Philip Morris and BAT both issued statements condemning ANVISA’s decision to maintain and strengthen e-cigarette regulations to keep the products (and other ENDS products) out of Brazil. Not surprisingly, they use the same generic arguments Big Tobacco uses against almost all regulations. The reality is that, as I noted in my post congratulating ANVISA, while there is some e-cigarette use in Brazil, it is much lower than in the countries, including the US, that have tried, without much success, to regulate e-cigarettes. Indeed, if the regulations were effective, you know that the companies wou ..read more

On Friday, April 19, 2024, the board of ANVISA, the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency strengthened its already-strong ban on electronic nicotine systems (ENDS), which includes e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products. In stark contrast to the US Biden Administration, which just caved to industry pressure and blocked the FDA’s well-conceived ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, ANVISA resisted pressure from the multinational tobacco companies to water down its prohibition on the import and sale of ENDS. The industry mobilized all their usual arguments, that these products reduced har ..read more

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