Tobacco industry denormalization — the strategy of educating people about the predatory behavior of the tobacco industry — is used in many high income states and countries. Now, Roengrudee Patanavanich and I have published “Awareness of tobacco industry tactics among tobacco control communities in Thailand and its association with attitudes towards tobacco industry and perceptions of e-cigarettes” that assesses awareness of the tobacco companies’ tactics in the middle income country Thailand and how awareness of industry behavior affects knowledge and attitudes of tobacco control and public he ..read more

Philip Morris has aggressively promoted its heated tobacco product (HTP) IQOS all over the world as a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes based on the fact that IQOS delivers lower levels of some combustion products than cigarettes. IQOS is the most populat HTP in Japan, and other tobacco companies make similar claims for their HTP. Satomi Odani and colleagues make an important contribution to the actual effects of HTP on actual disease in people in their new paper “Association between heated tobacco product use and airway obstruction: a single-centre observational study, Japan.” They meas ..read more

The 1964 Report on Smoking and Health represented a turning point in the history of tobacco in the United States and the world. Now Don Shopland [photo above], who at the time was an eighteen year-old, “newly working at the National Library of Medicine,” who found himself moonlighting for the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee that prepared the report, photocopying scientific articles for the committee, just published a detailed history of the committee’s deliberations that led the the report. The book, Clearing the Air: The Untold Story of the 1964 Report on Smoking and Health, uses w ..read more

The UCSF Industry Documents Library released another 519,000 new Juul Labs documents, bringing the total number of documents to 1,053,233. This is about one-quarter of the complete collection of more than 4 million documents. Check out the Juul documents here ..read more

Juul co-founders Adam Monsees and James Bowen portray themselves as idealistic entrepreneurs committed to improving the health of billions of adult smokers with no intent to sell nicotine to non-smokers. Documents released as part of the settlement of North Carolina’s lawsuit against Juul, however, tells quite a different story. In particular, Monsees & Bowen’s 2006 prospectus – Ploom phase- C implementation plan saw former smokers and even non-smokers as important markets for Ploom, a heated tobacco product that was a precursor to Juul. Here are excerpts from the marketing plan that high ..read more

Nicholas Florko at StatNews just published an excellent piece using the newly-released Juul internal documents to describe how the company worked behind the scenes in Washington all the way down to local governments to influence, legislators, the Administration, regulatory agencies, local governments and public opinion generally by campaign contributions, quietly hiring a range of political organizations across the political spectrum. These activities follow the long-established playbook used by Big Tobacco and other powerful corporations, but the specificity is informative. None of the people ..read more

The two justifications for the FDA’s proposed product standard prohibiting menthol cigarettes and cigars are (1) it will reduce youth initiation, and (2) it will help menthol smokers to quit. Now Sarah Mills and colleagues have published a review and meta-analysis of the effects of menthol bans around the world, The Impact of Menthol Cigarette Bans: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, that shows that the benefits of a national ban would be even bigger than the FDA estimated. In particular, they found that 24% of menthol cigarette smokers quit smoking after menthol was banned. This is a huge ..read more

Yogi Hendlin, Eileen Han and Pam Ling’s new paper Pharmaceuticalisation as the tobacco industry’s endgame provides a detailed analysis of how the multinational tobacco companies have developed and used the companies efforts to reposition themselves a source for “clean” nicotine while simultaneously maintaining and expanding their sales of cigarettes and other “traditional” tobacco products where they can do so: “the transition to continuing the tobacco epidemic in declining mature markets using pharmaceutical-style nicotine products to sustain nicotine addiction, sanctioning partnership with s ..read more

In the lead up to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Tenth Conference of the Parties that starts today, advocates for e-cigarettes and other “reduced harm” tobacco products have been busy again arguing that delegates should embrace these products. In reviewing some of this material, I have been struck by the fact that their arguments, and the supporting “evidence” hasn’t changed much in the last 10 years. What has changed, however, is the actual evidence, which has been rapidly accumulating. In particular, as of a few months ago, there were nearly 10,000 peer reviewed papers on t ..read more

One of the key provisions of North Carolina’s 2021 settlement with Juul was that the documents produced in litigation would be made available to the public. The settlement required that the documents be made available through a depository run by a North Carolina university. To accomplish this, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries partnered with the UCSF Industry Documents Library to integrate the roughly 4 million documents into the existing Truth Tobacco Documents Library.   The first 280,000 documents are now available online and UNC and UCSF plan to publish t ..read more