The mayor of Philadelphia last week proposed banning tobacco sales in pharmacies and drug stores.
This story jogged my memory that I think San Francisco did the same thing. Sure enough, San Francisco did ban tobacco sales in pharmacies, in fact some time ago — 2008 — longer ago than I remember.
City councilwoman Marian Tasco submitted the bill on behalf of Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter.
Nutter is a longtime anti-smoking advocate. He advocated for a state bill allowing Philadelphia to impose a $2 a pack cigarette tax (Wow, the Pennsylvania cigarette tax is $1.60 a tax, so that’s a $3.60 tax on a pack of cigarettes in Philadelphia — cigarettes have to be pretty pricey there.). He also signed a bill banning smoking in parks and as a city councilman, pushed for a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. (The state of Pennsylvania has a very weak smoking ban that still allows smoking in bars.)
CVS Pharmacies recently banned all tobacco sales at its chain of drug stores nationwide. The chain has reported that the move has not hurt its overall revenues and has urged other drug store chains to do the same. CVS also dropped out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because that group has been lobbying around the world to loosen nations’ laws restricting tobacco marketing and packaging.
So, it sounds like Philadelphia is vying with New York City and San Francisco to be one of the most smoking-unfriendly cities in the U.S. San Francisco, which recently banned chewing tobacco at AT&T Park, isn’t particularly friendly to tobacco in general.
Devastating study in the Lancet this month stating that unless smoking rates are cut in China, one-third of men in that country will die from tobacco-related disease.
Something about this article that jumped out at me. China obviously has the highest population of any nation on the planet — 1.3 billion. It also has a very high — and still growing — smoking rate.
There is an oft-quoted figure — 440,000 — this is the number of deaths the CDC and other agencies state are caused by tobacco in the United States. Some people dispute the number (people on the old smokers’ rights forums, mostly), but I believe it’s an absolutely solid number.
Well, according to the Lancet study, smoking today kills over 1 million Chinese people every year. So, just between China and the U.S., 1.44 million people a year are dying as a result of tobacco. That’s basically the entire state of Hawaii being wiped out on an annual basis.
More shockingly, that Chinese figure is expected to double to 2 million people a year by 2030.
The smoking rate is extremely high in China, especially among men. According to this study, two-thirds of Chinese men take up smoking. This study points out that since the tobacco industry in China is a government-controlled monopoly, this has a profound effect on Chinese policies regarding tobacco (though, surprisingly enough China has been implementing public smoking bans and attempting to crack down on tobacco marketing.).
From an article in Mother Jones:
he high smoking rates are fueled by low prices. “Over the past 20 years, tobacco deaths have been decreasing in Western countries, partly because of price increases,” said Richard Peto, a co-author of the study. “For China, a substantial increase in cigarette prices could save tens of millions of lives.” Pervasive myths don’t help either, including beliefs that Asians are less susceptible to tobacco’s effects and smoking is easy to quit. The World Health Organization estimates that only a quarter of Chinese adults have a “comprehensive understanding” of smoking’s hazards.
This lack of awareness is hardly surprising when you look into who’s selling the cigarettes: An estimated 98 percent of the Chinese cigarette market is controlled by China National Tobacco Corporation, a government-owned conglomerate that runs more than 160 cigarette brands. According to a Bloomberg Business feature on the topic, the industry accounts for 7 percent of the country’s revenue each year and employs roughly 500,000 people. In 2013, the company manufactured 2.25 trillion cigarettes. (Philip Morris International, the second-largest producer, manufactured 880 billion.)
“The extent to which the government is interlocked with the fortunes of China National might best be described by the company’s presence in schools,” writes Bloomberg’s Andrew Martin. “Slogans over the entrances to sponsored elementary schools read, ‘Genius comes from hard work. Tobacco helps you become talented.'”
OK, I don’t do many of these stories. I should do more. This is just too funny to pass up.
NBC News did a story last week about how a woman, apparently very drunk, tried to fire up her e-cigarette on an airplane and was told she couldn’t vape on the airplane. Even after she was told to put it away as she entered the airplane, she apparently tried to use it in her seat. For her trouble, she apparently was detained by the FBI and could face charges of interfering with a flight attendant.
After being told to put her e-cigarette away, she apparently tried to sneak in a few vapes in the bathroom. Witnesses said she then cursed at the flight attendant, exposed her breasts and threw a soda can at him. I love her explanation. “THAT is not true, I was trying to throw it in a trash can next to him.”
Yeah, because airplanes have trash cans….
She was ordered to move to the back of the plane where she apparently fell asleep. She was taken into custody after the plane landed.
“Maybe no one will mind … or notice….”
What really cracks me up about this, is at least once or twice every month, you will still to this day on the tobacco news boards (I used to see a lot of these stories back in the Topix days six, eight years ago), find a story about some smoker freaking out on an airplane after being told to put it out. Smoking has been banned on domestic flights for 25 years now 15 years on international flights. After 15 years, you will still find people who just gotta try and smoke on an airplane or in an airplane bathroom or fiddle with the bathroom smoke detector so they can smoke. Look, here’s one from just three weeks ago. And they’re usually drunk, too. I just don’t get this phenomena of drunken people lighting up on planes. You know you can’t do it, you know you won’t get away with it, you know you could go to jail for it …. all over a cigarette. But, some nitwits still try it. And now there’s going to be a few nutty vapers apparently joining that group, now. I know e-cigarettes aren’t as obnoxious as cigarettes, but c’mon, you have to know you cannot vape on an airplane. (There is no law against it, but I looked it up, no airline allows vaping.).
Hey, nicotine is nicotine. Junkie behaviour is junkie behaviour, no matter what the nicotine delivery system.
Another big New York Times article on how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is shilling around the world on behalf of Big Tobacco.
In the past several years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which used to be a fairly nonpolitical organization, but it has been transformed, mostly by its executive director Thomas Donohue, into a highly politicized lobbying organization.
And lately, much of the Chamber’s lobbying efforts have been directed toward not only defending Big Tobacco but aggressively attacking countries attempting to reign in tobacco marketing and packaging. The New York Times story uses the example of the Irish prime minister who visited the U.S. Chamber offices to lobby for investments, business opportunities in Ireland, and instead Donohue lobbied him to drop new Irish laws requiring plain packaging on tobacco products.
From the New York Times article:
Since taking over in 1997, Mr. Donohue has transformed the chamber into a powerful lobbying force, an evolution most starkly epitomized by its aggressive advocacy for tobacco. While the organization represents a variety of industries, its strategy has been a boon for cigarette makers, which have relied heavily on the chamber to push their agenda at home and abroad.
Few allies of Big Tobacco are as enduring as Mr. Donohue, who has personally lobbied the speaker of the House, the United States trade representative and the Irish prime minister on the industry’s behalf. A review of industry records, which came to light during government litigation, highlights the longevity of his ties.
In the 1990s, after taking over the chamber, Mr. Donohue fought the Justice Department’s tobacco litigation, personally lobbied against antismoking legislation in the Senate and promised “a unique role in determining the future direction of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce” to a big cigarette maker in a letter.
U.S. Chamber Executive Director Tom Donohue — New York Times photo
The US. Chamber’s lobbying efforts around the world on behalf of Big Tobacco has been talked about a lot in the past year. I’ve written about it and there’s been a number of major articles about it, including CVS Pharmacy quitting the U.S. Chamber over its tobacco lobbying. John Oliver has likewise taken on Big Tobacco’s battles against smaller countries.
This is specifically what’s changed just in the past year or two. While the U.S. Chamber has been for some time now lobbying for Big Tobacco in the U.S., it’s been putting a ton of energy into lobbying for Big Tobacco around the world lately. According to the Times article, it has gotten to the point that officials with the World Health Organization are literally calling the U.S. Chamber a “front group” for the tobacco industry.
According to the Times, a few weeks after Donohue took over at the U.S. Chamber in 1997, he received a letter from a Philip Morris executive. According the to the New York Times:
Mr. Donohue’s ambition, he wrote in a reply to the Philip Morris executive, was “to build the biggest gorilla in this town.” He scrapped the chamber’s in-house cable network and magazine, which were centerpieces of his predecessor.
“The chamber has become the antithesis of its former self,” a Philip Morris memo reported in 1999, while an executive said in an internal email, the “chamber is doing good work.”
There’s even been a revolving door between Philip Morris and the U.S. Chamber. A former Philip Morris executive is now one of the top executives in the U.S. Chamber … and better yet, a former U.S. Chamber employee is now a spokeswoman for Philip Morris International.
A very interesting article from Foreign Affairs on something I knew very little about, honestly — the World Health Organization’s groundbreaking Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, a treaty signed by most of the nations on Earth.
The FCTC was the first-ever WHO worldwide treaty. The agency had gone 50 years without using its treaty-making power and when it did, it chose to direct its power at the growth of tobacco products in international markets.
This is important because of greater awareness in the West, much higher tobacco taxes and more regulations banning smoking in workplaces, the smoking rate has dropped through most Western countries. However, the tobacco industry has adapted by turning its energies toward emerging markets in India, Africa, South America and Southeast Asia.
The FCTC came on the heels on the release of the so-called “cigarette papers,” millions of millions of internal memos and studies from the tobacco industry dating back to the 1950s which became public knowledge through the discovery process in various lawsuits against Big Tobacco. The treaty provides assistance to smaller, developing countries to battle the worldwide Big Tobacco industry in putting together tobacco control programs. The treaty, which took three years to negotiate and was first ratified by 40 countries in 2005. It has since been ratified by 180 countries representing over 90 percent of the people on Earth.
The FCTC gives smaller, poorer countries information and resources from richer countries as those nations face uphill battles with Big Tobacco in trying to implement laws regarding tobacco packaging, marketing and use in public areas. These battles have been talked by a lot by John Oliver and others with his “Jeff the Diseased Lung” campaign. Big Tobacco, oftentimes with assistance from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as its hammer, has fought tiny countries such as Togo and Uruguay (and not so tiny Australia) whenever those countries try to pass laws controlling tobacco marketing and packaging.
Some of the basic things the FCTC helps smaller nations with include some of the same things that have worked in the West to reduce tobacco use:
• Adopt tax and price measures to reduce tobacco consumption;
• Ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship;
• Create smoke-free work and public spaces;
• Put prominent health warnings on tobacco packages;
• Combat illicit trade in tobacco products.
Here’s a bit of a surprise. Macau, a huge casino and gaming resort city in Southern China near Hong Kong, is apparently seriously considering a total smoking ban in its casinos.
Surprise because the People’s Republic of China isn’t big on environmental or health regulations.
According to a study done by the local government, casino revenue, which has already been dropping the last few years, would be cut by about 4.6 percent if the ban was implemented. The study concludes that about 23 percent of the people who visit Macau are smokers and about 30 percent to 50 percent like to smoke while they are gambling.
Remember this scene from “Skyfall”? That’s Macau
SSM (A Chinese Health Agency) Director Lei Chin Ion made these estimates based on the assumption that 20 percent of the smokers who travel to Macau to gamble would go elsewhere if they couldn’t smoke.
According to this Macau News, smoking is already banned in mass gaming areas, but smoking lounges are allowed in casinos. A law being proposed would ban smoking on all casinos premises.
Clemson, the heart of tobacco country, recently announced that all tobacco products are banned on campus. The ban includes chew and e-cigarettes.
Many colleges and universities now ban tobacco products, even in deep red states like South Carolina, which have low taxes on cigarettes and lax tobacco control laws in general. No state in the Deep South has a full smoking ban, and only a few such as Georgia and Louisiana, even ban smoking in restaurants.
According to a state study, only 6.9 percent of Florida kids under 18 are smoking cigarettes, the lowest level ever recorded. However, NOT a coincidence, 15.8 percent are now using e-cigs. That number is up from 5.4 percent in 2013.
This follows a similar trend all over the country in which the teen smoking rate has plummeted in the past five years; at the same time the teen vaping rate is skyrocketing. Kids are simply ditching cigarettes for a different nicotine delivery system, one that is easy to buy and ultimately cheaper than cigarettes. And studies show kids who vape are three times MORE likely to ultimately take up cigarettes, which makes total sense to me — they got the nicotine Jones already and they gotta keep getting their little nicotine fix somehow.
So, I consider it mixed news. Kids getting addicted to nicotine sucks no matter what the delivery system. This just adds more fuel to the fire to have the Food and Drug Administration crack down on e-cig marketing to teens. The agency was supposed to issue new regulations on e-cigs months ago, but for some reason is dragging its feet. In draft regulations released a year or two ago, the agency made no recommendations to control e-cig marketing and instead recommending simply banning e-cig sales to minors (which is already banned in most states — but kids can still easily buy e-cig products, especially online.).
From an article out of West Palm Beach, Florida:
The use of e-cigarettes, and this dramatic increase that we’re seeing among youth, threatens to normalize smoking again,” said Shannon Hughes, director of the Florida Health Department’s Community Health Promotion Division. “We have worked for decades to de-normalize smoking.”
This isn’t the first study to raise alarms about the level of formaldehyde in e-cig steam. Another study about a year ago said that when e-cigs are turned up to their highest heat level, e-cigs actually give off more formaldehyde than cigarettes. (This study was roundly downplayed by the industry and e-cig advocates, who pointed that people rarely if ever charge their e-cigs at that high of a temperature.).
Formaldehyde is one of the most infamous nasty carcinogenic chemicals and substances known to be given off by tobacco cigarettes.
According to this article from the International Business Times:
An independent laboratory analysis looked at 97 e-cigarette products from two dozen manufacturers and found most emit higher levels of these cancer-causing gases than allowed under California’s Proposition 65, the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986.
Anyway, this latest CEH study completely contradicts a study done recently in the UK suggesting that e-cigs are safe and recommending that they be treated as an effective tool for helping people quit smoking cigarettes. It was a study loved by the industry and by e-cig advocates.
The Oakland, Calif.-based CEH obviously strongly disagrees. The group is planning litigation in California courts citing the state’s consumer protection act to crack down on e-cigs. The CEH cites the exceptionally blatant marketing of e-cig products to teenagers in its response to the study.
“For decades, the tobacco industry mounted a campaign of lies about cigarettes, and now these same companies claim that their e-cigarettes are harmless,” said Michael Green, executive director of CEH.
“Anyone who thinks that vaping is harmless needs to know that our testing unequivocally shows that it’s not safe to vape.
“This is especially troubling given the reckless marketing practices of the e-cigarette industry, which targets teens and young people, and deceives the public with unfounded health and safety claims. Our legal action aims to force the industry to comply with the law and create pressure to end their most abusive practices.”
The Food and Drug Administration, which for the most part has taken a pretty milquetoast approach to administering tobacco products ever since the agency was given regulatory authority over nicotine, just banned four new RJ Reynolds brands.
RJ Reynolds, long known to tobacco control advocates as the truly sleaziest tobacco company out there, will be forced to pull the brands — Camel Crush Bold, Pall Mall Deep Set Recessed Filter, Pall Mall Deep Set Recessed Filter Menthol and Vantage Tech 13 — and to stop selling them because they are new “formulations.” (Camel Crush Bold is the only one I’m familiar with.).
One part of the problem with the new brands is that one of them had a new delivery system of adding menthol to the tobacco, while RJ Reynolds resisted the FDA on providing information on the sweeteners and formulations of the new brands. From the NBC News article:
The FDA said the Camel Crush product has a little capsule of menthol in the filter that’s new. After “considerable back and forth” R.J. Reynolds was unable to show that the menthol capsule didn’t change the product’s risk and didn’t change how consumer might view the brand. As for the Pall Mall products, the company wouldn’t give FDA enough information about sweeteners and other flavors added to the cigarettes, Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, told reporters.
Retailers have 30 days to remove these brands from theirs shelves. After 30 days, the FDA has the power to simply seize them from the shelves.
From NBC News:
“Today’s decision sets an important precedent that almost certainly will apply to other brands. The FDA’s action is a critical step in preventing the introduction of tobacco products that may be more appealing to youth, more addictive or more harmful,” Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said in a statement.
“Tobacco manufacturers have a long history of continually modifying their products to make them more attractive and more addictive and introducing new brands and styles designed to appeal to specific segments of the market, including children. These tactics have been spectacularly successful in attracting new smokers, most of whom are children, and in discouraging current smokers from quitting.”
The FDA recently cracked down on RJ Reynolds for labeling its “American Spirit” brand of cigarettes as a “natural” cigarette. The agency is still holding off on regulations regarding e-cigarettes. Advocates have been waiting for months for the FDA to finally release final regs on e-cigs. So far, the agency has only proposed to disallow the sale of e-cigs to minors, which is already banned in most states. Tobacco control advocates want the FDA to ban Internet sales of e-cigs, crack down on e-cig marketing obviously directed at teens and ban sugary, fruity flavours of e-cigs.
