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Impose hefty fines on retailers who supply to kids. This Queensland retailer was fined $2000 and could have been hit up to $10,000. Why not $10,000 or indeed $100,000? 22% of underage smokers obtain their cigarettes directly from retailers in NSW. If you really wanted to be tough fine illegal cigarette purchasers as well as [...] I am occupied in my work with thinking about government policies for reducing the damages of cigarette smoking. There are also market mechanisms that operate to reduce damages automatically. In most cases these can be given a boost by government policy. On the demand side that smoking causes disease encourages smokers to pay others [...] The key addictive agent (perhaps not the only one) in cigarettes is nicotine. This has led to proposals to cut the nicotine content of cigarettes so that it is more difficult for new smokers to get addicted. The difficulty with this proposal – and the failure of the so-called ‘low tar derby’ that sought to [...] According to the New York Times Swedish smokeless tobacco (snus) is being actively promoted in the US. Snus (pronounced like ‘loose’) is a smokeless tobacco product packed in tiny pouches that look like miniature used tea bags and which is placed between cheek and gum. I have argued before that, although possibly risky, this product [...] In searching for possible harm-minimisation policies with respect to the lung cancer consequences of smoking I recently posted on the possibility of using CAT scans as an earlier way of detecting tumours. The difficulty of such testing is the problem of too many false positives and the possibility that malignant tumours are likely to develop [...] One of the best reads I have enjoyed this year is Robert Proctor’s, The Nazi War on Cancer, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999. It s the provocative story of how valuable science and public policy thrived under an anti-democratic, despicable regime. I had been scouting around in the area of the early history of [...] A major risk that occurs in smokers and ex smokers is lung cancer. Are there steps that smokers or ex smokers can take to offset the effects of this terrible disease? The difficulty is that a disease like lung cancer can emerge in otherwise healthy people without early warning signs at all. Once it is [...] I was interested to read last week that the world’s biggest national consumer of cigarettes – China has 350 million smokers – will totally ban the advertising of tobacco products from 2011. I am pursuing a limited study of the incidence of smoking in China and three other developing countries – India, Pakistan and [...] Avery et al. (2007) in the June 2007 JPE (subscription required) examine whether advertising of cigarette smoking cessation products (reprint) does induce smoking quits or not. They find people exposed to such advertising are more likely to attempt to quit and more likely to successfully quit. Moreover such advertising induces ‘cold turkey’ quits that [...] I learnt from Hoyden that the ban on smoking has improved business in NSW bars. I forecast that it would – there is prior US evidence – but even I was surprised at the scale of the increase. That business improves when smoking is eliminated is scarcely surprising. Around 83% of adult Australians don’t smoke [...] Smoking cigarettes usually begins in adolescence. In Australia the average age of smoking initiation is 15.9 years. Although the incidence of youth smoking has decreased dramatically over the last few decades still around 10% of school-kids aged 12-17 smoke . A basic issue for designing possible policies for limiting such use is whether youth understand [...] In Australia there had been no successful individual actions against local tobacco companies until the successful case of lung-cancer sufferer Ms. Rolah Ann McCabe who was awarded $700,000 against British American Tobacco (BAT) in the Supreme Court by Justice Geoffrey Eames in 2002. The judgement, however, was overturned by the Court of Appeal 8 [...] I have been reading some quasi-medical literature on lung cancer and emphysema. The Wikipedia entry here, despite some wiki-criticism, seems to me an excellent start to the subject of lung cancer. The graph above I pinched from this survey. It shows nicely the 20 year lag between smoking and the contracting of lung cancer in [...] The story I have long believed is that it is nicotine that addicts smokers to tobacco products but that it is the other compounds in tobacco (e.g. tobacco specific nitrosamines) which cause medical problems such as cancer. Hence one way to encourage people to stop smoking is to provide NRTs (nicotine replacement therapies) such [...] In the 1880s when ‘Buck’ Duke purchased the Bonsack machine, which enabled the mass production of cigarettes for the first time, he was able to produce cigarettes much more cheaply than his competitors. However cigarettes in these days were an unpopular form of consuming tobacco – most was consumed as pipe tobacco, cigars or chewing [...] From Opinion Dominion (a conservative blogsite) I learned of this funding proposal to investigate use of a bacterium found in the stomach of kangaroos to try to deal with lung cancer. A longer report is here. From the first report: ‘A Queensland scientist has won a $750,000 fellowship to develop a lung cancer treatment from [...] A major plank in policy efforts to reduce cigarette smoking are public information-based policies. How should these policies be constructed to increase quitting? This is a tough issue. Telling old people that there are benefits, at any age, to quitting (a truthful statement!) encourages them to delay quitting. It might even encourage younger people to [...] One of the more interesting discussions of the costs of cigarette smoking is Frank A. Sloan, Jan Ostermann, Gabriel Picone, Christopher Conover & Donald H. Taylor, The Price of Smoking, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2004. This provides a provocative new view of what matters and what doesn’t in considering these costs. The study emphasises [...] One reason for banning smoking in the workplace, in public places, bars and in cars with non-smokers is to limit the deadly consequences of passive smoking – moderate exposure to passive smoking increases heart disease risks by 50%. Another reason is to increase the ‘user costs’ of smoking for those who pursue the deadly-dangerous habit [...] Yobbo suggested in response to an earlier post that there was convincing evidence that passive smoking was not linked to higher incidence of tobacco-related disease. This is an important argument in the context of tobacco regulation since one motivation for bans on smoking in bars and in the workforce is to reduce the health costs [...] |
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