Tobacco Control Has Another Bad Idea & More @ Vape-Deals

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Tobacco Control thinks safer nicotine products should need a prescription. Tobacco company pretends to care about public health. Two new studies falsely claim to find evidence of harm. Vape companies prevail in lawsuit against FDA and more!

Scroll to the bottom of this post for a link to the audio/video versions of this post!

CALLS TO ACTION

⚠️UPDATE⚠️

There was already a committee meeting on July 31st, so please contact your lawmakers ASAP!

Vapor products are currently taxed at a rate of just 5¢ per milliliter for products with less than 3 mL of liquid, and wholesalers pay only 10% of the purchase price for products containing over 3 mL of liquid. LB 1 would raise the tax on ALL vapor products to 30% of the wholesale cost! To put this in perspective, a 3 mL vape that once cost a consumer just 15¢ in tax could now have a wholesale tax of $3 or more added onto the purchase price.

TAKE ACTION: Nebraska: Stop a Tax Hike on Vaping!

CALLS TO ACTION:  GET INVOLVED: Calls to Action By State

TOBACCO CONTROL

Tobacco Control Has Another Bad Idea: Safer Products Should Require Prescription

“Doctors, tobacco researchers and political leaders warn that Zyn’s marketing — which shows the brand in smoke-free environments like at work and in transportation — may perpetuate nicotine addiction among existing users or introduce nicotine to younger people.”

“A better strategy from a public health approach, says Pamela Ling, the director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California San Francisco, “would be to tailor nicotine pouch availability to prescriptions, smoking cessation clinics, quit lines and other programs to help consumers with tobacco and nicotine addiction.”

Meanwhile, the most deadly tobacco product–cigarettes–would still be easy to buy just about everywhere. Good plan.

Every single adult who currently smokes was once a younger person who didn’t smoke. The idea that making safer alternatives to smoking more difficult to purchase than cigarettes will keep young people from ever smoking (or encourage adults to quit nicotine use) is delusional.

Furthermore, adults who are existing nicotine consumers may be more concerned about the far greater health effects of smoking than the extremely low risks from smoke-free nicotine products. Either way, whether or not they want to continue using nicotine is not any one else’s business.

Common sense dictates that safer nicotine products should be sold right next to the deadly products they replace, not locked up behind a pharmacy counter!

READ MORE: Big Tobacco’s viral hit may be its biggest success since cigarettes

Big Tobacco Company Pretends to Care About Public Health

Imperial Tobacco Canada (a subsidiary of British American Tobacco,) which sells 10 brands of cigarettes in Canada, has the audacity to say the availability of “illegal” smoke-free nicotine products is the “serious public health issue” that the Canadian government needs to address.

We live in a truly bizarro world.

READ MORE: Imperial Tobacco Canada calls for quick and decisive enforcement of regulations

 

FDA NEWS

Kentucky PMTA Lawsuit

A Kentucky judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the state’s new PMTA registry law. The new law will ban the sale in Kentucky of all vape products except those that have either have received FDA authorization, are still undergoing review by the FDA, are currently undergoing appeal, or have had an FDA marketing denial order (MDO) stayed or reversed by the FDA or a court.

Attorney Greg Troutman told The Kentucky Lantern earlier that his clients would appeal the decision.

READ MORE: Kentucky Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Challenging PMTA Registry Law

Vape Companies Prevail in FDA Lawsuit

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that five more #vaping product companies may continue to sell their products until the FDA conducts new scientific reviews of their applications (PMTAs.) The court found that those five petitions posed the same issues as an earlier case ruling involving Triton Distribution.

The FDA appealed the Triton ruling in the Supreme Court, which is expected to be decided in the spring and could have a profound effect on the agency’s vaping product regulatory practices.

READ MORE: Fifth Circuit Cites Triton as Precedent to Vacate Five More MDOs

 

TOBACCO HARM REDUCTION

Commentary: THR Advocates Have a Huge Obstacle to Overcome

“Nicotine was not only that generally sinister thing, a “chemical,” but it was one you could become addicted to. Again, it’s understandable that people who weren’t specialists in addiction science wouldn’t realize that the concept itself was a much-debated thing, and people who had grown up in a War on Drugs era when “drug addicts” were seen as an undifferentiated group of miserable, ruined junkies naturally saw addiction itself—regardless of the addictive substance concerned—as a terrible condition.

Again, of course, there are those who ought to know better who use the concept to spread distrust; it amused me a few years ago when the then U.S. surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said that nicotine was “as addictive as heroin.” Leaving aside the whole issue of how you assess comparative addictiveness, the logical corollary here was that heroin is no more addictive than nicotine, but I doubt he would have wanted to spread that as a public health message.”

In any case, some definitions of addiction or dependency now stipulate that it must be harmful, and it’s highly questionable whether nicotine—once separated from cigarette smoking—falls into that category. So there’s even a case to be made that nicotine addiction doesn’t exist as a problem in the first place. But the bottom line is that it is widely perceived to be harmful and addictive.

And that is a huge obstacle for THR to overcome.”

~ Barnaby Page, @ECigIntel

READ MORE: The Case for Nicotine

 

RESEARCH

Despite Bold Claim, Study Fails to Show Evidence

“This study presents clear evidence showing that vaping in addition to smoking can increase your risk for lung cancer.”

~ Marisa Bittoni, Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute.

No, it really doesn’t.

Here is the study link: Vaping, Smoking and Lung Cancer Risk

Researchers compared people who smoked and vaped at the time of their lung cancer diagnosis to people with lung cancer who smoked but didn’t vape;  people with lung cancer who neither smoked nor vaped, and people without cancer who smoked and/or vaped.

A quick review shows that they did not:

  • Determine whether or not the person vaped at all before being diagnosed with cancer.
  • Determine how long each person vaped before being diagnosed with cancer.
  • Determine how often, how much or what the person vaped in addition to smoking.
  • Compare cancer rates for people who both smoked and vaped with people who had quit smoking and just vaped.
  • Compare cancer rates for people who both smoked and vaped with people who had never smoked and only ever vaped.
  • Adjust for people who smoked more than 1 pack of cigarettes per day.
  • Have “consistent information on duration of smoking cessation or the levels of continued cigarette smoking among those who reported vaping.”

Therefore, they cannot establish that it was the vaping that increased the risk of cancer. It could be that those people smoked more heavily than those who didn’t vape and just so happened to have started vaping as a means to quit just before their diagnosis.

The researchers are missing way too much information to conclude that vaping was the cause of the increased risk.

READ MORE: Smoking, vaping called a deadly combination for lung cancer risk

No Evidence Here Vaping Causes Myocardial Infarction

Imagine that you’re doing a study on weight gain. You survey people who are overweight and ask them if they drink diet soda. You don’t know if they were drinking diet soda before they became overweight or for how long they’ve been drinking diet soda. However, because you found that people who drink diet soda were more likely to be overweight, you conclude that means diet soda “probably” causes weight gain.

Of course, you wouldn’t do something so silly, but that’s pretty much what they did with this study — except with myocardial infarction and e-cigarette use. They didn’t ask the subjects if they were even vaping before they were diagnosed with myocardial infarction, yet go on to say that there’s still “probably” an association.

This is in spite of their own admission that:

“In the absence of information about the type or extent of myocardial infarction or the order of presentation between MI/CHD and the use of e-cigarettes, we cannot assess whether the exposure occurred before or after the outcome; therefore, we cannot determine the temporal association between them.”

Translation: We don’t know which came first, the myocardial infarction or the e-cigarette use, so we don’t actually have any evidence that e-cigarettes played a part in causing the myocardial infarction. ‍

Unsurprisingly, past studies that attempted to link vaping with myocardial infarction suffered from the nearly identical fatal “chicken or the egg” flaw.

READ MORE: Association between the use of electronic cigarettes and myocardial infarction in U.S. adults

 

Real people. Real Stories.

“Anecdote” #13,544:

Without access to the vaping options that worked for her—such as pleasant flavors and non-nicotine liquids—Patricia would likely still be smoking today. Adults who smoke depend on these products. What happens if those products are then banned?

SHARE YOUR SUCCESS STORY:  CASAA Testimonial Project

CASAA IN ACTION // CASAA Live

On this week’s episode, join Alex and Logan as they discuss hot topics in Tobacco Harm Reduction, including the recent authorization of menthol vaping products, the Supreme Court Chevron decision and the anti-nicotine “end game.”

CASAA Live will return this fall!

TAKE ACTION // CASAA State Facebook Groups

Have you joined your CASAA State Facebook group yet? Check it out now! Click the link below, click on your state on the map, then click the “Join Now” button to go to your state’s group page. It’s as easy as that to stay updated on local happenings, meet local advocates and never miss a Call to Action in your state!

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FIND YOUR GROUP: CASAA State Locator

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VISIT: CASAA Apparel and Swag Store

CASAA MEDIA // Spotify

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CASAA MEDIA // Podcast

Catch up on past tobacco harm reduction news with Alex and Logan on the CASAA podcasts on SoundCloud every Monday and now live on YouTube and Facebook every Saturday at 3:30 PM.

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