There have been 700,000 arrests for cannabis-related offending in Australia in the past 12 years, more than 90 per cent of them for personal use or possession.
That is the extraordinary finding from a study released [...] by public health research and drug policy organisation the Penington Institute. That’s hundreds of thousands of Australians entering the criminal justice system for use of a drug that likely does little harm to them and no measurable harm to others.
Households are staring into a financial abyss as the cost of living crisis worsens, with no end in site, says Mark Oates.
Finance commentator Martin Lewis now predicts the energy price cap could increase to £3,700 next April. Food bills continue to rise at an unprecedented rate. Filling the tank leaves many in a state of shock. And this is the new normal.
AFRICAN governments have been implored to adopt new strategies to reduce public health threats caused by tobacco as eight million deaths are recorded every year.
Health experts, who converged in Nairobi, Kenya, last week at the second edition of the Harm Reduction Exchange, noted that the tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced. [...] The experts revealed that all forms of tobacco were harmful where cigarette smoking is the most common form of tobacco use worldwide.
Swedish authorities officially confirmed that the current level of smoking in Sweden has fallen to 5,6%. This makes Swedes the only European nation close to reaching the smoke-free goal set by the EU 18 years ahead of the 2040 target. [...] Dr. Delon Human, President of Health Diplomats and organiser of the event in Stockholm said: "If all smokers in the world, some 1.1 billion people, would switch to one of less harmful alternative smoke-free, nicotine-based products, it could prevent disease and save millions of lives worldwide. Sweden has found the fire-escape for smokers. We need to work together to repeat the Swedish experience globally to save lives."
After recommendations from the Standing Committee, the Parliament may soon ban the production and sale of single cigarettes.
Is the sale of single cigarettes getting banned?
According to various reports, the Standing Committee of Parliament has put out some recommendations to reduce the use of tobacco products. This includes putting restrictions on the production and sale of single cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes is one of the prime reasons behind excessive tobacco consumption. Thus this step is expected to bring considerable changes. To reduce the consumption of tobacco, the Standing Committee has reportedly recommended restrictions on the sale of single cigarettes.
Content creators on YouTube are being forced into a terrible choice either self-mark pro-vaping content as “harmful & dangerous” or face a litany of warnings, restrictions, and inevitable channel strikes. [...]
Joining us today is top vape YouTuber GrimmGreen who fought off eradication and saved his popular YouTube channel, with 400,000 subscribers and over 80 million video views.
ELF Bar is a worldwide vape brand, particularly popular in the UK.
The company is famous for their wide range of disposable vapes, vape liquids and kits. People who are trying to quit smoking cigarettes and switching to Elf Bars instead might be wondering how many cigarettes there are in one of the vapes.
Elf Bar states that the classic Elf Bar 600 is equivalent to approximately 48 cigarettes.
The number of people smoking in the UK dropped to its lowest level on record last year but more people were using e-cigarettes, new figures have revealed.
Data from the Office for National Statistics found around 13.3% of people aged 18 or over smoked cigarettes in 2021, down from 14.0% in 2020.
But 7.7% of those aged 16 and over said they used e-cigarettes - compared to 6.4% in 2020.
The first ONS records on smoking were in 2011 and found 20.2% had smoked.
The ONS said the latest data was a "statistically significant" drop.
The current case study is based on a 25-year-old female chronic e-cig user who used between two and four mL of e-cig liquid daily for more than two years. Although she had a history of smoking less than 10 packs of cigarettes per year, she did not smoke for over three years.
This individual used THC- and nicotine-containing products, thus making her suitable for this study. Another similar-aged female subject who never smoked a cigarette or used e-cigs throughout her lifetime was used as a control.
This review describes the evolution of smoking prevalence in countries with relatively high adoption of alternative nicotine products such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco, and snus compared to neighboring countries where these products are less prevalent. The data indicate that countries with high adoption of alternative nicotine products have been able to achieve lower smoking rates. The findings suggest that adoption of alternative nicotine products may help in reduce smoking prevalence faster than traditional tobacco control measures solely focused on prevention and cessation.
COCHRANE REVIEWS ARE THE GOLD STANDARD for determining if a treatment is effective in randomised controlled trials (RCTs). The recent Cochrane review on e-cigarettes found high certainty evidence that vaping help peoples quit smoking better than traditional nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs).
This my response published today in Australian Doctor here.
In his recent interview with Australian Doctor (‘Why Cochrane got it badly wrong: Aussie expert unpicks ‘pro-vaping’ review‘), Professor Chapman dismissed the Cochrane review for not reflecting real world behaviour.
Cigarettes kill over half of their long-term users. The World Health Organisation (WHO) considers the tobacco epidemic to be one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced, killing more than eight million people per year worldwide. Smoking and exposure to second-hand smokes cause 65,000 deaths per year in England alone. It remains the largest single risk factor for death and ill-health, and is a leading cause of health inequalities in England.
On December 6, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that tobacco companies would be required to post signs in retail stores warning about the dangers of smoking.
The order concludes a long-standing civil racketeering lawsuit by the government against the largest US cigarette companies, which has been held up to varying degrees in court ever since 1999. It’s set to go into effect on July 1, 2023, and gives the relevant manufacturers—Altria, Philip Morris USA, R.J. Reynolds and ITG Brands (a subsidiary of Imperial)—a further three months to post the mandated “corrective statements.”
Later this week, the European Union is expected to release a new Tobacco Tax Directive, the first update in more than a decade. Early reports indicate that the EU will propose a significant increase to the existing minimum cigarette tax rates levied across the Union and expand the product categories that are taxed, including a block-wide vaping tax.
If the EU decides to increase the scale and scope of tobacco taxation, they will miss a real opportunity to decrease both the harms of smoking and the harms of punitive fiscal policy. Decades of empirical research have found that most smokers keep smoking despite tax-induced price increases and that most of these smokers come from low-income households. [...]
The Swedish government has officially confirmed that smoking rates in the country have dropped to 5.6 percent, setting up the nation to become the first in Europe to reach “smoke free” status. The designation “smoke free,” at least in the European Union and the United Kingdom, refers to smoking prevalence of less than 5 percent in a given population.
Sweden’s success is attributable, in large part, to tobacco harm reduction (THR). But rather than the vapes that are replacing smoking in the UK, say, or the heated tobacco products that have seen cigarette sales plummet in Japan, a third major THR option is key to the Swedish story: snus, a moist oral tobacco product that’s placed inside the upper lip.
There’s an oversimplified notion that only Big Tobacco supports vaping. On the contrary, thousands of small businesses, selling vapor products manufactured by small companies, are the backbone of tobacco harm reduction in the United States. Until recently, I ran one of them.
Much of my family smoked cigarettes. After a heart attack at age 29, my son switched to vaping. He then opened a vape shop in Brainerd, a small town in Minnesota, to help others quit smoking. That included me; I was his first accidental quitter. We both quit smoking using a rainbow sherbet flavor.
Embattled vaping company Juul Labs has reached settlements covering thousands of lawsuits over its e-cigarettes, which in recent years became a scourge in schools and communities nationwide.
Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Juul said that it has secured an equity investment to fund it.
Buffeted by lawsuits, Juul announced hundreds of layoffs last month and bankruptcy appeared increasingly likely as it secured financing to continue operations.
Early in November, a website called Tobacco Tactics, which calls itself “the essential source for rigorous research on the tobacco industry,” posted information about a small organization called the International Association on Smoking Control and Harm Reduction, or SCOHRE. [...] Tobacco Tactics’ 1,000-word description of SCOHRE is a model of innuendo and guilt by association. The founders of SCHORE, including a Norwegian tobacco control expert named Karl Erik Lund, stood accused of having “tobacco industry links” as well as “connections” to the Foundation for A Smoke Free World, which is funded by Philip Morris International.
British American Tobacco (BATS.L) said on Thursday it expects full-year revenue growth of between 2% and 4% at constant currency rates, as more people are using its e-cigarettes and oral nicotine products.
BAT forecast mid-single digit adjusted diluted earnings per share growth on a constant currency basis for the year ending Dec. 31.
The Lucky Strike cigarette maker also expects "strong adjusted operating margin improvement despite increasing inflation in our supply chain."
Adolescent cannabis abuse has increased 245% since 2000 in the US, while alcohol abuse has steadily declined over the same period.
That’s according to a national, peer-reviewed study tracking intentional misuse and abuse reported to the National Poison Data System (NPDS) up until 2020.
Findings [...] find over 338,000 instances of intentional abuse or misuse amongst American children aged 6-18.
The majority of ingestions occurred in males (58.3%), and more than 80% of all reported exposure cases occurred in young people aged 13 to 18.
In total, over 32% of instances resulted in “worse than minor clinical outcomes”.
