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- Category: December 2019
Every attempt to isolate a cause to explain the war on vaping faces its difficulties, as no cause is entirely defective in explanation, yet neither is any satisfyingly sufficient to explain the level of hysteria engulfing the nation. Clues are best found by examining similar phenomenon and terrifyingly, there’s no better example than the decades-long battle in the “War on Drugs.”
In this edition of RegWatch we’re joined by Ethan Nadelmann [...]
For decades Nadelmann led the fight to end the “War on Drugs,” so he knows all too well the dehumanizing, slanderous, coercive tactics used by moral crusaders. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
Germany's Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the CSU, have backed a plan to phase out tobacco advertising in outdoor areas from 2022.
The issue has long been a source of debate within the country's ruling conservative bloc, which had struggled to arrive at a common position and had blocked previous efforts to introduce such a ban.
A policy paper endorsed by the bloc's parliamentary group on Tuesday said the move was necessary to confront "the biggest avoidable health risk of our time."
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- Category: December 2019
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a “gentle reminder” to all physicians connected with public hospitals not to have any form of interaction with the tobacco and electronic cigarette industries.
The FDA issued an advisory under acting director general Eric Domingo that said doctors of state hospitals should avoid all interaction with the industry in compliance with Joint Memorandum Circular 2910-01 issued by the Department of Health and Civil Service Commission.
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- Category: December 2019
After Parliament passed the Prohibition of Electronic Cigarettes Bill, 2019, doctors have raised concerns about people becoming vulnerable to chronic heart and lung diseases.
Suggesting that the government should have conducted more studies before banning e-cigarettes, Dr Bharat Gopal, Senior Pulmonologist and Director of National Chest Centre, Delhi, said, "There is data available regarding e-cigarettes as smoking cessation devices from the UK, so Indian studies should have been taken up by the government as well as health organisations. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
Holidaymakers to some of Otago's most popular beaches this summer will be asked to stub out their cigarettes and stop vaping.
A three-month smoke-free trial starts next week at the main beaches of Queenstown, Frankton, Wanaka and Glenorchy.
The Queenstown Lakes District Council decided to set aside $5000 for "ambassadors" to "educate" those flouting the ban as well as signage. "Should a smoker invoke their right to continue to smoke they can do so with no further implication," council corporate services manager Meaghan Miller said.
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- Category: December 2019
At a time when Washington, D.C. is paralyzed by partisan gridlock and impeachment hearings, it can be challenging for lawmakers to focus on their day jobs: lawmaking. But Raja Krishnamoorthi [...] has won bipartisan support for his efforts to curb young people’s use of e-cigarettes, as their surging popularity perpetuates a health crisis among the nation’s youth. [...] In October, he introduced a bill that would limit the amount of nicotine in vaping products, which he says is crucial to preventing children from getting addicted. “The forces of Big Tobacco and the e-cigarette industry are very powerful. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
Smoking giant Philip Morris wants to introduce a new tobacco product in Australia: heated “sticks” it claims are an alternative to vaping and smoking that “produce fewer and/or lower levels of toxic chemicals than cigarettes”.
The heated tobacco products are legal in the US, the UK and other countries including New Zealand and Japan. The Therapeutic Goods Administration will decide if they can be sold here. Health Minister Greg Hunt has previously made it clear he does not support alternative tobacco products. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
Carrie Wade, Director of Harm Reduction Policy of think tank R Street Institute, told DZIQ Radyo Inquirer in an interview that regulating e-cigarettes is a “better pathway for public health” as “a ban would only create criminalization”.
She explained that in markets where e-cigarettes are not regulated, an opportunity for dangerous products to enter is created, similar to what has happened in the United States. America is currently gripped in a health scare due to a spate of deaths and over 2,000 lung injuries linked to the use of illicit drugs in e-cigarettes.
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- Category: December 2019
When electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) first appeared in Canada a decade ago, many healthcare professionals expressed major concerns about their potential harmful effects. They called for strict regulation and more research to ensure that Canadians weren’t falling into a health hazard trap – but this did not materialize.
Fast-forward to May 2018 and the federal government officially legalized e-cigarettes containing nicotine, and, in October 2019, the sale of cannabis-containing e-cigarettes was given the green light. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
During a meeting Donald Trump held about the vaping epidemic in November, Mitt Romney suggested a reason for the spike in teenage usage: unicorn poop.
Trump had invited both critics and advocates for e-cigarettes to the gathering in a rare moment of civilized debate, as if he were actually looking to better understand the issue. He had been waffling for weeks about what to do, entertaining at one point a full-on ban of flavored vaping products, though his campaign staff reportedly talked him out of it, fearing that such a strategy could antagonize a chunk of his political base. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
New York's ban on flavored e-cigarettes is still held up in court but the state may try to keep it alive and expand it to include menthol. The state's Public Health and Health Planning Council is set to vote Thursday to keep the emergency ban on the books for another 90 days. The council had approved the ban in September but a state appeals court blocked the state from enforcing it in October.
Council members could also vote Thursday to ban menthol e-cigarette flavoring.
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- Category: December 2019
The Food and Drug Administration can regulate e-cigarettes like it does conventional cigarettes, an appeals court said Tuesday, finding that the products are “indisputably highly addictive and pose health risks, especially to youth, that are not well understood.” [...] The issue for the court was whether the FDA has the authority to treat e-cigarettes as “tobacco products” and to subject the vaping products to the same set of rules and regulations as their conventional counterparts.
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- Category: December 2019
A fixture of the public health crisis since the announcement of the Government of India’s e-cigarette ban has been the expression of doctors’ concerns – and a number have been expressed since the ban was announced.
[...] “There is data available regarding e-cigarettes as smoking cessation devices from the UK, so Indian studies should have been taken up by the government as well as health organisations,” said Dr Bharat Ghopal, the senior pulmonologist and director of the National Chest Centre in Delhi. ‘A lot of smokers come to us asking for alternatives so that they can quit smoking. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely to self-administer nicotine and report more pleasurable responses than people without the condition, according to a study by Duke Health researchers. [...] Duke researchers tested a nicotine nasal spray to determine the effects of the addictive chemical on non-smoking young adults. They recruited 136 people aged 18-25 years. About half (61) of the participants had a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, and the others (75) were free from any psychiatric condition.
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- Category: December 2019
Smoking e-cigarettes or “vaping” has been marketed as an alternative to traditional tobacco cigarettes to help existing smokers “kick the habit”. However, their popularity is also rising among non-smoking adolescents – from 2017–2018 e-cigarette use increased by a staggering 78% in high school students – with the primary appeal cited as being the variety of available flavors. But how safe are the ingredients in e-cigarettes? Here we highlight some of the studies exploring e-cigarette safety, published during 2019.
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- Category: December 2019
Many cancer survivors continue to use tobacco products after their cancer diagnosis despite the mounting evidence showing reduced effectiveness of cancer treatments, increased overall and cancer-specific mortality and increased risk for a second primary cancer. Tobacco use has also been associated with poorer response to cancer treatment and cancer recurrence leading to significantly increased costs associated with cancer treatment. Cigarette smoking rates among cancer survivors have been reported in prior studies using two national data sources. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
Flavored e-cigarettes and vaping products are quickly erasing decades of progress in decreasing youth tobacco use. And, unless the Trump administration takes swift action, these products will lead to severe but entirely preventable health consequences for a new generation of Americans addicted to nicotine. Although vaping technology is too new to gauge its long-term effects on health, the immediate impact is stark: More than one-quarter of U.S. high school students, and one in 10 middle school students, have used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days [...]
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- Category: December 2019
At the end of September, about 24 hours after Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf came out in support of legalizing recreational cannabis, he talked to a journalist on the street about the so-called vaping epidemic. [...] "The real problem with vaping is the illicit substances that are being introduced into the vaping," Wolf said that day. "Again, bring it out in the open. Let's deal with it." Now Wolf's administration is more explicitly tying their push for legal weed to the need to respond to the ongoing vape crisis. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
A substance potentially causing serious lung diseases has been found in liquid e-cigarettes sold here, health authorities said, Thursday. The "vaping" products, however, did not contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a chemical that is said to be responsible for most cases of lung damage from vaping reported in the U.S. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety announced the results of its toxicity tests on seven potentially harmful ingredients in 153 liquid e-cigarette products, or e-liquids, amid growing anxiety among vapers following the health authorities' strong warning against using them issued in October.
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- Category: December 2019
E-cigarette companies insist that their products are not aimed at young people, however this idea has been rejected by Irish teenagers who believe that they are being specifically targeted, new research has found.
The research [...] involved focus groups made up of 3rd and 4th year secondary school students.
According to the findings, teenagers do not believe that the flavours and packaging used are designed for adults only. In fact, some believe that a number of these products would not appeal to adults at all, but would to children.