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- Category: February 2019
I am writing in response to Alice Wu’s commentary on the government’s recent e-cigarette ban, “E-cigarette ban is clueless, elitist government at its worst (February 17)”. [...] Ms Wu’s interpretation of the research paper she cites is misguided. The observed effect of e-cigarettes on smoking cessation is due to regulation of the amount of use and close monitoring of the subjects by clinical professionals. [...]
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- Category: February 2019
It’s incredible the things that have changed for the vaping industry over the last couple of years, and the things that have stayed just the same. One of the most common problems facing the vaping industry is the lack of understanding among the general public to the harm reduction and smoking cessation value they offer. At first, it was forgivable for so many to not know, but with the massive pile of evidence we now have, it’s a shame so many public health institutions still undermine the value of vaping. [...]
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- Category: February 2019
Doctors are calling for a crackdown on vaping devices as the number of kids and teens using the products skyrockets.
More kids than ever before are using these electronic cigarettes which can contain nicotine or marijuana and the I-Team found parents and schools are having a hard time keeping up. Parents were surprised when they saw the seemingly every day-looking items are actually electronic cigarettes, some hold up to 50 doses or more of nicotine.
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- Category: February 2019
As Arizona and other states consider legislation to limit the sale and use of e-cigarettes, researchers at the University of Arizona and elsewhere are urging caution regarding the potential danger of secondhand vapor from the devices.
E-cigarettes are often touted as a safer alternative to regular cigarettes. But studies show that the vapor released by e-cig users is not “just water,” as e-cigarette companies advertise.
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- Category: February 2019
Student smokers no longer exude the potent smell of marijuana in its original state, which alarms both College advisors and law enforcement. Smoking methods that require the original flower form of marijuana such as joints, blunts or bongs that emit the alerting smell are seemingly obsolete.
This common routine for students has become a concerning phenomenon to Janice Vermeychuk, the nurse practitioner director at Student Health Services.
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- Category: February 2019
Survey results published this week indicate that cigarette smoking was about as common among high school students last year as it was in 2017. Is this evidence that the surge in adolescent vaping is finally reversing the decline in adolescent smoking that began in the late 1990s? Probably not.
In the 2018 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), [...] 8.1 percent of high school seniors reported smoking cigarettes in the previous month, compared to 7.6 percent in 2017. The difference was not statistically significant. [...]
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- Category: February 2019
Robert Chan lit his first cigarette aged 18. He quickly became hooked, smoking 15 a day for more than a decade. [...] Two years ago, on his 30th birthday, Chan started using a device that heats tobacco -- instead of burning it -- to release a nicotine-laced vapor.
Chan is one of the 35 million people around the world believed to be using e-cigarettes or heat-not-burn products, according to Euromonitor.
"I wanted to stop smoking but I wasn't quite ready to quit nicotine yet," he says. [...]
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- Category: February 2019
As a relatively new device, it’s not uncommon for vaporizers to receive a lot of scrutiny from public health institutions over their overall risk and impact, especially on teens. But while a growing pile of evidence indicates vaping is an extremely powerful smoking cessation and harm reduction tool, it’s had little impact on how much heat e-cigarettes get from the FDA. Things have been ramping up in the battle over vaping for the last couple of years, but it seems to be coming to a head as Commissioner Gottlieb continues his crusade against the vaping industry. [...]
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- Category: February 2019
Absolute safety does not exist, it is always relative to some reference, to an exposure dose or to a delivery path. No substance or product or medication is 100% safe independently of all these factors: [...] Whenever you hear the phrase “…there is no safe level of exposure to …X”, you can be certain that it is scare mongering about X, not toxicological science. Rather than asking “is it safe?”, the right question should be “is it safer than X?”, where X is an appropriate standard. Your question should be “when will we know if e-cigarettes are “safer than ..X?”.
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- Category: February 2019
Smokers need all the help they can get to quit cigarettes. New research reported in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine confirms that e-cigarettes are significantly more effective than FDA-approved nicotine medicines in helping smokers end their deadly habit.
This study is impressive proof of the scientific concept known as tobacco harm-reduction: the substitution of vastly safer smoke-free tobacco products like e-cigarettes and smokeless tobacco by smokers who are unable or unwilling to become nicotine and tobacco abstinent.
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- Category: February 2019
Buried deep within the article is the rather startling, but most critically relevant finding of the entire study: The investigators were unable to report a single youth out of the 12,000 in the sample who was a cigarette naive, regular vaper at baseline who progressed to become a smoker at follow-up. Why? Because the number of these youth was so small that it was impossible to accurately quantify this number.
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- Category: February 2019
Over 300 million people in India regularly use tobacco products, with a third using cigarette-type products and twice as many using oral tobacco. The use of these products causes over 1 million premature deaths annually in the country, and as the population and disposable income increases, this toll can be expected to worsen significantly.
It’s is a public health catastrophe, and for many people the story ends there. [...]
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- Category: February 2019
Philip Morris International (PMI), the world’s largest tobacco company, mulls the introduction in the Philippines of its heated-not-burned cigarette technology that it hopes could be categorized differently from the conventional tobacco saying its portfolio of smoke-free products significantly reduces the harmful effects caused by tobacco smoking.
James Arnold, PMI director [...] told [...] that its portfolio of smoke-free products presents less risk of harm to smokers than the traditional cigarette.
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- Category: February 2019
The annual Public Health England SmokeFree Health Harms campaign, now in its seventh year, focuses on the toxins present in cigarette smoke and their harmful effects on the body. A novel feature this year is emphasis on the relative safety of e-cigarettes compared with smoking. A video shows sticky yellow black sludge appearing after a few packets of cigarettes are smoked through a simulator. The same noxious material is being deposited in the lungs of smokers and the shock value of the “jar of tar” is a familiar tool.
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- Category: February 2019
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the U.S. government’s preeminent agency governing electronic communications, telephonic infrastructure, the internet, television, and radio.
This agency’s regulatory purview also covers digital and electronic advertisements for tobacco products. Citing this justification, Obama-era FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel has voiced her concerns over e-cigarette advertisement and the so-called risks to youth who consume digital media.
Hong Kong health minister Sophia Chan compares e-cigarettes to an epidemic as she defends coming ban
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- Category: February 2019
Hong Kong’s health minister likened the e-cigarette trend to an epidemic on Thursday, as she defended the government’s push to remove alternative cigarettes from the market, saying they posed new challenges to the authorities’ drive to deter teenagers from picking up smoking. While seeking to prohibit the sale and supply of such products, Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee said, the administration was not pushing for a complete ban, as it was not trying to punish the users themselves.
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- Category: February 2019
The government’s war on e-cigarettes is simply bizarre – and that’s putting it nicely. Of all the unhealthy lifestyle choices available to – or forced upon – Hongkongers, why are e-cigarettes the only item being targeted? The biggest beneficiaries of the ban, traditional tobacco companies that have not invested in researching and developing new alternatives, can now laugh all the way to the bank.
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- Category: February 2019
Nearly every authority agrees; we are in the midst of a public health epidemic.
In November, the American Medical Association, representing the nation’s physicians, called on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to take action against the “urgent public health epidemic” of skyrocketing e-cigarette use.
In early December, then-Senator Hatch (R-UT) introduced the Smoke Free Schools Act, which — among other measures — called on the FDA [...] to discourage e-cigarette use among students and to study gaps in knowledge of the harms of e-cigarettes on youth, [...]
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- Category: February 2019
New regulations will allow the legal sale of e-cigarettes and vaping devices in the UAE for the first time.
Manufacturers will be allowed to sell the battery-powered products as long as they meet new standards and carry health warnings similar to traditional cigarettes.
The Emirates Authority for Standardisation and Metrology confirmed the move on Sunday. The new rules - known as UAE.S 5030 - allow the sale of electronic cigarettes, electronic pipes, electronic shisha devices plus the liquid refills.
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- Category: February 2019
‘A lot of people still think e-cigarettes are not harmful,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said last week. “But studies show that nicotine is, pound for pound, as addictive as heroin.” Dr. Adams, speaking to the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, was making an appeal to fear, not science. Drug consumption is measured by the dosage, not the pound.
More fundamentally, the concept of “addictiveness” is so vague that it can easily be manipulated. There isn’t a single agreed-upon scientific definition. [...]