FDA: Teen vaping has reached “epidemic” level

Is this the beginning of the end for e-cigs in the U.S..?

It sounds like a hammer might be coming down very soon, one way or the other.

The FDA is really ratcheting up the rhetoric level against e-cigarettes this week, with FDA Chief Scott Gottlieb saying new data that is soon coming out is showing that the problem of e-cigarette use by teens has grown far worse.

They sound serious. I get a little jaded that the FDA will do anything about nicotine products, but I’ve never seen such strong governmental rhetoric against e-cigarettes before.

From a Bloomberg article.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency will soon release data that show a “substantial increase” in youth vaping this year compared with 2017. He said the problem had reached “epidemic proportion.”

“I have grown increasingly concerned around what we see as rising youth use in these products, and I’m disappointed in the actions the companies have taken to try to address this,” Gottlieb said in an interview.
The FDA told five major e-cigarette manufacturers Wednesday to come up with ways to address youth use in 60 days or the agency could require them to stop selling flavored products that appeal to children. The products being targeted are: Juul, Altria Group Inc.’s MarkTen, Fontem Ventures’s blu, British American Tobacco’s Vuse and Logic.
Whoa, 60 days, so that will be mid-November.
And they’re going after the big boys. Blu, Vuse, MarkTen are about 75 percent of the e-cig market, not counting Juuls.
This new sense of urgency toward e-cigs appears to be driven somewhat by concerns over the exploding use of Juuls. Juuls are a relatively new kind of e-cig that look like a flash drive and are powered by actually plugging them into a laptop computer. They’re incredibly popular with kids.
From the Bloomberg article:

“This could result in a bullet through the head of Juul, the driver of youth initiation,” said Nico von Stackelberg, an analyst with Liberum in London.

To gain clearance to return to the market, the companies would have to prove that the benefits to adults who use e-cigarettes to stop smoking outweigh the risks associated with youth vaping.

“I certainly am in possession of evidence that warrants that,” Gottlieb said. He declined to disclose the evidence.

Of the 3.6 million middle- and high-school students who said in 2017 they are current tobacco-product users, 2.1 million used e-cigarettes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There is no question that a lot of the youth use is being driven by Juul,” Gottlieb said.

And From a Washington Post article:

Much of the FDA’s sharp change in course is a result of the phenomenal success of the Juul vaping device, which looks like a USB flash drive. In just three years, it has captured about 70 percent of the e-cigarette market, according to a Wells Fargo analysis of Nielsen sales data. The FDA has pressed Juul in recent months for information about its marketing.

“Juul was a game changer,” said Matthew Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. He listed three reasons the company became so successful: It figured out how to deliver high levels of nicotine in a way that wasn’t harsh; it packaged the product in a streamlined, clever way; and it developed a social media and advertising campaign that made a Juul e-cigarette “cool and hip.”

Keep in mind, this issue here isn’t that e-cigs are as bad as cigarettes. But,they are a nicotine-delivery system and they are effectively getting teenagers physically addicted to nicotine. And nicotine addiction is a bad thing in of itself, regardless of the delivery system. And the issue here is e-cig companies have been BRAZENLY marketing e-cig products to kids for years. I know I’ve been railing about it for years.

So, stay tuned. The end could be nigh for e-cigs.

 

 

Keytruda, a new hope

The issue of Keytruda has become near and dear to my heart the past few weeks with a close family member taking it to treat his lung cancer.

Keytruda is an immunotherapy drug that instead of poisoning the body, uses the body’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. It’s been very effective for melanoma.

Keytruda is sometimes known as “The Jimmy Carter drug.” He is the most famous Keytruda patient. In 2015, Jimmy Carter was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in his brain and liver and was given months to live. Three years later, after being given Keytruda on an experimental basis, he’s still kicking and cancer-free. In fact, now, many cancer patients are left asking their doctors “can I get the Jimmy Carter medication”?

That doesn’t mean Keytruda is some kind of “miracle drug.” It hasn’t worked on everyone. But, after being shown that it was more effective than chemotherapy for melanoma, they started giving it to lung cancer patients.

This is the best description I’ve seen about Keytruda. That it “wakes up” the body’s natural immune system and teaches it to recognize that cancer cells are not normal cells and need to be destroyed.

Keytruda is manufactured by Merck and its chemical name is pembrolizumab. There’s some similar auto-immune cancer drugs, one of which is called Opdivo.

The drug has created so much buzz that it’s gotten attention in L.A. Times articles that it could be a more effective first-line defence against lung cancer than traditional chemotherapy.

Some people call Keytruda a “miracle drug,” but it isn’t quite that. Not yet. It doesn’t cure everyone with melanoma or lung cancer, but apparently it is more effective than traditional chemotherapy. It’s a promising breakthrough. It works fantastic for some people.

Hopefully, immunotherapy will ultimately lead to a total cure for lung cancer.

Montana puts huge cigarette tax increase on ballot

Another ballot measure to watch. Montana recently put a $2 a pack cigarette tax increase on its ballot to help pay for Medicaid programs. And sure enough, a fishy organization that is quietly funded by RJ Reynolds and Altria is putting out a massive advertising campaign to stop it.

Having lived in Montana for 12 years, I suspect this ballot measure will fail. Montanans are extremely anti-tax. That being said, voters in the state did approve a $1 a pack tax increase about 12, 13 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised that it passed.

That brought Montana’s cigarette tax to $1.70 a pack, which is just below the national average. The raise to $3.70 a pack would be one of the highest taxes in the nation.

This group, called Montanans Against Tax Hikes (notice no mention of that Big Tobacco financing in its name?), is expected to spend up to $680,000 to defeat the measure. According to the Helena Independent, Montanans Against Tax Hikes is almost entirely funded by the makers of Marlboro and Camel. That would be Altria and RJ Reynolds.

That figure compares to $61,000 being spent by proponents of the tax increase. They barely seem to have a chance.

$680,000 sure seems like a lot to defeat a tax measure in a smalls state like Montana, but keep in mind, Big Tobacco spent tens of millions to defeat cigarette tax measures in California (Big Tobacco won the first time, defeating a cigarette tax increase by a few thousand votes, but lost round two, as California raised its cigarette taxes by $2 a pack thanks to a Nov. 2016 ballot measure.)

Probably roughly about 200,000 people in Montana smoke. Say they spend an average of $1,500 a year on cigarettes (that would be just less than a pack a day). It’s believed that every $1 you add to a pack’s cigarette tax drops the smoking rate about 10 percent — so a $2 a pack increase would translate into about 40,000 lost smokers. So 40,000x$1,500xper year = Now you see why Big Tobacco is willing to spend $680,000 to defeat the measure.

The measure would also tax e-cig products for the first time in Montana. The measure goes to a vote in November.

FDA thinking about ban on vaping flavours; Juuls on the radar

Oooh, I will DEFINITELY be keeping my eye on this one. The Food and Drug Administration is apparently mulling the possibility of banning vaping flavours and is reviewing any regulations that are needed for Juuls, as well.

Juuls are a fairly new type of e-cigarette that doesn’t look like an e-cig at all. It looks like a little flash drive that plugs into a laptop computer … and they DO plug into laptop computers in order to recharge.

Anyway, for now the FDA is doing anything, but will be starting an anti-teen vaping initiative in mid-September.

From a USA Today article:

This month, the FDA asked four e-cigarette companies for information about the appeal of their products to youths and said it could take enforcement action against the companies based on what it learns.

In mid-September, the FDA will launch a vaping prevention campaign targeting 10 million youths who vape or are open to trying it, Scott Gottlieb said. It will continue enforcement against retailers that sell to minors.

“We are very concerned that we could be addicting a whole generation of young people,” Gottlieb said. “We only have a narrow window of opportunity to address it.”

Instead of committing to regulate flavor, the FDA solicited more research on flavor’s role. Robin Koval, CEO of the anti-tobacco group Truth Initiative, said there is ample evidence that flavors attract teens.

USA Today interviewed a bunch of young college students who vaped. The interview that really jumped out at me came from Kevin Kee.

From the article:

Kevin Kee, 22, took up vaping to give up smoking when he was starting college but found himself going back to smoking again when he noticed the Juul was “more ingrained in my life than cigarettes ever were.”

“With the Juul, you can vape anywhere, 24/7. I went through pods way quicker – I could go through a pod in one day,” Kee said. “My tolerance was higher, and I didn’t want that kind of life coming out of college.”

Kee said he thinks people who vape to quit smoking are a minority and most people “vape just to vape.” Out of college and working, he’s given up cigarettes and vaping but fears a flavor ban would really hurt others.

“It’s become so ingrained in our culture that banning flavored nicotine would be like the prohibition,” he said.

People vape just to vape, not to quit cigarettes. I’m all for people using ecigs to get off cigarettes. What I’m not all for is kids 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds becoming addicted to nicotine to begin with via ecigs or Juuls.

Gottlieb also said that the FDA is keeping an eye on Juuls and for its alleged marketing to teens.

Also from the USA TODAY article regarding the controversial and relatively new Juuls:

A class-action lawsuit filed at U.S. District Court in San Francisco by Juul users alleged that the vaping giant used a two-pronged approach to target adult smokers and teens.

One San Diego teen said she was introduced to Juul by eighth-grade classmates. When her device broke last November, she obtained a warranty replacement through Juul’s website even though she was only 14, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit alleges Juul targeted youth and nonsmokers through ads and “social media blitzes” using “alluring imagery.” Adult smokers were wooed with the promise of a lower or equal amount of nicotine compared with a cigarette even though the product is designed to be more potent and addictive than cigarettes, the lawsuit says.

“On a puff-for-puff basis, this was designed to be more powerful than the gold standard – the cigarette,” said Esfand Nafisi, a San Francisco Bay Area attorney representing Juul users. “That potency was either not disclosed or misrepresented continuously from the time of the company’s inception.”

So, the moral of the story goes … teen smoking has been all but  eliminated, but the struggle continues, and likely will always continue as long as nicotine is a legal product and companies are looking to make billions off of it by attracting new users … be it cigarettes, e-cigs or Juuls. I suspect it will be a never-ending battle.

Cigarette butts the No. 1 cause of beach pollution

This is why I have ZERO sympathy for smokers complaining about beach smoking bans. They really have no one to blame but themselves for smoking being banned on beaches.

Here is an NBC story about the latest campaign to ban plastic straws. There’s a good argument for banning plastic straws, especially when paper straws are a perfectly usable alternative.

But, the article points out that cigarette butts have been and continue to be the champion contaminant in the oceans and on the beaches.

This story makes an interesting point, that flicking butts away on the ground is a pretty deeply ingrained behaviour that’s hard to stop. A tobacco industry study confirmed this.

From NBC News:

In industry focus groups, some smokers said they thought filters were biodegradable, possibly made of cotton; others said they needed to grind the butts out on the ground, to assure they didn’t set a refuse can afire; others said they were so “disgusted” by the sight or smell of cigarette ashtrays, they didn’t want to dispose of their smokes that way. In one focus group cited in industry documents, smokers said tossing their butts to the ground was “a natural extension of the defiant/rebellious smoking ritual.”

According to this story:

The Ocean Conservancy has sponsored a beach cleanup every year since 1986. For 32 consecutive years, cigarette butts have been the single most collected item on the world’s beaches, with a total of more than 60 million collected over that time. That amounts to about one-third of all collected items and more than plastic wrappers, containers, bottle caps, eating utensils and bottles, combined.

People sometimes dump that trash directly on to beaches but, more often, it washes into the oceans from countless storm drains, streams and rivers around the world. The waste often disintegrates into microplastics easily consumed by wildlife. Researchers have found the detritus in some 70 percent of seabirds and 30 percent of sea turtles.

Actually, I never thought of that before, that the butts are washing into the oceans though sewers.

Anyway, some people are taking an interesting tack on the cigarette butt problem — get rid of cigarette filters altogether.

Yeah, now that you think about it. Why not? It’s been long proven that cigarette butts serve no useful purpose other than trying to trick smokers that their cigarettes have been made safer. No one really buys that anymore, so why keep the filters around. The Truth Initiative has proposed simply getting rid of cigarette filters.

So cigarettes butts continue being a huge pollution problem, despite the precipitous drop in smoking rates in the West.. Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on this campaign to get rid of cigarette butts and see if it goes anywhere.