “a society free of tobacco-related death and disease.”
While a landmark 1964 report on smoking and lung cancer helped cut cigarette use by more than half to 18 percent of U.S. adults, the decline has slowed. Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death, killing 480,000 people each year, and the U.S. may miss a 2020 goal of limiting to 12 percent the share of smoking adults, today’s report shows.
“Enough is enough,” Lushniak said repeatedly at a press conference in Washington where he presented the more than 900-page report. “It’s astonishing that so many years later we’re still making these findings.”
The report shows the U.S. must be more aggressive in promoting tobacco control than regulators have been, he said.
“What we really need to do is say ‘Now is the time,’” Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer at the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society, said in a telephone interview.

Further Stalling

Maintaining the status quo on tobacco control will lead to further stalling in the declining rate of smoking, said Lushniak, whose job serves as the nation’s main public-health advocate. He placed part of the blame on tobacco companies.
“The tobacco epidemic was initiated and has been sustained by the aggressive strategies of the tobacco industry, which has deliberately misled the public on the risk of smoking cigarettes,” he said in the report.
Earlier this week, Altria Group Inc. (MO:US), Reynolds American Inc. (RAI:US)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. Altria is the largest tobacco company in the U.S. and its Philip Morris unit makes the popular Marlboro brand of smokes.

Overwhelming Evidence

“Philip Morris USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers,” David Sutton, a spokesman for parent company Altria Group Inc., said in an e-mail.“ Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers. There is no safe cigarette.”
The report lists smoking as a cause of liver cancer and colorectal cancer, which is responsible for the second-largest number of cancer deaths each year. Cigarette use may cause breast cancer and women smokers’ chances of dying from lung cancer have caught up to men, the surgeon general said. Even secondhand smoke can now be linked to a higher risk of stroke, Lushniak said.
The first surgeon general report on tobacco’s ill effects was made in January 1964, when at least half of all men in the U.S. and almost 40 percent of women smoked. Congress later adopted an act that required warning labels about the health consequences of smoking and in 1970 it prohibited cigarette advertising on television and radio.

Extend Lifespans

Measures, such as city and state bans on smoking in workplaces, restaurants and bars, also have helped to prevent 8 million early deaths and extended lifespans by two decades. About 5.3 million men and 2.7 million women live longer thanks to tobacco control, according to one of six studies on the topic published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Advertising and promotional activities entice younger smokers and nicotine addiction keeps people smoking as they grow older. Portrayals of tobacco use in U.S. films rebounded in the past two years and the use of multiple tobacco products may increase initiation rates among teens and young adults, according to the report.
While the share of teens and young adults who smoke is down, the number of them who start to smoke has increased since 2002. In addition, the prevalence of U.S. students in middle and high school who used electronic cigarettes doubled in 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a September report.
“There are a substantial number of diseases, not just cancer, but certain cardiovascular disease, stroke, respiratory disease, whether it’s chronic lung disease or asthma, the list goes on and on about how tobacco impacts this country,” Lichtenfeld said.

Erectile Dysfunction

Smokers also have as much as a 40 percent higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and the habit is attributable to erectile dysfunction and deadly ectopic pregnancies where the embryo implants in the Fallopian tube or elsewhere outside the uterus, according to the report. People exposed to second-hand smoke are as much as 30 percent more likely to have a stroke.
Women smokers were 2.7 times more likely to develop lung cancer in 1959, a number that jumped to 25.7 percent by 2010. Male smokers were 12.2 times more likely to get lung cancer in 1959 and now smokers of both genders carry almost an equal chance of being diagnosed with the disease.
In the last 50 years almost 25 trillion cigarettes have been consumed in the U.S. costing at least $130 billion a year for direct medical care and $150 billion annually in lost productivity from premature death, according to the surgeon general.

Kicking the Habit

The surgeon general recommended helping people kick the habit with more national media campaigns like the federally funded graphic advertisements that featured former smokers with missing limbs and holes in their throats. He also advocated consideration of additional cigarette taxes and legislation to extend smoke-free indoor protections.
Banning smoking “is a bigger societal issue,” Lushniak said at the press conference. “We need to have that discussion.”
The tobacco companies and the Justice Department resolved this week 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 Jan. 10 in federal court in Washington.

Altria Support

“Moving forward, we believe FDA regulation, particularly as it applies to product innovation, has the potential to substantially reduce the harm caused by smoking,” Altria’s Sutton said. “We support extending its regulatory authority over all tobacco products, including those containing tobacco-derived nicotine such as e-cigarettes.”
The FDA regulates cigarettes and is poised to extend its oversight to their electronic counterparts.
While smoking substitutes such as e-cigarettes may help reduce tobacco use, more needs to be known about their health effects and how much they may help, the report said.
“However, the promotion of electronic cigarettes and other innovative tobacco products is much more likely to be beneficial in an environment where the appeal, accessibility, promotion, and use of cigarettes are being rapidly reduced,” Lushniak said.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-17/surgeon-general-sets-tobacco-end-game-as-smoking-decline-stalls

Jury is out on health effects of e-cigarettes

By Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times
Electronic cigarettes are either a potent weapon in the war against tobacco, or they are an insidious menace that threatens to get kids hooked on nicotine and make smoking socially acceptable again.

There are health experts who back each point of view. But they do agree that the empirical evidence that will tell them who is right will not be in for several years.
“There are a few studies out there right now, but scientists like to have a gazillion,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control at UC San Francisco.
Among the most pressing questions for researchers: What are the long-term health effects of e-cigarettes on users and people around them? Do e-cigarettes help people kick the smoking habit, or do they actually make it harder? If kids start smoking e-cigarettes, are they likely to graduate to regular cigarettes?
“My big question with e-cigarettes is whether it puts youth on a pathway to smoking,” said acting Surgeon General Boris Lushniak, who will join other U.S. health officials Friday at the White House to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the surgeon general’s first report on the hazards of smoking.
When that landmark report was released in 1964, the proportion of U.S. adults who smoked was at an all-time high of 43%. By 2012, that figure had dropped to 18%. But without a renewed focus on the campaign against tobacco, the U.S. will miss its goal of reducing the national smoking rate to 12% by the end of the decade.
E-cigarettes are uniquely positioned to undo recent public health gains, Lushniak and others fear.
The battery-operated devices heat nicotine, propylene glycol and glycerin into a vapor, which is inhaled by the user. Unlike conventional tobacco-burning cigarettes, e-cigarettes do not deliver poisonous tars or carbon monoxide.
Currently, the devices are regulated only by a smattering of local governments who have passed laws concerning their sale and use. The Food and Drug Administration has the legal authority to regulate e-cigarettes as a tobacco product, but has not yet done so. In the meantime, e-cigarettes have grown to become a $2-billion industry with no federal oversight.
Though the FDA says propylene glycol and glycerin food additives are “generally regarded as safe,” the long-term effects of inhaling the substances are unknown. The FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products has begun collecting reports of adverse effects from e-cigarettes, and those complaints include claims of eye irritation, headaches and coughing.
E-cigarette backers say the health effects of the key component — nicotine — are well established and minimal for most everyone except pregnant mothers. They note that nicotine gum and patches have been used as smoking cessation tools for many years.
“It’s not the nicotine that’s the real enemy; it’s the way it’s burned and delivered in cigarettes,” said psychologist David Abrams, executive director of the American Legacy Foundation’s Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies in Washington. “In reasonable doses, and assuming good quality control, nicotine might raise your heart rate two or three beats per minute, but it really has few adverse effects.”
Yet that might not be true for teens. A surgeon general’s report released Friday says evidence now suggests that nicotine exposure during adolescence “may have lasting adverse consequences for brain development.”
And then there are the potential health effects on bystanders, who are also exposed to nicotine and propylene glycol emitted by the e-cigarette and its user.
Studies performed on e-cigarette vapor have detected heavy metals and volatile compounds such as formaldehyde, but the concentration and threat they pose has been hotly debated.
In a review of studies that examined e-cigarette mist, Drexel University environmental and occupational health expert Igor Burstyn concluded that “while these compounds are present, they have been detected at problematic levels only in a few studies that apparently were based on unrealistic levels of heating.”
Abrams took heart in that assessment, though he acknowledged that the vapor was not benign. Even so, the bystander effects are “almost immeasurable compared to the toxins in secondhand cigarette smoke,” he said.
That assessment may change when several studies examining fine particulate matter from e-cigarette vapor and their effects on the cardiovascular system are completed, Glantz said.
The burning question for most experts is whether e-cigarettes actually help people to quit smoking.
Researchers have conducted surveys that give them a “snapshot” of smoker behavior at a particular moment, but not over an extended period. Some results suggest e-cigarette users are continuing to smoke conventional cigarettes and relying on the electronic substitutes to satisfy nicotine cravings in the workplace, restaurants and other places where cigarettes are forbidden.
Another study published in the journal Lancet compared the effectiveness of e-cigarettes to nicotine patches and gum. Researchers said they expected e-cigarettes to be the clear winner, but it was a tie.
Now experts are looking toward long-term behavioral studies that will reveal how smokers actually use e-cigarettes. One such analysis by the FDA is set to begin field work this year, and will track about 60,000 smokers and nonsmokers for two years.
“It should tell us if people are using them for cessation, or as a gateway to traditional tobacco use,” said Brian King, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-e-cigarettes-science-20140117,0,7562029.story#ixzz2qh59hXu7

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