In the News October 4th
Tuesdays News at a glance:
Council wants staff to report colleagues who smoke or use an e-cigarette on site – More Crookedness – Countries Will Go To Great Lengths to Protect Their Tobacco Revenues – Home Smoking Bans: The Next Confidence Trick – E-cigarettes linked with higher quitting success rate, provide no change in total quit attempts – Part 2 | Glantz on e-Cigs | Promoting the Tobacco Epidemic – Special issue on electronic cigarettes – Presidential Campaign Endorses Vaping – BAT providing e-cig leadership – Stop burning cash on anti-smoking schemes
Council wants staff to report colleagues who smoke or use an e-cigarette on site
Simon Clark, Taking Liberties
Tomorrow (Monday) Aberdeenshire Council introduces a ban on smoking and the use of e-cigarettes on all council sites.
If you think that’s bad read this. According to the council:
“Individuals are accountable for monitoring implementation of the policy on-site and must report anyone not complying.”
Last week I said no smoking zones in parks and other outdoor areas were “unwarranted” and “Orwellian” but this really is Orwellian.
Countries Will Go To Great Lengths to Protect Their Tobacco Revenues
Phil Busardo, Taste Your Juice
I received this story from an upset vaper who prefers to remain anonymous. It simply amazes me how something like vaping, one of the most important health advancements in our lifetime when it comes to combating cigarette related disease, is under such furious attack.
I continue to believe the attacks are due to vaping threatening big pharma, big tobacco and big revenues. Our health be damned.
Just unreal…
Home Smoking Bans: The Next Confidence Trick
Dick Puddlecote
Back in 2009, Deborah Arnott was caught off-guard and revealed the true extent of her prohibitionist ambitions.
It must have caught the fake charities as cold as it caught Forest though, as they were all wibbling at cross purposes.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said the charity was in favour of a ban on smoking in cars.The risks were not just to children but to adults suffering from conditions like heart disease, she said.
That’s the problem with being caught off-guard, Debs wasn’t able to tailor her junk science quickly enough to the nonsense in hand so had to just grab what she was working on at the time – the total ban on smoking in cars, with or without children present. An interesting view into the future, I thought.
At the time, she was selling a policy of banning smoking only in cars containing children. She was very clear about that and would have told every MP who would listen that it wasn’t an assault on property rights at all, oh no, merely an issue of protecting kids from a mythical exaggerated danger that her and her professional bansturbators fabricated to keep the gravy train going.
E-cigarettes linked with higher quitting success rate, provide no change in total quit attempts
Healio
Although e-cigarettes’ increased popularity in England has not coincided with a significant change in overall attempts to quit smoking, their prevalence appears positively associated with the success rate of individual quit attempts, according to data published in BMJ.
“There has been concern that the increase in population use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) could be undermining quitting activities,” Emma Beard, PhD, MSc, of the research department of clinical, educational and health psychology at University College London, and colleagues wrote. “If this is true, then e-cigarettes could have a negative effect on public health, even if they might increase the chances of success for an individual smoker using them in a given quit attempt.”
Part 2 | Glantz on e-Cigs | Promoting the Tobacco Epidemic
Brent Stafford, Regulator Watch
When Public Health England, the nation’s primary health authority, put these words into print “e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful to your health than normal cigarettes” it sparked celebration in the vaping world and a cascade of controversy amongst public health officials and anti-smoking activists.
Are e-cigarettes really 95% safer than smoking? Stanton Glantz says no!
He thinks the 95% number was “made-up” by a group of people who have financial conflicts of interest and no evidence to backup their claims.
Tune in for Part 2 of our EXCLUSIVE interview with UCSF professor Stanton Glantz, the world’s most well-known tobacco control activist and the man who beat Big Tobacco in the 1990’s.
Inspired by #inktober2016 challenge #ecigs #vaping #cartoon pic.twitter.com/hPRCOQA0IB
— Dr Marewa Glover (@MarewaGlover) October 3, 2016
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU61z2Ce4mM]
Special issue on electronic cigarettes
Toxicology Mechanisms and Methods
The recent rise in public interest in electronic nicotine deliv-ery systems (ENDS) such as electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes)has attracted significant attention from health practitioners,policy makers and regulatory authorities, investigativeresearchers, and the private industry. Tobacco use is clearlypreventable, and according to health authorities at regulatoryagencies is the single largest preventable cause of diseaseand death in the United States (FDA,2016). E-cigarettes havebeen developed in recent years and predicated as an alterna-tive to combustible cigarettes in a harm-reduction strategy.However, there are many outstanding questions regardingthe role and impact of electronic cigarettes in public health,and many of these have been brought forth in both scientificand medical publications as well as government reports(DHHS,2014; Grana et al.,2014; Kosmider et al.,2014;McNeill et al.,2015; Nelson,2014). Long-term adverse healtheffects of e-cigarettes or ENDS remain poorly understood.
Presidential Campaign Endorses Vaping
Daniel Hall, Guide to Vaping
For the last several months, vapers around the United States have asked questions of politicians, from the steps of State Houses to the halls of the nation’s Capital. With the implementation of the FDA’s regulatory stranglehold set to destroy an entire industry in less than 3 years, the 9 million users of electronic cigarettes and 12,000 companies that look after their needs have tried to get straight answers. Lawsuits have been filed and legislation has been put into place to try to minimise the damage of the archaic ruling of a Federal Agency that is out of step with scientific evidence.
While our Cousins in the United Kingdom are embracing this technology as a way to aid smokers quit combustible tobacco, with everyone from The Royal College of Physicians to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, endorsing vaping as a public health gift that’s 95% less harmful, we’ve been left with an awkward silence from those who are attempting to become the next “Leader of the Free World”.
BAT providing e-cig leadership
Tobacco Reporter
Vapor from electronic cigarettes is non-toxic to human lung cells under normal usage conditions, according to a British American Tobacco press note citing one of two papers published on Friday.
Even when tests were performed using what was described as ‘extremely unrealistically high doses’, electronic cigarette vapor proved to be significantly less toxic to human lung cells than did cigarette smoke.
And whereas cigarette smoke was cytotoxic even at levels typically observed in real life use, lung cells exhibited low levels of cytotoxicity only after exposing them to an amount of vapor equivalent to a day’s exposure in just one hour.
“We only saw signs of cytotoxicity from the e-cigarette aerosols when we used unrealistically high levels of vapor,” said Dr. Chris Proctor, BAT’s chief scientific officer. “The conservative approach we took means that it is unlikely that normal vaping use would yield cytotoxic effects, even at the low levels observed here.”
Stop Burning Cash on Anti-Smoking Schemes
Mark Littlewood, The Times
I must be a great disappointment to the organisers of Stoptober — the annual effort to persuade cigarette smokers to abstain from their unhealthy habit for a full calendar month. As someone who has smoked heavily for more than a quarter of a century, I should be the key target for this project. If I don’t quit now, I’m told there’s a fair to middling chance that, sooner or later, cigarettes will be the death of me.
Visit Nicotine Science & Policy for more News from around the World
