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- Category: January 2021
Outlawing the sale of flavored tobacco products for adults — such as cherry pipe tobacco and menthol cigarettes — would deepen New York State’s budget hole, threaten the survival of thousands of mom-and-pop retailers, and place the jobs of frontline workers at these businesses at risk.
That’s the conclusion of an economic study performed by Regional Economic Models Inc. (REMI) for the New York Association of Convenience Stores (NYACS). REMI estimated the proposed action would cost the state $3.4 billion in tax revenue over the next decade, cost shop owners nearly $500 million annually in lost sales, [...]
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- Category: January 2021
Marijuana stocks are booming this week following the victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia's Senate election runoffs, which will give Democrats control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress.
Canopy Growth, the first marijuana stock to ever be publicly traded in North America, is up 13.2% since the election Tuesday. "This new slate of leadership presents an incredible opportunity for national cannabis reform in the United States—the beginning of the end for the long-outdated prohibition on cannabis," David Culver, U.S. Vice President of Government Relations at Canopy Growth, told [...]
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- Category: January 2021
Marijuana smoke contains some of the same toxicants present in tobacco smoke. Marijuana smoking is prevalent among HIV+ individuals, but few studies have characterized smoke-related toxicants or associated health outcomes in exclusive marijuana users. This longitudinal study included 245 participants over age 40 (76% HIV+). 33 plasma and 28 urine metabolites of nicotine, ∆-9-trans-tetrahydrocannabinol, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and volatile organic compounds were assayed by liquid or gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. [...]
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- Category: January 2021
Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the popularity of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) among adolescents in the USA. Evidence on their role in the continuation of or abstinence from cigarette smoking among young smokers remains scarce. The data were drawn from the 2015–2018 National Youth Tobacco Survey—a nationally representative survey of US middle and high school students. Multivariable logistic regression was used to assess the association between ever e-cigarette use and past 30-day abstinence from cigarette smoking. [...]
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- Category: January 2021
The State government has proposed to make it mandatory for shops in urban areas to obtain licences for selling cigarettes and other tobacco products.
The draft bylaws of Karnataka Municipalities (Regulation and inspection of places used for sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products) seek to prohibit sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products without obtaining licenses from the jurisdictional municipal corporations. The provisions of these rules shall apply to all the municipal corporations, including Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP).
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- Category: January 2021
Touted by makers as a “healthy” alternative to traditional nicotine cigarettes, new research indicates the chemicals found in e-cigarettes disrupt the gut barrier and trigger inflammation in the body, potentially leading to a variety of health concerns. In the study, published in the journal iScience, Soumita Das, PhD, associate professor of pathology, and Pradipta Ghosh, MD, professor of cellular and molecular medicine [...] found that chronic use of nicotine-free e-cigarettes led to a “leaky gut,” in which microbes and other molecules seep out of the intestines, resulting in chronic inflammation.
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- Category: January 2021
Of all the many business collapses of 2020, perhaps one of the most disappointing was the demise of a smoking-cessation start-up backed by a colourful cast of big City names.
Kind Consumer is the London-based developer of the Voke nicotine inhaler device. It had ambitions to upend the multibillion-pound tobacco market by solving one of public health’s most devastating and costly problems: smoking-related disease.
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- Category: January 2021
The Kazakh State Revenue Committee Jan. 5 announced various excise tax changes for tobacco and alcohol products, effective for the 2022 tax year. The announcement includes: 1) an increase to 12,300 Kazakh tenge (US$29) from 11,000 tenge (US$26) per 1,000 cigarettes; 2) an increase to 11,750 tenge (US$28) from 7,345 tenge (US$17) for per kilogram of tobacco mixture for products with heated tobacco; 3) an increase to 8 tenge (US$0.019) from 5 tenge (US$0.001) per milliliter for nicotine-containing liquids; [...]
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- Category: January 2021
The availability of vaping products would be sharply curtailed in Connecticut under bills that are being introduced in the General Assembly, including a ban on the sale of all nicotine products in pharmacies, and e-cigarettes within five miles of schools.
Lawmakers are also expected to reintroduce legislation from Gov. Lamont that failed in the closure of the General Assembly last March, to ban flavored vaping devices, in attempt to prevent teenagers and young adults from starting what data show can become lifetime habits.
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- Category: January 2021
The World Vapers’ Alliance strongly urges policymakers to stay away from equating smoking tobacco and vaping, especially when it comes to taxation. This comes off the heels of a recently ended consultation on the update of the Tobacco Excise Directive, which specified the European Commission’s intention to tax vaping products similarly to how cigarettes are taxed.
Commenting on consultation, WVA Director Michael Landl said:
“Making vaping less appealing to smokers by higher prices will discourage current smokers from switching to less harmful alternatives. This is certainly not going to be of any public health benefit.
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- Category: January 2021
Lawmakers reiterated the call for an investigation on the Food and Drug Administration’s questionable receipt of private funding from international private groups, The Union and Bloomberg Initiative, in exchange for the issuance of pre-defined policies on e-cigarettes or vapor products and heated tobacco products.
“Government policies and regulations should not be influenced by any vested foreign interest. It is incumbent for Congress to investigate FDA’s receipt of private funds from known anti-tobacco, anti-ENDS [electronic nicotine delivery systems] and anti-HTP organizations and how these could have shaped the agency’s adopted policies. [...]
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- Category: January 2021
Health experts say that smoking presents dangerous risks to a person’s overall health. It can cause chronic illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic cough, and others. British Columbia has the lowest youth smoking rates across Canada, but according to the BC Adolescent Health Survey the rate of vaping has drastically increased, with 42 per cent of youth ranging from Grade 7-12 having tried e-cigarettes before.
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- Category: January 2021
Overdoses are a deadly epidemic that we’ll still have to live with after COVID-19 is gone, but without similar promises of vaccination and return to normal – only the hope that we can change our attitudes. Opioid deaths are the epidemic no one wants to think about within the epidemic no one can stop talking about. In the past 3½ years, more than 17,602 Canadians have died of opioid-related overdoses. And between April and June last year, as COVID-19 throttled the country for the first time, overdose deaths jumped a record 58 per cent over the previous quarter. [...]
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- Category: January 2021
E-cigarettes commonly known as vapes and e-hookahs, work by creating aerosols that are inhaled into the lungs through the process of heating up the contained liquid. This liquid usually consists of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), nicotine, cannabinoid (CBD) oils, additives, and flavourings.
Researchers examined the health risks of cannabis vaping by conducting a study with 2553 young adults from Southern California. They looked at different frequencies of exposure to cannabis use in order to determine whether or not any health risks were involved.
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- Category: January 2021
[...] researchers found that in 2014 people age 12 to 24 who used e-cigarettes were three times as likely to become daily cigarette smokers in the future. Among those who reported using a tobacco product, daily use increased with age through age 28. Daily cigarette smoking nearly doubled between 18 to 21 year olds (12 percent) and 25 to 28 year olds (21 percent).
"This is the first paper that actually looks at progression to dependent cigarette smoking among young adults. In these data, e-cigarettes are a gateway for those who become daily cigarette smokers," said the study's first author, John P. Pierce, [...]
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- Category: January 2021
There have been substantial recent changes in youth tobacco product use in the USA – including, notably, a rapid increase in use of e‐cigarettes. It is not known whether, and if so how far, these changes are reflected in levels of nicotine dependence. This study used data from a large, nationally‐representative sample of US adolescents to (i) estimate the annual prevalence of nicotine dependence in relation to current use of tobacco products, (ii) describe trends in dependence over time, [...]
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- Category: January 2021
This week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the third lockdown in England, which started this week and will last until around mid-February. [...] The UK fully endorses the use of vapes as smoking cessation and/or harm reduction tools, and it is a well known fact that the pressures brought about by the pandemic are leading to a lot of smoking relapses. To this effect, public health experts have been pointing out that closing vape shops at this time is particularly nonsensical. Only last October, the government-funded campaign – Stoptober, was urging smokers to quit cigarettes by switching to vaping.
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- Category: January 2021
Trade body the UK Vaping Industry Association is lobbying government to classify vape shops as essential retailers.
The lobbying effort has been ongoing since the first national lockdown in March, but the association has redoubled its efforts, warning that former smokers who have made the switch to electronic alternatives “could be tempted back”.
Furthermore, UKVIA says, many smokers will have made new year’s resolutions to quit, with vaping a good way to help them achieve this ambition.
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- Category: January 2021
Government plans to appeal the High Court ruling on the ban of cigarettes during hard lockdown last year. The court found the ban was unnecessary.
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- Category: January 2021
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will assume the offices of president and vice president at a time of great societal division as the pandemic continues to ravage the United States.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that tobacco harms have been largely overlooked amid the unfolding political drama. Yet almost half a million Americans—more even than have so far died of COVID-19—lose their lives to smoking-related causes every single year.