Any government permitting the promotion of usage of a product that when used as intended has a scientific certainty of killing its citizenry1 is not aiding and abetting "free markets"—at best it's aiding and abetting negligent homicide; at worst its guilty of mass murdering its citizenry. Kudos to the Australian High Court for its decision in JT International SA v Commonwealth of Australia; British American Tobacco Australasia [sic] Limited & Ors v Commonwealth of Australia |
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Scientific process and progress can be expected to routinely and sometimes rapidly render products harmful or deadly—it's a perverse national or international legal system that permits or enables scientific process and progress to promote products that when used as intended kills its citizenry2, 3.
Res:
UPDATED 08/18/2017 AJHP, Tobacco Industry Research on Nicotine Replacement Therapy: “If Anyone Is Going to Take Away Our Business It Should Be Us”
UPDATED 05/02/2017 AHA, Loss of Cardio-Protective Effects at the ADAMTS7 Locus Due to Gene-Smoking Interactions
UPDATED 04/19/2017 NatureSciRpts, Reduced biological effect of e-cigarette aerosol compared to cigarette smoke evaluated in vitro using normalized nicotine dose and RNA-seq-based toxicogenomics
UPDATED 01/31/2017 TobaccoControl, Global Economic Cost of Smoking Attributable Diseases
"The amount of healthcare expenditure due to smoking-attributable diseases totalled purchasing power parity (PPP) $467 billion (US$422 billion) in 2012, or 5.7% of global health expenditure. The total economic cost of smoking (from health expenditures and productivity losses together) totaled PPP $1852 billion (US$1436 billion) in 2012, equivalent in magnitude to 1.8% of the world's annual gross domestic product (GDP). Almost 40% of this cost occurred in developing countries, highlighting the substantial burden these countries suffer.
Smoking imposes a heavy economic burden throughout the world, particularly in Europe and North America, where the tobacco epidemic is most advanced. These findings highlight the urgent need for countries to implement stronger tobacco control measures to address these costs."
UPDATED 01/12/2017 WHO, Tobacco control can save billions of dollars and millions of lives (NCI Tobacco Control Monograph Series 21 - The Economics of Tobacco and Tobacco Control)
UPDATED 11/11/2016 CDC, Trends in Current Cigarette Smoking Among High School Students and Adults, United States, 1965–2014
Our government must continue its creative efforts to drive smoking prevalence in the United States well below 12%, preferably zero.
The notion that our government (or any government) would passively or actively help a corporation(s) or entity(ies) to stream into national or international commerce a product(s), which when used as intended kills its citizenry is shockingly negligent, at best. Our government must make sure that all incentives for a corporation or entity, which engages in such activity are constantly and consistently negative. (hint: providing a startup guide, Getting Started in the Tobacco Industry is not negative!)
Also, Treasury Tobacco Statistics; WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic Raising Taxes on Tobacco 2015; WHO Global Report on Trends in Prevalence of Tobacco Smoking 2015;
UPDATED 11/03/2016 COSMIC, Signatures of Mutational Processes in Human Cancer and Nature, Signatures of mutational processes in human cancer (2013) A primer article on base pair signatures.
UPDATED 10/03/2016 CDC, Current Cigarette Smoking Among U.S. Adults Aged 18 Years and Older and CDC, 2014 Crude Prevalence Smoker Status by State BRFSS
UPDATED 09/21/2016 CDC, Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking
UPDATED 04/01/2016 Cell, DNA Methylation in Newborns and Maternal Smoking in Pregnancy: Genome-wide Consortium Meta-analysis
UPDATED 09/14/2015 Nature, Tobacco smoke carcinogens, DNA damage and p53 mutations in smoking-associated cancers
UPDATED 09/09/2015 MedNews, What is nicotine?
UPDATED 08/15/2015 NIH, Smoking, p53 Mutation, and Lung Cancer
UPDATED 07/24/2015 FDA, Tobacco Products; (August - Biomarkers of Tobacco Exposure: A Public Workshop)
UPDATED 07/02/2015 SmokeFree
UPDATED 03/14/2015 NAP, Understanding the U.S. Illicit Tobacco Market: Characteristics, Policy Context, and Lessons from International Experiences and Public Health Implications of Raising the Minimum Age of Legal Access to Tobacco Products
UPDATED 11/02/2014 UCSF, The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and NIH, The economic burden of smoking in California, [1999] (pdf) and TRDRP, The Cost of Smoking in California, [2009] dated October 2014 (pdf)
UPDATED 10/03/2013 WHO, FCTC [ Framework Convention on Tobacco Control] Health Warnings Database and WHO, MPower Tobacco Free Initiative (TFI) and WHO, Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2013: Enforcing Bans on Tobacco Advertising, Promotion and Sponsorship (pdf)
Pictures and pictograms are important in countries whose development has not yet achieved sufficient educational attainment.
It's not without significant irony that the same economic system capable of propelling a nation's development is also capable of propelling a nation's demise, if or when incorrectly operated and managed.
Our nation has signed the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control but Congress has not, yet ratified it. Our Congress may be applying its bizarre and delusional "Exceptional America" logic to justify its failure to ratify this important international framework?
UPDATED 08/17/2012 Lancet, Tobacco use in 3 billion individuals from 16 countries: an analysis of nationally representative cross-sectional household surveys (available at no cost but requires registration)
UPDATED 08/17/2012 CDC, Cigarette Package Health Warnings and Interest in Quitting Smoking --- 14 Countries, 2008--2010
Web:
UPDATED 11/21/2019 AMA, AMA calls for total ban on all vaping products not approved by FDA
...it's unclear why the FDA would approve any vaping product...
UPDATED 09/08/2019 CDC, Outbreak of Lung Illness Associated with Using E-cigarette Products UPDATED 08/20/2019 Wired, Vaping May Harm Your Blood Flow—Even Without Nicotine and RSNA, Acute Effects of Electronic Cigarette Aerosol Inhalation on Vascular Function Detected at Quantitative MRI
"Inhaling nicotine-free electronic cigarette aerosol transiently impacted endothelial function in healthy nonsmokers. Further studies are needed to address the potentially adverse long-term effects on vascular health."
UPDATED 08/09/2019 ChemistryWorldOpEd, Smoking Kills: It Could Be Lights Out When You Light Up…"A murder weapon that self-destructs. It’s like something out of a spy story or an elaborate crime drama."...
...corporations and people trafficking in tobacco products (heat or burn) require strict control to reduce proliferation of these deadly munitions...
UPDATED 06/24/2019 WSJ, San Francisco Set to Ban E-Cigarettes and Nature, The Debate Over e-cigarettes Demands Stronger Evidence of Their Value
UPDATED 05/20/2019 UPI, Study: Half of Juul's Twitter Followers Are Teens, Young Adults
UPDATED 05/12/2019 Reuters, Exclusive: Philip Morris Suspends Social Media Campaign After Reuters Exposes Young 'Iinfluencers'
...capitalists should not await more regulations, lawsuits, or overwhelming harm before stopping their production of these class of products...
UPDATED 01/30/2019 Reuters, Exclusive: Juul Plans India e-Cigarette Entry with New Hires, SubsidiaryUPDATED 12/20/2018 NYT, Juul Closes Deal With Tobacco Giant Altria and NYT, Did Juul Lure Teenagers and Get ‘Customers for Life’? and HHS, Surgeon General Releases Advisory on E-Cigarette Epidemic Among Youth
...brazen doesn't describe the assertion by capitalists that markets will end cigarette use by the unconstrained marketing of nicotine delivery devises...
UPDATED 11/15/2018 NYT, Juul Will Stop Selling Most E-Cigarette Flavors in Stores and Halt Social Media Promotions and Reuters, FDA To Ban Flavored e-Cigarettes At U.S. Convenience Stores and Examiner, Parents Protest e-Cigarette Company’s [i.e. JUUL] Pier 70 Tenancy
...JUUL must buy insurance against all expected harm, which results from producing its nicotine delivery products...
UPDATED 10/17/2018 MedPress, E-Cigarette Additives Increase Inflammation And Impair Lung Function, Study Finds
UPDATED 10/12/2018 Reuters, In Crackdown, U.S. FDA Seeks Details On New Electronic Cigarettes
...it's unclear why regulators must continuously "police" the relatively few balefully rapacious capitalists from one deadly product to the next?...
UPDATED 09/24/2018 Reuters, Special Report: Juul Copycats Flood e-cig Market, Despite FDA Rule
UPDATED 09/13/2018 Reuters, FDA Considering Ban On Flavored e-Cigarettes and FDA, Statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., On New Steps To Address Epidemic Of Youth E-cigarette Use
...it is unclear why are next generation industrialists are having such a difficult time abandoning products that are malignant, if not malevolent and develop products for the 21st Century...
...quit treating tobacco manufactures and their ilk like they are responsible industrialists using our capitalistic system for the benefit of society...these industrialists, investors, and political supporters are parasitic pariah peddling death for profit...
UPDATED 09/10/2018 NewAsia, MPs, Citing Dangers Of Secondhand Smoke, Want To Curb Smoking In Homes
...it is egregious for America's policymakers to continue enabling these mobile sources of deadly toxins (smokers) to spew their secondhand smoke around millions of our citizenry each day...you should not have to continuously dodge smokers' plumes of toxins every time you go outside...
...a smoker's toxic and deadly smoke plume must not directly or indirectly impact another person, period...
UPDATED 08/10/2018 Vox, How Juul Made Nicotine Go Viral
UPDATED 07/27/2018 TedxSydney, You May Be Accidentally Investing in Cigarette Companies
UPDATED 05/07/2018 Reuters, The Philip Morris Files and Reuters, Scientists Describe Problems in Philip Morris e-cigarette Experiments, Part Three and Reuters, A Menthol Cigarette Ban May Influence Smokers to Quit
...it is not difficult to understand or applaud our policymakers' complex and aggressive efforts to cut the number of our citizenry addicted to deadly tobacco products...
...it is difficult to understand why in the 21st century any industrialist would behave in such an unconstrained and rapacious way as to produce a product that when used as intended has a scientific certainty of killing large numbers of our citizenry...
...our policymakers' must continue, extend, and accelerate their complex and aggressive efforts to drop all tobacco products from any 21st century production possibilities frontier curve, including but not limited to bankruptcy, tax disincentives, counter-advertising, citizen initiatives, education, public lawsuits, regulation, criticism, research, banning all public usage, liability for all secondary and tertiary smoke plumes etc...
UPDATED 03/17/2018 USAToday, Exclusive: Anti-smoking Group Says More Cigarettes in Streaming Shows May Lure Younger Viewers and TruthInitiative, While You Were Streaming
An undesirable effect of our economic model is it encourages the development of products or services, which leverage externalities for illusory or negative profits. It is important that policymakers neutralize or eliminate all externality incentives, before products or services are placed in the streams of commerce.
Kudos to the FDA and those working hard to neutralize or eliminate all externalities associated with the harmful and addictive products contained in cigarettes.
UPDATED 02/01/2018 SA, CDC Director’s Investment in Tobacco, Drug Companies Baffles Ethics Experts
Our unstable, unfit, unwell, and unbalanced "new" alt-white-house appoints a corrupt Secretary of Health and Human Services (Thomas Edmunds Price) who appoints a corrupt Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Brenda Fitzgerald) who invests in cigarette equities...
Is it true that those who have their head in their "shithole", appoints those who have their head in their "shithole", appoints those who have their head in their "shithole"...who think having their head in a "shithole" is the "new" normal?
UPDATED 01/27/2018 BMJ, Low cigarette consumption and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke: meta-analysis of 141 cohort studies in 55 study reports
UPDATED 01/26/2018 Bloomberg, Tobacco Device Hits Snag as Experts Question Disease Dangers and Vox, An FDA panel is ruling on a new Philip Morris Product That Could Upend the Cigarette Market and FDA, Philip Morris Products S.A. Modified Risk Tobacco Product (MRTP) Applications and Reuters, FDA's Tobacco Stance Faces Test with Philip Morris iQOS Device
Brazen economic entities that insert addictive tobacco products into the stream of commerce, which when used as intended kills our citizenry with scientific certainty should expect imminent bankruptcy.
Tobacco corporations must stop producing these tobacco weapons, which kills our citizenry when used as intended! Our government and citizenry must increase their efforts to end these destructive tobacco weapons for our society, including ending all economic incentives for trafficking in these harmful tobacco weapons.
Stated differently our society must make sure all tobacco entities and those profiting from those entities (e.g. pension plans, share holders, banks etc.) go bankrupt mitigating the harms they inflict!
UPDATED 12/29/2017 RockefellerUniv, Brain Research Points the Way to New Treatments for Nicotine Addiction UPDATED 11/28/2017 VOA, Anti-Smoking Ads to Air on American TV and Al JazeeraEnglish, US to start airing court-ordered anti-smoking adverts
It is criminal for our leaders to spend decades defending corporations before launching initiatives to end tobacco products. It is necessary, but insufficient to run decades late ads correcting for such a deadly disinformation and misinformation campaign against our citizenry, which our leaders aid and perpetuate to this day!
UPDATED 11/18/2017 AAAS, Editorial: Use Big Tobacco's Nov 26 Corrective Statements To Reduce Cmoking and Tobacco On Trial
Beginning November 26, 2017 "Big Tobacco" must run court ordered "corrective ads" informing the public of the:
...brazen doesn't describe the assertion by capitalists that markets will end cigarette use by the unconstrained marketing of nicotine delivery devises...
UPDATED 11/15/2018 NYT, Juul Will Stop Selling Most E-Cigarette Flavors in Stores and Halt Social Media Promotions and Reuters, FDA To Ban Flavored e-Cigarettes At U.S. Convenience Stores and Examiner, Parents Protest e-Cigarette Company’s [i.e. JUUL] Pier 70 Tenancy
...JUUL must buy insurance against all expected harm, which results from producing its nicotine delivery products...
UPDATED 10/17/2018 MedPress, E-Cigarette Additives Increase Inflammation And Impair Lung Function, Study Finds
UPDATED 10/12/2018 Reuters, In Crackdown, U.S. FDA Seeks Details On New Electronic Cigarettes
...it's unclear why regulators must continuously "police" the relatively few balefully rapacious capitalists from one deadly product to the next?...
UPDATED 09/24/2018 Reuters, Special Report: Juul Copycats Flood e-cig Market, Despite FDA Rule
UPDATED 09/13/2018 Reuters, FDA Considering Ban On Flavored e-Cigarettes and FDA, Statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., On New Steps To Address Epidemic Of Youth E-cigarette Use
...it is unclear why are next generation industrialists are having such a difficult time abandoning products that are malignant, if not malevolent and develop products for the 21st Century...
...quit treating tobacco manufactures and their ilk like they are responsible industrialists using our capitalistic system for the benefit of society...these industrialists, investors, and political supporters are parasitic pariah peddling death for profit...
UPDATED 09/10/2018 NewAsia, MPs, Citing Dangers Of Secondhand Smoke, Want To Curb Smoking In Homes
...it is egregious for America's policymakers to continue enabling these mobile sources of deadly toxins (smokers) to spew their secondhand smoke around millions of our citizenry each day...you should not have to continuously dodge smokers' plumes of toxins every time you go outside...
...a smoker's toxic and deadly smoke plume must not directly or indirectly impact another person, period...
UPDATED 08/10/2018 Vox, How Juul Made Nicotine Go Viral
UPDATED 07/27/2018 TedxSydney, You May Be Accidentally Investing in Cigarette Companies
UPDATED 05/07/2018 Reuters, The Philip Morris Files and Reuters, Scientists Describe Problems in Philip Morris e-cigarette Experiments, Part Three and Reuters, A Menthol Cigarette Ban May Influence Smokers to Quit
...it is not difficult to understand or applaud our policymakers' complex and aggressive efforts to cut the number of our citizenry addicted to deadly tobacco products...
...it is difficult to understand why in the 21st century any industrialist would behave in such an unconstrained and rapacious way as to produce a product that when used as intended has a scientific certainty of killing large numbers of our citizenry...
...our policymakers' must continue, extend, and accelerate their complex and aggressive efforts to drop all tobacco products from any 21st century production possibilities frontier curve, including but not limited to bankruptcy, tax disincentives, counter-advertising, citizen initiatives, education, public lawsuits, regulation, criticism, research, banning all public usage, liability for all secondary and tertiary smoke plumes etc...
UPDATED 03/17/2018 USAToday, Exclusive: Anti-smoking Group Says More Cigarettes in Streaming Shows May Lure Younger Viewers and TruthInitiative, While You Were Streaming
Kudos to the FDA and those working hard to neutralize or eliminate all externalities associated with the harmful and addictive products contained in cigarettes.
UPDATED 02/01/2018 SA, CDC Director’s Investment in Tobacco, Drug Companies Baffles Ethics Experts
Our unstable, unfit, unwell, and unbalanced "new" alt-white-house appoints a corrupt Secretary of Health and Human Services (Thomas Edmunds Price) who appoints a corrupt Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Brenda Fitzgerald) who invests in cigarette equities...
Is it true that those who have their head in their "shithole", appoints those who have their head in their "shithole", appoints those who have their head in their "shithole"...who think having their head in a "shithole" is the "new" normal?
UPDATED 01/27/2018 BMJ, Low cigarette consumption and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke: meta-analysis of 141 cohort studies in 55 study reports
UPDATED 01/26/2018 Bloomberg, Tobacco Device Hits Snag as Experts Question Disease Dangers and Vox, An FDA panel is ruling on a new Philip Morris Product That Could Upend the Cigarette Market and FDA, Philip Morris Products S.A. Modified Risk Tobacco Product (MRTP) Applications and Reuters, FDA's Tobacco Stance Faces Test with Philip Morris iQOS Device
Brazen economic entities that insert addictive tobacco products into the stream of commerce, which when used as intended kills our citizenry with scientific certainty should expect imminent bankruptcy.
Tobacco corporations must stop producing these tobacco weapons, which kills our citizenry when used as intended! Our government and citizenry must increase their efforts to end these destructive tobacco weapons for our society, including ending all economic incentives for trafficking in these harmful tobacco weapons.
Stated differently our society must make sure all tobacco entities and those profiting from those entities (e.g. pension plans, share holders, banks etc.) go bankrupt mitigating the harms they inflict!
UPDATED 12/29/2017 RockefellerUniv, Brain Research Points the Way to New Treatments for Nicotine Addiction UPDATED 11/28/2017 VOA, Anti-Smoking Ads to Air on American TV and Al JazeeraEnglish, US to start airing court-ordered anti-smoking adverts
It is criminal for our leaders to spend decades defending corporations before launching initiatives to end tobacco products. It is necessary, but insufficient to run decades late ads correcting for such a deadly disinformation and misinformation campaign against our citizenry, which our leaders aid and perpetuate to this day!
Al JazeeraEnglish, US to start airing court-ordered anti-smoking adverts
...don't forget to laugh...
UPDATED 11/18/2017 AAAS, Editorial: Use Big Tobacco's Nov 26 Corrective Statements To Reduce Cmoking and Tobacco On Trial
Adverse Health Effects of Smoking
Lack of Significant Health Benefit from Smoking “Low Tar,” “Light,” “Ultra Light,” “Mild,” and “Natural” Cigarettes
• Many smokers switch to low tar and light cigarettes rather than quitting because they think low tar and light cigarettes are less harmful. They are not.
• Low tar” and “light” cigarette smokers inhale essentially the same amount of tar and nicotine as they would from regular cigarettes.
• All cigarettes cause cancer, lung disease, heart attacks, and premature death – lights, low tar, ultra lights, and naturals. There is no safe cigarette.
Manipulation of Cigarette Design and Composition to Ensure Optimum Nicotine Delivery
• Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Philip Morris USA intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive.
• Cigarette companies control the impact and delivery of nicotine in many ways, including designing filters and selecting cigarette paper to maximize the ingestion of nicotine, adding ammonia to make the cigarette taste less harsh, and controlling the physical and chemical make up of the tobacco blend.
• When you smoke, the nicotine actually changes the brain – that’s why quitting is so hard.
Adverse Health Effects of Exposure to Secondhand Smoke
• Secondhand smoke causes lung cancer and coronary heart disease in adults who do not smoke.
• Children exposed to secondhand smoke are at an increased risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), acute respiratory infections, ear problems, severe asthma, and reduced lung function.
• There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.
This is fantastic news, it's becoming "cool" to not smoke! Hopefully the trends will soon near zero.
UPDATED 11/09/2017 Medline, With Cigarettes Out of Favor, Many U.S. Teens Also Shun Pot
Kudos to our young adults for their reduced usage of cigarettes and other smoke products!
UPDATED 08/25/2017 Twitter, FreshEmpire: Live Tobacco Free
UPDATED 08/18/2017 Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and UCSF, What the tobacco companies know about NRT: Without counselling, it keeps people smoking
Those selling tobacco products must continually pay for ALL the costs this toxic mobile menace has and is inflicting on our nation. Yes, even the cost of so-called "nicotine replacement therapy" products containing "little or zero nicotine" (i.e. 0-6 mg of nicotine).
UPDATED 07/17/2017 MedicalX, Smoking Raises Risk of Aneurysm Recurrence After Endovascular Treatment
UPDATED 07/29/2017 Reuters, U.S. Proposes Cigarette Nicotine Cut, Shift Toward e-Cigarettes and FDA, Protecting American Families: Comprehensive Approach to Nicotine and Tobacco
UPDATED 07/21/2017 Reuters, India to quiz Philip Morris on marketing of Marlboro and Reuters, Philip Morris takes aim at young people in India, and health officials are fuming
Who would have guessed that our corporations are incapable of self-regulation without strong oversight and enforcement?
UPDATED 07/10/2017 BBC, Philip Morris: Tobacco Giant Ordered to Compensate Australia
"Tobacco giant Philip Morris has been ordered to pay the Australian government millions of dollars after unsuccessfully suing the nation over its world-first plain-packaging laws."
UPDATED 05/17/2017 UCTV, A Lung Doctor Takes On E-Cigarettes and CDC, Electronic Cigarette Use Among Adults: United States, 2014 and BerkeleyLab, All E-Cigarettes Emit Harmful Chemicals, but Some Emit More Than Others and FDA, New Regulations for E-Cigarettes, Cigars, and All Other Tobacco Products
Smokers of insidious e-cigarettes exhale massive clouds of toxic aerosol into our atmosphere, which others unwillingly inhale to the detriment of their health.
Our nation must continuously act to end any economic incentives to produce or use any tobacco products (e.g. enable any person subjected to smoke or other effects of a tobacco product to collect liquidated damages from the smoker or producer of a tobacco products.)
UPDATED 04/25/2017 Reuters, U.S. House Bill Would Exempt e-cigarettes from Tobacco Regulations
Shame on Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA 50th District) for sacrificing his constituents' health for campaign contributions from big-tobacco (e.g. Reynolds American Inc. PAC)! FDA is rightly focused on protecting the health of our citizenry not the campaign contributions of our corrupt politicians!
UPDATED 04/19/2017 CaHealthline, San Francisco Seeks To Ban Sale Of Menthol Cigarettes, Flavored Tobacco Products
Kudos to San Francisco Board of Supervisor Malia Cohen on proposing a ban on flavored tobacco products (should be all tobacco product), ignoring the usual canard that United States alcohol prohibition is predictive for publicly banning tobacco products.
Impediments to tobacco products are significantly helpful for all but our most addicted (i.e. steepest price elasticities) users. Medical and behavioral options can help even our most addicted users quit this singularly deadly* product.
* A human biologically beneficial level of a tobacco product, like ionizing radiation does not exist! In fact cigarette smoke contains the harmful ionizing radiation, Polonium 210.
UPDATED 04/14/2017 MedlinePlus, Kids Can Pick Up Nicotine on Their Hands
UPDATED 04/06/2017 Reuters, Parental smoking linked to genetic changes in kids with cancer
A person subjecting another non-smoking person(s) to any cigarette smoke is abusing that person(s).
UPDATED 03/26/2017 Wikipedia, List of smoking bans in the United States and MedPress,The global tobacco control treaty has reduced smoking rates in its first decade, but more work is needed
It's not clear why there is not a total ban on publicly using all aerosol producing tobacco products? We ban public activity that is much less harmful than tobacco smoke!
Why must anyone publicly walk, run, push a stroller, ride a bicycle or dodge the oblivious miscreants' toxic and extraordinarily harmful smoke plumes?
Our nation must lead the way to zero tolerance for using all tobacco products, not just support for the five measures of the WHO framework (i.e. high tobacco taxes, smoke-free public spaces, warning labels, comprehensive advertising bans, and support for stop smoking services).
UPDATED 02/18/2017 AsapScience, What Happens When You Stop Smoking? and DNews, What Is Thirdhand Smoke And How Dangerous Is It?
UPDATED 01/24/2017 Medline, E-Cigarettes Not a Smoking Deterrent for Kids
UPDATED 12/06/2016 Reuters, Philip Morris seeks U.S. approval to market alternative cigarette
UPDATED 12/05/2016 WP, Forget those occasional cigarettes: There is no safe smoking level
Just another reminder how deadly cigarettes and government duplicity in both promoting and proscribing even low dosage tobacco use.
UPDATED 11/08/2016 Reuters, Frequent vaping by teens linked to heavy smoking later
UPDATED 11/07/2016 CoAuthorSite, Public health benefits from pictorial health warnings
on US cigarette packs: a SimSmoke simulation
"Requiring PWLs [pictoral warning labels] on all US cigarette packs would be appropriate for the protection of the public health, because it would substantially reduce smoking prevalence and thereby reduce SADs [smoking attributable-deaths] and the morbidity and medical costs associated with adverse smoking attributable birth outcomes"--D. Levy et al.--
UPDATED 11/04/2016 LosAlamosNL, Mutational signatures mark cancer's smoking gun
UPDATED 11/03/2016 NavyMil, Navy Medicine Encourages Sailors and Marines to Quit Tobacco and NavyMil, Live Tobacco-Free: The Time Is Now and Wired, This Robot Chain Smokes Cigarettes So Rats [and you] Don't Have To and MedPress, Smoking a pack a day for a year causes 150 mutations in lung cells (Science, Mutational signatures associated with tobacco smoking in human cancer)
Until clinical medicine is able to reliably block an individual's molecular addictive pathway(s)7 related to nicotine, tobacco usage will be a difficult habit to "kick"...but stopping is possible, even if it requires repeated attempts over prolong periods of time.
Tobacco smoke has ionizing Polonium 210, which has a half-life of about 138 days, alpha decaying to stable Lead 206. Submariners and others should avoid tobacco smoke as if it were ionizing radiation.
Also, it's worth noting that smoking impairs the molecular mechanisms that routinely repair our intercalated DNA helical base pairs (mutations), which prevents normal cellular DNA replication (see above article on mutational signatures associated with tobacco smoking).
UPDATED 11/03/2016 Reuters, Exclusive: India's tobacco industry, government face off ahead of WHO conference and Exclusive: Tobacco treaty leaders propose barring delegates linked to state firms and NTP, RoC Profile: Tobacco-Related Exposures; 14th RoC 2016 and NTP, 14th Report on Carcinogens (RoC)
Bleated pleas and threats from producers of products that fatally harm our citizenry in the name of employment are not new. The response is as simple as it is direct, develop and manufacture products, which benefit our citizenry, not that kills them!
Categorization of tobacco products as a known carcinogen is routine but these products should also be categorize as "weapons of mass destruction" when exported to another nation.1
UPDATED 10/27/2016 Medline, 3 in 4 Teens Think E-Cigarettes Safer Than Tobacco: Survey Obama administration delays attempt to regulate flavored e-cigarettes.
• Smoking kills, on average, 1,200 Americans. Every day.
• More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined.
• Smoking causes heart disease, emphysema, acute myeloid leukemia, and cancer of the mouth, esophagus, larynx, lung, stomach, kidney, bladder, and pancreas.
• Smoking also causes reduced fertility, low birth weight in newborns, and cancer of the cervix.
• When you smoke, the nicotine actually changes the brain – that’s why quitting is so hard.
Lack of Significant Health Benefit from Smoking “Low Tar,” “Light,” “Ultra Light,” “Mild,” and “Natural” Cigarettes
• Many smokers switch to low tar and light cigarettes rather than quitting because they think low tar and light cigarettes are less harmful. They are not.
• Low tar” and “light” cigarette smokers inhale essentially the same amount of tar and nicotine as they would from regular cigarettes.
• All cigarettes cause cancer, lung disease, heart attacks, and premature death – lights, low tar, ultra lights, and naturals. There is no safe cigarette.
Manipulation of Cigarette Design and Composition to Ensure Optimum Nicotine Delivery
• Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Philip Morris USA intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive.
• Cigarette companies control the impact and delivery of nicotine in many ways, including designing filters and selecting cigarette paper to maximize the ingestion of nicotine, adding ammonia to make the cigarette taste less harsh, and controlling the physical and chemical make up of the tobacco blend.
• When you smoke, the nicotine actually changes the brain – that’s why quitting is so hard.
Adverse Health Effects of Exposure to Secondhand Smoke
• Secondhand smoke causes lung cancer and coronary heart disease in adults who do not smoke.
• Children exposed to secondhand smoke are at an increased risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), acute respiratory infections, ear problems, severe asthma, and reduced lung function.
• There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.
This is fantastic news, it's becoming "cool" to not smoke! Hopefully the trends will soon near zero.
UPDATED 11/09/2017 Medline, With Cigarettes Out of Favor, Many U.S. Teens Also Shun Pot
Kudos to our young adults for their reduced usage of cigarettes and other smoke products!
UPDATED 08/25/2017 Twitter, FreshEmpire: Live Tobacco Free
UPDATED 08/18/2017 Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and UCSF, What the tobacco companies know about NRT: Without counselling, it keeps people smoking
Those selling tobacco products must continually pay for ALL the costs this toxic mobile menace has and is inflicting on our nation. Yes, even the cost of so-called "nicotine replacement therapy" products containing "little or zero nicotine" (i.e. 0-6 mg of nicotine).
UPDATED 07/17/2017 MedicalX, Smoking Raises Risk of Aneurysm Recurrence After Endovascular Treatment
UPDATED 07/29/2017 Reuters, U.S. Proposes Cigarette Nicotine Cut, Shift Toward e-Cigarettes and FDA, Protecting American Families: Comprehensive Approach to Nicotine and Tobacco
UPDATED 07/21/2017 Reuters, India to quiz Philip Morris on marketing of Marlboro and Reuters, Philip Morris takes aim at young people in India, and health officials are fuming
Who would have guessed that our corporations are incapable of self-regulation without strong oversight and enforcement?
UPDATED 07/10/2017 BBC, Philip Morris: Tobacco Giant Ordered to Compensate Australia
"Tobacco giant Philip Morris has been ordered to pay the Australian government millions of dollars after unsuccessfully suing the nation over its world-first plain-packaging laws."
UPDATED 05/22/2017 MedPress, Doctors urge FDA to tighten regulations on 'filtered' cigarettes Our nation's cigarette tragicomedy continues—researchers accumulate sufficient evidence to plug the holes on cigarette filters!
UPDATED 05/20/2017 Guardian, Stricter cigarette packaging rules come into force in UK and BBC, Cigarettes sold in plain green packs under new rules
Smokers of insidious e-cigarettes exhale massive clouds of toxic aerosol into our atmosphere, which others unwillingly inhale to the detriment of their health.
Our nation must continuously act to end any economic incentives to produce or use any tobacco products (e.g. enable any person subjected to smoke or other effects of a tobacco product to collect liquidated damages from the smoker or producer of a tobacco products.)
UPDATED 04/25/2017 Reuters, U.S. House Bill Would Exempt e-cigarettes from Tobacco Regulations
Shame on Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA 50th District) for sacrificing his constituents' health for campaign contributions from big-tobacco (e.g. Reynolds American Inc. PAC)! FDA is rightly focused on protecting the health of our citizenry not the campaign contributions of our corrupt politicians!
UPDATED 04/19/2017 CaHealthline, San Francisco Seeks To Ban Sale Of Menthol Cigarettes, Flavored Tobacco Products
Kudos to San Francisco Board of Supervisor Malia Cohen on proposing a ban on flavored tobacco products (should be all tobacco product), ignoring the usual canard that United States alcohol prohibition is predictive for publicly banning tobacco products.
Impediments to tobacco products are significantly helpful for all but our most addicted (i.e. steepest price elasticities) users. Medical and behavioral options can help even our most addicted users quit this singularly deadly* product.
* A human biologically beneficial level of a tobacco product, like ionizing radiation does not exist! In fact cigarette smoke contains the harmful ionizing radiation, Polonium 210.
UPDATED 04/14/2017 MedlinePlus, Kids Can Pick Up Nicotine on Their Hands
UPDATED 04/06/2017 Reuters, Parental smoking linked to genetic changes in kids with cancer
A person subjecting another non-smoking person(s) to any cigarette smoke is abusing that person(s).
UPDATED 03/26/2017 Wikipedia, List of smoking bans in the United States and MedPress,The global tobacco control treaty has reduced smoking rates in its first decade, but more work is needed
It's not clear why there is not a total ban on publicly using all aerosol producing tobacco products? We ban public activity that is much less harmful than tobacco smoke!
Why must anyone publicly walk, run, push a stroller, ride a bicycle or dodge the oblivious miscreants' toxic and extraordinarily harmful smoke plumes?
Our nation must lead the way to zero tolerance for using all tobacco products, not just support for the five measures of the WHO framework (i.e. high tobacco taxes, smoke-free public spaces, warning labels, comprehensive advertising bans, and support for stop smoking services).
UPDATED 02/18/2017 AsapScience, What Happens When You Stop Smoking? and DNews, What Is Thirdhand Smoke And How Dangerous Is It?
Smokers are mini mobile toxic waste dumps, even when they're not smoking.
UPDATED 01/24/2017 Medline, E-Cigarettes Not a Smoking Deterrent for Kids
UPDATED 12/06/2016 Reuters, Philip Morris seeks U.S. approval to market alternative cigarette
UPDATED 12/05/2016 WP, Forget those occasional cigarettes: There is no safe smoking level
Just another reminder how deadly cigarettes and government duplicity in both promoting and proscribing even low dosage tobacco use.
UPDATED 11/08/2016 Reuters, Frequent vaping by teens linked to heavy smoking later
UPDATED 11/07/2016 CoAuthorSite, Public health benefits from pictorial health warnings
on US cigarette packs: a SimSmoke simulation
"Requiring PWLs [pictoral warning labels] on all US cigarette packs would be appropriate for the protection of the public health, because it would substantially reduce smoking prevalence and thereby reduce SADs [smoking attributable-deaths] and the morbidity and medical costs associated with adverse smoking attributable birth outcomes"--D. Levy et al.--
UPDATED 11/04/2016 LosAlamosNL, Mutational signatures mark cancer's smoking gun
Lead Researcher, Dr. Ludmil Alexandrov Summarizes Study
The cellular damage to human organs resulting from tobacco smoking is ubiquitous!
UPDATED 11/03/2016 NavyMil, Navy Medicine Encourages Sailors and Marines to Quit Tobacco and NavyMil, Live Tobacco-Free: The Time Is Now and Wired, This Robot Chain Smokes Cigarettes So Rats [and you] Don't Have To and MedPress, Smoking a pack a day for a year causes 150 mutations in lung cells (Science, Mutational signatures associated with tobacco smoking in human cancer)
click image to enlarge
Until clinical medicine is able to reliably block an individual's molecular addictive pathway(s)7 related to nicotine, tobacco usage will be a difficult habit to "kick"...but stopping is possible, even if it requires repeated attempts over prolong periods of time.
"There is no safe tobacco product and no safe level of use,"--Dr. Long--
Tobacco smoke has ionizing Polonium 210, which has a half-life of about 138 days, alpha decaying to stable Lead 206. Submariners and others should avoid tobacco smoke as if it were ionizing radiation.
Also, it's worth noting that smoking impairs the molecular mechanisms that routinely repair our intercalated DNA helical base pairs (mutations), which prevents normal cellular DNA replication (see above article on mutational signatures associated with tobacco smoking).
UPDATED 11/03/2016 Reuters, Exclusive: India's tobacco industry, government face off ahead of WHO conference and Exclusive: Tobacco treaty leaders propose barring delegates linked to state firms and NTP, RoC Profile: Tobacco-Related Exposures; 14th RoC 2016 and NTP, 14th Report on Carcinogens (RoC)
Categorization of tobacco products as a known carcinogen is routine but these products should also be categorize as "weapons of mass destruction" when exported to another nation.1
UPDATED 10/27/2016 Medline, 3 in 4 Teens Think E-Cigarettes Safer Than Tobacco: Survey Obama administration delays attempt to regulate flavored e-cigarettes.
UPDATED 10/22/2016 SA, If Soda Companies Don't Want to Be Treated Like Tobacco Companies They Need to Stop Acting Like Them
UPDATED 10/19/2016 SWMC, Breakthrough in mapping nicotine addiction could help researchers improve treatment and ANL, A Breakthrough in Mapping Nicotine Addiction
Those manufacturing products must conduct such basic research before6 injecting toxic, addictive, and deadly products into our global commerce streams.
UPDATED 10/11/2016 Reuters, U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear tobacco arbitration dispute
UPDATED 09/21/2016 SD, Smoking has a very broad, long-lasting impact on the human genome (AHA, Epigenetic Signatures of Cigarette Smoking)
UPDATED 09/02/2016 NYT, Tobacco Industry Works to Block Rules on E-Cigarettes
Evidently, big tobacco is incapable of constructively producing products beneficial to civil society? Perhaps, a law that revokes its ability to respond in federal courts resulting in default judgments for the harm its products produce will make sure it ceases producing harmful products? Similar to revocation of a nuisance litigant's ability to file lawsuits, but with damages attached.
Alternatively, our citizenry can vote to impose taxes (i.e a form of liquidated and ascertained damages) on its products proportional to the harm it is and will inflict on civil society?
UPDATED 07/28/2016 LBL, All E-Cigarettes Emit Harmful Chemicals, but Some Emit More Than Others
"Regular cigarettes are super unhealthy. E-cigarettes are just unhealthy.”
UPDATED 07/26/2016 NAM, National Academy of Medicine and FDA Select Four Individuals for 2016-2017 Tobacco Regulatory Science Fellows
UPDATED 07/23/2016 American Stroke Association, Sex, Smoking, and Risk for Subarachnoid Hemorrhage (Medline, Women Smokers at Higher Risk for Brain Bleed)
"There is no safe level of smoking" ... --Dr. Joni Lindbohm of the University of Helsinki, lead researcher studying female smokers' subarachnoid hemorrhage risk--
UPDATED 07/20/2016 SA, Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
UPDATED 07/18/2016 MedLinePlus, 1 in 5 Americans Uses a Tobacco Product
Cigarette smoke has toxic particulate that requires strict regulation to make sure it never involuntarily impacts another person.
UPDATED 06/22/2016 NutritionFacts, American Medical Association Complicity with Big Tobacco
A reminder of how imperfect (some might say criminally negligent 5) our government can be when promoting the general Welfare of our present and future citizenry (see U.S. Constitution).
UPDATED 06/21/2016 Reuters, Smokers may try to quit 30 times before it sticks
The absurd notion that a smoker lacks will power to quit because they cannot stop smoking on the first attempt likely hinders or prevents many smokers from quitting.
It may take many more than 30 attempts before quitting this highly addictive and deadly habit!
UPDATED 05/23/2016 BBC, Axa stubs out €1.7bn tobacco industry investment and Reuters, CalPERS to study possible reinvestment in tobacco
It is retrogressive, misguided, and malevolent tax policy that permits or enables any investment in a product, which has a scientific certainty of killing humans to be profitable.
UPDATED 05/19/2016 BBC, Tobacco laws: Bid to overturn packaging rules dismissed
UPDATED 05/16/2016 Reuters, U.S. top court rejects Philip Morris appeal of judgment in smoker's death
UPDATED 05/11/2016 WP, New, sweeping federal rules bar e-cigarette sales to teens younger than 18 and WSJ, India’s Supreme Court Orders Tobacco Companies to Comply With Health Warning Rules and Reuters, U.S. cracks down on e-cigarettes and cigars, bans sales to minors
A corporation producing any product that has a scientific certainty of harming people when used as intended (e.g. tobacco products) must expect comprehensive prophylactic government regulation throughout its (products and corporate entity) entire life cycle.
It's unclear how our corporations learned that they can freely produce otiose and odious products as a matter of right—clearly the expectations for our 21st century corporations need to dramatically increase!
Somehow a corporation learned it can dump a product into the stream of commerce and forget about it, until sued, ad nauseam for incremental damages, while their product(s) continues harming people! Corporations must transparently and publicly account for its product(s) in perpetuity or until all instances of the product(s) no longer exist, including all existing or future harm.
UPDATED 03/28/2016 ACS, Cigarettes Cheaper than E-cigarettes in 44 of 45 Countries Studied Oft touted reason for switching a nicotine addiction from cigarettes to e-cigarettes is unsupported by the data.
UPDATED 03/02/2016 SFGate, Supes raise age to buy tobacco from 18 to 21 — lawsuit possible
The law is one of the many tools that governments on all levels (municipal, state, federal etc) should constantly and creatively deploy to minimize the direct and indirect baleful human impacts of tobacco usage.
UPDATED 02/06/2016 BBC, Do e-cigarettes make it harder to stop smoking? and Lancet, Respiratory Medicine ; E-cigarettes and smoking cessation in real-world and clinical settings: a systematic review and meta-analysis
...Odds of quitting cigarettes were 28% lower in those who used e-cigarettes compared with those who did not use e-cigarettes...
UPDATED 01/22/2016 PBS, Why these anti-smoking TV ads are working
CDC's latest "Tips" anti-smoking campaign:
UPDATED 12/29/2015 NM, E-cigarettes damage cells in ways that could lead to cancer
How many of our citizens will die before this "free-market-product" becomes intolerable like its sibling free-market-product, cigarettes (i.e. mobile source of toxic and hazardous pollution)?
UPDATED 12/18/2015 NZHerald, Australia welcomes plain cigarette packaging win and WSJ, Big Tobacco Challenges U.K.’s Plain-Packaging Laws in High Court and WSJ, Tobacco Companies Revive Suit Against FDA Over Packaging
It's difficult to take seriously a First (speech clause) or Fifth (taking clause) Amendment challenge to our government's efforts to curtail or eliminate the usage of a product that kills so many of our citizenry.
Surely, a nation's toolbox includes tools short of declarations of illegality, which directly impact interests in a deadly product? Stated differently, declarations of illegality are not a condition precedent to subsequent actions that may impact an interest in a product subsequently discovered to be deadly.
UPDATED 12/08/2015 Telegraph, E-cigarettes contain flavouring chemical linked to deadly 'popcorn lung'
No need to await decades of accumulated health issues before challenging the promotion of products with a significant likelihood for negatively impacting human health.
UPDATED 12/01/2015 SFGate, Which counties smoke the most in the Bay Area?
UPDATED 11/14/2015 AP, Residents mixed on proposed smoking ban in public housing
UPDATED 09/28/2015 BBC, Rare 'healthy' smokers' lungs explained
"The strongest thing that people can do to affect their future health in terms of COPD and also smoking-related disease like cancer and heart disease is to stop smoking."
UPDATED 09/15/2015 FDA, FDA issues orders that will stop further U.S. sale and distribution of four R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company cigarette products
UPDATED 07/16/2015 Economist, Quitting is so Hard
"Everybody now knows how people can be persuaded to stop smoking. So all countries should be doing it"
UPDATED 06/01/2015 Reuters, China launches campaign to snuff out smoking
UPDATED 04/18/2015 Reuters, Youth e-cigarette data prompts new calls to speed regulation
UPDATED 12/30/2014 YouTube, Hard-hitting anti-smoking campaign 'aims to save lives'
It's important, as nations' public health specialists roll-out these "hard-hitting" adverts, to recall the nefarious and baleful history of tobacco—The history of the discovery of the cigarette-lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll, Big Tobacco knew radioactive particles in cigarettes posed cancer risk but kept quiet, List of cigarette smoke carcinogens (which excludes several thousands of chemicals in cigarette smoke whose biological interactions still require elucidation).
"The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation."—The History, Robert N. Proctor
...and just in case you think tobacco's shameful shenanigans are in the dustbin of history—our conflicted corporations and perverse politicians are continuing to gamble on our citizen-residents' smoking rates! (ProPublica, Behind New Jersey's Tobacco Bond Bailout, A Hedge Funds 100 Million Payday)
UPDATED 11/27/2014 CDC, Adult Cigarette Smoking Rate Overall Hits All-time Low
UPDATED 08/26/2014 CSM, Why WHO calls for indoor ban on e-cigarettes
UPDATED 08/11/2014 ProPublica, How Wall Street Tobacco Deals Left States With Billions in Toxic Debt
Unfortunately, the tobacco industry related infliction of misery and mayhem does not end with the hundred of thousands smokers who die each year.
Perhaps if our corporate containers possessed the anthropomorphic attributes our Supreme Court has assigned them the inflicted misery and mayhem would cease accumulating over decades, along with the mob-like interest on financial instruments commonly referred to as capital accumulation bonds.
UPDATED 04/24/2014 WT, FDA extends its reach to e-cigarettes in proposal and FDA, Extending Authorities to Additional Tobacco Products
Public comment on the proposed extension of authority begins April 25, 2014.
UPDATED 04/16/2014 NYT, Early Data in E-Cigarette Study May Raise Safety Concerns
It seems amazingly absurd that any 21st century civil society structure would enable its manufacturers of any product to use its citizenry as laboratory rats for the safety testing of that product. Particularly if that product has an uncertain but related status as a substitute or complement for any product that kills to a scientific certainty when used as intended (e.g. tobacco products).
UPDATED 04/14/2014 UPI, New congressional report presses for e-cigarette regulation
UPDATED 04/03/2014 NYT, Britain Shows Support for Tougher Cigarette Laws
UPDATED 02/05/2014 LiveScience, CVS to Become 1st National Pharmacy Chain to Stop Selling Tobacco and FDA, FDA launches its first national public education campaign to prevent, reduce youth tobacco use ( includes link to ads)
UPDATED 01/29/2014 ThomsonReuter, Cigarettes kicked out of school in China
UPDATED 11/28/2013 Telegraph, Plain cigarette packaging could be brought in by 2015
Opponents to governments' efforts to demote cigarette smoking byour citizenry often selectively use the curious concept of "freedom to [insert activity]", but fail to exposit this freedom within a context of "scientific certainty".
Often their explanations or logic simply substitute or incorporate a plethora of unchallenged personal and cultural myths, assumptions and assertions.
Some governments not only ignore "scientific certainty" but completely blow-up science by ascribing anthropomorphic attributes to an inanimate corporate object, then "reason" that our government cannot constitutionally demote cigarette smoking because demotion infringes the ascribed anthropomorphic attributes.
It's truly bizarre when the living anthropomorphize the dead, which proximately kills the living, to a scientific certainty!
UPDATED 08/01/2013 LBNL, Secondhand Smoke in Bars and Restaurants Means Higher Risk of Asthma and Cancer
It seems worth noting that our restaurant sector has not historically provided healthcare insurance or the wages necessary to purchase healthcare insurance.
Perhaps, just another example of our accumulating market failures that will be ameliorated by our Affordable Healthcare Act and eliminated when our citizenry have universal healthcare.
UPDATED 07/26/2013 Economist, No Butts Some country per capita smoking percentages.
UPDATED 07/01/2013 LBNL, Berkeley Lab Confirms Thirdhand Smoke Causes DNA Damage
Baleful cigarette weaponry continues to menace, molest, mutate, maim and collaterally kill members of our civil society while our judiciary considers whether requiring prominent pictograms on "product packaging" is permissible. You can't make this stuff up!
UPDATED 01/24/2013 ScienceDaily, Smoke-Free Law Linked to Large Fall in Child Asthma Hospital Admissions
UPDATED 12/28/2012 BBC, Graphic anti-smoking ad launched
UPDATED 12/19/2012 WSJ, EU Proposes Tougher Tobacco Rules Prominent text and images
UPDATED 11/27/2012 Reuters, Judge orders tobacco companies to admit deception
UPDATED 11/13/2102 USN, Study: Graphic Warnings on Cigarette Packs Would Be Effective
Evidently, pictures and pictograms are important to smoking cessation in countries whose development has achieved sufficient educational attainment, too!
UPDATED 11/12/2012 ManilaBulletin, Healthier Crops
UPDATED 08/25/2012 Reuters, U.S. court strikes down graphic warnings on cigarettes It seems odd that any legal system would endowed a corporate entity with commercial speech rights4—it seems positively perverse for our legal system to then use those commercial speech rights to enable our corporations to promote a highly addictive product that has a scientific certainty of killing our citizenry when used as intended!
Hopefully, our Supreme Court will reverse R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company v. FDA (pdf)—surely the odd concept of corporate commercial speech developed and used by our U.S. Supreme Court does not include the right to produce and promote a highly addictive product that has a scientific certainty of killing our citizenry when they use this product as intended3!
Some legal decisions can cause an uninitiated reader to wonder if its author isn’t really a toddler hilariously answering a question that has overwhelmed their still developing conceptual capacity. Surely the court is not saying that if industry can produce a lethal product sufficiently addictive that death precedes usage cessation our government cannot emotionally, experimentally, or otherwise require or compel graphic images for the purpose of prompting, promoting or provoking usage cessation short of death.
UPDATED 08/17/2012 Reuters, UPDATE 1-"Alarming" smoking habits found in poorer countries
-----notes-----
1. Weaponry used in warring is the promotion of usage of a product that when used as intended has a scientific certainty of killing other nation's citizenry—should an exported cigarette be characterized as weaponry?
Current cigarette consumption in the United States has been estimated by the CDC at Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), Consumption of Cigarettes and Combustible Tobacco—United States, 2000–2011, August 3, 2012 / 61(30);565-569
2. It seems useful to note that if no nation operated a perverse legal system then "its citizenry" could be changed to "human beings".
3. The rapidly developing field of genomics and related fields will likely routinely demonstrate to a scientific certainty that a product is harmful to human beings—corporate commercial speech rights, however interpreted by our U.S. Supreme Court must not enable mischief to that scientific process and progress.
4. Corporate entities are inanimate objects created and chartered by governments—speech is typically not an attribute one associates with inanimate objects—much less constitutionally protected speech that its creator or charter cannot alter.
5. UPDATED 06/23/2016 The Supreme Court recently ruled that the European Union could not criminally pursue RJR Nabisco Inc. under the RICO statute ( RJR Nabisco Inc. v. The European Community, No. 15-138) for claimed injury extraterritorial to the United States. (NYT, Supreme Court Sides With R.J. Reynolds in RICO Case)
This ruling should not prevent the subsequent assertion of criminal and civil logic, which continually holds "big tobacco" responsible and accountable for all harm their activities (both territorial and extraterritorial) inflict.
6. Some might argue that "Big Tobacco", in addition to perpetually paying for all the harm their product continues to inflict must fund the basic, applied,and clinical research, which will help every addicted tobacco users to precisely and exclusively block nicotine's cell porin pathway action.
7. UPDATED 11/17/2016 SA, Surgeon General Report Tackles Addiction (The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health: Facing Addition in America; Executive Summary and Full Report)
UPDATED 10/19/2016 SWMC, Breakthrough in mapping nicotine addiction could help researchers improve treatment and ANL, A Breakthrough in Mapping Nicotine Addiction
"The protein, called the α4β2 (alpha-4-beta-2) nicotinic receptor (3D imaged using Argonne's beamlines), sits on nerve cells in the brain. Nicotine binds to the receptor when someone smokes a cigarette or chews tobacco, causing the protein to open a path for ions to enter the cell. The process produces cognitive benefits such as increased memory and focus but is also highly addictive."Kudos to our researchers who patiently pursue the difficult basic research, which enables us to fundamentally understand problems vexing our nation and citizenry.
Those manufacturing products must conduct such basic research before6 injecting toxic, addictive, and deadly products into our global commerce streams.
UPDATED 10/11/2016 Reuters, U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear tobacco arbitration dispute
UPDATED 09/21/2016 SD, Smoking has a very broad, long-lasting impact on the human genome (AHA, Epigenetic Signatures of Cigarette Smoking)
UPDATED 09/02/2016 NYT, Tobacco Industry Works to Block Rules on E-Cigarettes
Evidently, big tobacco is incapable of constructively producing products beneficial to civil society? Perhaps, a law that revokes its ability to respond in federal courts resulting in default judgments for the harm its products produce will make sure it ceases producing harmful products? Similar to revocation of a nuisance litigant's ability to file lawsuits, but with damages attached.
Alternatively, our citizenry can vote to impose taxes (i.e a form of liquidated and ascertained damages) on its products proportional to the harm it is and will inflict on civil society?
UPDATED 07/28/2016 LBL, All E-Cigarettes Emit Harmful Chemicals, but Some Emit More Than Others
"Regular cigarettes are super unhealthy. E-cigarettes are just unhealthy.”
UPDATED 07/26/2016 NAM, National Academy of Medicine and FDA Select Four Individuals for 2016-2017 Tobacco Regulatory Science Fellows
UPDATED 07/23/2016 American Stroke Association, Sex, Smoking, and Risk for Subarachnoid Hemorrhage (Medline, Women Smokers at Higher Risk for Brain Bleed)
"There is no safe level of smoking" ... --Dr. Joni Lindbohm of the University of Helsinki, lead researcher studying female smokers' subarachnoid hemorrhage risk--
UPDATED 07/20/2016 SA, Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public
UPDATED 07/18/2016 MedLinePlus, 1 in 5 Americans Uses a Tobacco Product
Cigarette smoke has toxic particulate that requires strict regulation to make sure it never involuntarily impacts another person.
UPDATED 06/22/2016 NutritionFacts, American Medical Association Complicity with Big Tobacco
A reminder of how imperfect (some might say criminally negligent 5) our government can be when promoting the general Welfare of our present and future citizenry (see U.S. Constitution).
UPDATED 06/21/2016 Reuters, Smokers may try to quit 30 times before it sticks
The absurd notion that a smoker lacks will power to quit because they cannot stop smoking on the first attempt likely hinders or prevents many smokers from quitting.
It may take many more than 30 attempts before quitting this highly addictive and deadly habit!
UPDATED 05/23/2016 BBC, Axa stubs out €1.7bn tobacco industry investment and Reuters, CalPERS to study possible reinvestment in tobacco
It is retrogressive, misguided, and malevolent tax policy that permits or enables any investment in a product, which has a scientific certainty of killing humans to be profitable.
UPDATED 05/19/2016 BBC, Tobacco laws: Bid to overturn packaging rules dismissed
UPDATED 05/16/2016 Reuters, U.S. top court rejects Philip Morris appeal of judgment in smoker's death
UPDATED 05/11/2016 WP, New, sweeping federal rules bar e-cigarette sales to teens younger than 18 and WSJ, India’s Supreme Court Orders Tobacco Companies to Comply With Health Warning Rules and Reuters, U.S. cracks down on e-cigarettes and cigars, bans sales to minors
A corporation producing any product that has a scientific certainty of harming people when used as intended (e.g. tobacco products) must expect comprehensive prophylactic government regulation throughout its (products and corporate entity) entire life cycle.
It's unclear how our corporations learned that they can freely produce otiose and odious products as a matter of right—clearly the expectations for our 21st century corporations need to dramatically increase!
Somehow a corporation learned it can dump a product into the stream of commerce and forget about it, until sued, ad nauseam for incremental damages, while their product(s) continues harming people! Corporations must transparently and publicly account for its product(s) in perpetuity or until all instances of the product(s) no longer exist, including all existing or future harm.
UPDATED 03/28/2016 ACS, Cigarettes Cheaper than E-cigarettes in 44 of 45 Countries Studied Oft touted reason for switching a nicotine addiction from cigarettes to e-cigarettes is unsupported by the data.
UPDATED 03/02/2016 SFGate, Supes raise age to buy tobacco from 18 to 21 — lawsuit possible
The law is one of the many tools that governments on all levels (municipal, state, federal etc) should constantly and creatively deploy to minimize the direct and indirect baleful human impacts of tobacco usage.
UPDATED 02/06/2016 BBC, Do e-cigarettes make it harder to stop smoking? and Lancet, Respiratory Medicine ; E-cigarettes and smoking cessation in real-world and clinical settings: a systematic review and meta-analysis
...Odds of quitting cigarettes were 28% lower in those who used e-cigarettes compared with those who did not use e-cigarettes...
UPDATED 01/22/2016 PBS, Why these anti-smoking TV ads are working
CDC's latest "Tips" anti-smoking campaign:
UPDATED 12/29/2015 NM, E-cigarettes damage cells in ways that could lead to cancer
How many of our citizens will die before this "free-market-product" becomes intolerable like its sibling free-market-product, cigarettes (i.e. mobile source of toxic and hazardous pollution)?
UPDATED 12/18/2015 NZHerald, Australia welcomes plain cigarette packaging win and WSJ, Big Tobacco Challenges U.K.’s Plain-Packaging Laws in High Court and WSJ, Tobacco Companies Revive Suit Against FDA Over Packaging
It's difficult to take seriously a First (speech clause) or Fifth (taking clause) Amendment challenge to our government's efforts to curtail or eliminate the usage of a product that kills so many of our citizenry.
Surely, a nation's toolbox includes tools short of declarations of illegality, which directly impact interests in a deadly product? Stated differently, declarations of illegality are not a condition precedent to subsequent actions that may impact an interest in a product subsequently discovered to be deadly.
UPDATED 12/08/2015 Telegraph, E-cigarettes contain flavouring chemical linked to deadly 'popcorn lung'
No need to await decades of accumulated health issues before challenging the promotion of products with a significant likelihood for negatively impacting human health.
UPDATED 12/01/2015 SFGate, Which counties smoke the most in the Bay Area?
UPDATED 11/14/2015 AP, Residents mixed on proposed smoking ban in public housing
"There is no safe level of secondhand smoke."
Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy
UPDATED 09/28/2015 BBC, Rare 'healthy' smokers' lungs explained
"The strongest thing that people can do to affect their future health in terms of COPD and also smoking-related disease like cancer and heart disease is to stop smoking."
UPDATED 09/15/2015 FDA, FDA issues orders that will stop further U.S. sale and distribution of four R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company cigarette products
UPDATED 07/16/2015 Economist, Quitting is so Hard
"Everybody now knows how people can be persuaded to stop smoking. So all countries should be doing it"
UPDATED 06/01/2015 Reuters, China launches campaign to snuff out smoking
UPDATED 04/18/2015 Reuters, Youth e-cigarette data prompts new calls to speed regulation
UPDATED 12/30/2014 YouTube, Hard-hitting anti-smoking campaign 'aims to save lives'
It's important, as nations' public health specialists roll-out these "hard-hitting" adverts, to recall the nefarious and baleful history of tobacco—The history of the discovery of the cigarette-lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll, Big Tobacco knew radioactive particles in cigarettes posed cancer risk but kept quiet, List of cigarette smoke carcinogens (which excludes several thousands of chemicals in cigarette smoke whose biological interactions still require elucidation).
"The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation."—The History, Robert N. Proctor
...and just in case you think tobacco's shameful shenanigans are in the dustbin of history—our conflicted corporations and perverse politicians are continuing to gamble on our citizen-residents' smoking rates! (ProPublica, Behind New Jersey's Tobacco Bond Bailout, A Hedge Funds 100 Million Payday)
UPDATED 11/27/2014 CDC, Adult Cigarette Smoking Rate Overall Hits All-time Low
UPDATED 08/26/2014 CSM, Why WHO calls for indoor ban on e-cigarettes
UPDATED 08/11/2014 ProPublica, How Wall Street Tobacco Deals Left States With Billions in Toxic Debt
Unfortunately, the tobacco industry related infliction of misery and mayhem does not end with the hundred of thousands smokers who die each year.
Perhaps if our corporate containers possessed the anthropomorphic attributes our Supreme Court has assigned them the inflicted misery and mayhem would cease accumulating over decades, along with the mob-like interest on financial instruments commonly referred to as capital accumulation bonds.
UPDATED 04/24/2014 WT, FDA extends its reach to e-cigarettes in proposal and FDA, Extending Authorities to Additional Tobacco Products
Public comment on the proposed extension of authority begins April 25, 2014.
UPDATED 04/16/2014 NYT, Early Data in E-Cigarette Study May Raise Safety Concerns
It seems amazingly absurd that any 21st century civil society structure would enable its manufacturers of any product to use its citizenry as laboratory rats for the safety testing of that product. Particularly if that product has an uncertain but related status as a substitute or complement for any product that kills to a scientific certainty when used as intended (e.g. tobacco products).
UPDATED 04/14/2014 UPI, New congressional report presses for e-cigarette regulation
UPDATED 04/03/2014 NYT, Britain Shows Support for Tougher Cigarette Laws
UPDATED 02/05/2014 LiveScience, CVS to Become 1st National Pharmacy Chain to Stop Selling Tobacco and FDA, FDA launches its first national public education campaign to prevent, reduce youth tobacco use ( includes link to ads)
UPDATED 01/29/2014 ThomsonReuter, Cigarettes kicked out of school in China
UPDATED 11/28/2013 Telegraph, Plain cigarette packaging could be brought in by 2015
Opponents to governments' efforts to demote cigarette smoking by
Often their explanations or logic simply substitute or incorporate a plethora of unchallenged personal and cultural myths, assumptions and assertions.
Some governments not only ignore "scientific certainty" but completely blow-up science by ascribing anthropomorphic attributes to an inanimate corporate object, then "reason" that our government cannot constitutionally demote cigarette smoking because demotion infringes the ascribed anthropomorphic attributes.
It's truly bizarre when the living anthropomorphize the dead, which proximately kills the living, to a scientific certainty!
UPDATED 08/01/2013 LBNL, Secondhand Smoke in Bars and Restaurants Means Higher Risk of Asthma and Cancer
It seems worth noting that our restaurant sector has not historically provided healthcare insurance or the wages necessary to purchase healthcare insurance.
Perhaps, just another example of our accumulating market failures that will be ameliorated by our Affordable Healthcare Act and eliminated when our citizenry have universal healthcare.
UPDATED 07/26/2013 Economist, No Butts Some country per capita smoking percentages.
UPDATED 07/01/2013 LBNL, Berkeley Lab Confirms Thirdhand Smoke Causes DNA Damage
Baleful cigarette weaponry continues to menace, molest, mutate, maim and collaterally kill members of our civil society while our judiciary considers whether requiring prominent pictograms on "product packaging" is permissible. You can't make this stuff up!
UPDATED 01/24/2013 ScienceDaily, Smoke-Free Law Linked to Large Fall in Child Asthma Hospital Admissions
UPDATED 12/28/2012 BBC, Graphic anti-smoking ad launched
UPDATED 12/19/2012 WSJ, EU Proposes Tougher Tobacco Rules Prominent text and images
UPDATED 11/27/2012 Reuters, Judge orders tobacco companies to admit deception
UPDATED 11/13/2102 USN, Study: Graphic Warnings on Cigarette Packs Would Be Effective
Evidently, pictures and pictograms are important to smoking cessation in countries whose development has achieved sufficient educational attainment, too!
UPDATED 11/12/2012 ManilaBulletin, Healthier Crops
UPDATED 08/25/2012 Reuters, U.S. court strikes down graphic warnings on cigarettes It seems odd that any legal system would endowed a corporate entity with commercial speech rights4—it seems positively perverse for our legal system to then use those commercial speech rights to enable our corporations to promote a highly addictive product that has a scientific certainty of killing our citizenry when used as intended!
Hopefully, our Supreme Court will reverse R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company v. FDA (pdf)—surely the odd concept of corporate commercial speech developed and used by our U.S. Supreme Court does not include the right to produce and promote a highly addictive product that has a scientific certainty of killing our citizenry when they use this product as intended3!
Some legal decisions can cause an uninitiated reader to wonder if its author isn’t really a toddler hilariously answering a question that has overwhelmed their still developing conceptual capacity. Surely the court is not saying that if industry can produce a lethal product sufficiently addictive that death precedes usage cessation our government cannot emotionally, experimentally, or otherwise require or compel graphic images for the purpose of prompting, promoting or provoking usage cessation short of death.
"...FDA has not provided a shred of evidence—much less the “substantial evidence” required by the APA—showing that the graphic warnings will “directly advance” its interest in reducing the number of Americans who smoke. FDA makes much of the “international consensus” surrounding the effectiveness of large graphic warnings, but offers no evidence showing that such warnings have directly caused a material decrease in smoking rates in any of the countries that now require them...."Our FDA is acting under the Family Smoking Prevention And Tobacco Control legislation, which aims to prevent smoking and promote its cessation, without expressly banning tobacco products.
UPDATED 08/17/2012 Reuters, UPDATE 1-"Alarming" smoking habits found in poorer countries
"...The WHO says tobacco already kills around 6 million people a year worldwide, including more than 600,000 non-smokers who die from exposure to second-hand smoke."
-----notes-----
1. Weaponry used in warring is the promotion of usage of a product that when used as intended has a scientific certainty of killing other nation's citizenry—should an exported cigarette be characterized as weaponry?
Current cigarette consumption in the United States has been estimated by the CDC at Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), Consumption of Cigarettes and Combustible Tobacco—United States, 2000–2011, August 3, 2012 / 61(30);565-569
2. It seems useful to note that if no nation operated a perverse legal system then "its citizenry" could be changed to "human beings".
3. The rapidly developing field of genomics and related fields will likely routinely demonstrate to a scientific certainty that a product is harmful to human beings—corporate commercial speech rights, however interpreted by our U.S. Supreme Court must not enable mischief to that scientific process and progress.
4. Corporate entities are inanimate objects created and chartered by governments—speech is typically not an attribute one associates with inanimate objects—much less constitutionally protected speech that its creator or charter cannot alter.
5. UPDATED 06/23/2016 The Supreme Court recently ruled that the European Union could not criminally pursue RJR Nabisco Inc. under the RICO statute ( RJR Nabisco Inc. v. The European Community, No. 15-138) for claimed injury extraterritorial to the United States. (NYT, Supreme Court Sides With R.J. Reynolds in RICO Case)
This ruling should not prevent the subsequent assertion of criminal and civil logic, which continually holds "big tobacco" responsible and accountable for all harm their activities (both territorial and extraterritorial) inflict.
6. Some might argue that "Big Tobacco", in addition to perpetually paying for all the harm their product continues to inflict must fund the basic, applied,and clinical research, which will help every addicted tobacco users to precisely and exclusively block nicotine's cell porin pathway action.
7. UPDATED 11/17/2016 SA, Surgeon General Report Tackles Addiction (The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health: Facing Addition in America; Executive Summary and Full Report)
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