While many groups of people stand to lose health insurance benefits under the new health care bill, smokers would be particularly harmed. Here’s how cutbacks in cessation programs could harm them.
The effective ban on e-cigarettes in Australia forces people to access unregulated nicotine products to help them quit smoking.
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Classing e-cigarettes as quit smoking aids could help rebrand the tobacco industry as a legitimate player in health policy. Here’s why we should be concerned.
Californians are going to be seeing more messages like this because voters stood up to Big Tobacco and passed a $2 tobacco tax increase.
California Department of Health Services
Thanks to voters ignoring Big Tobacco, California may be the first smoke free society. Here’s how it happened.
Tobacco companies are spending millions to stop a cigarette tax increase in California that public health officials say would save thousands of lives a year.
California Department of Health Services
California, the nation’s single largest market for cigarettes, has one of the lowest taxes on them. A proposal to raise the tax by US$2 a pack could signal a sea change.
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Improvements in education and vascular health are likely partly responsible for a sharp decline in dementia over the past few decades. The trend may continue, if we also address obesity and diabetes.
Smokers not only pay a lot of money for cigarettes but also for their health insurance.
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To discourage smoking, insurance companies charge higher premiums for smokers. This is having an unexpected consequence: rather than quit smoking, poor people are quitting insurance.
Hundreds of millions of these will go up in smoke. Via Shutterstock.
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Smoking rates among the poor are almost double the rates for middle-class Americans. Yet we are not providing poor people with the medical help they need to stop. We will pay billions for that later.
Very few smokers are willing to seek anything more than brief assistance.
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The New Zealand government has decided to reorient its priorities in tobacco control. It has announced it will be pulling 73% of its previous funding support for tobacco control advocacy. The only money…
As smoking continues its inexorable southward journey toward single-digit percentages of populations being smokers, it’s common to hear people say the smokers who remain are all “hard core”, heavily dependent…
Monthly bouts of abstinence have become regular features of public health and charity campaigns, but there may be even more important milestones for giving up.
Over the 23 days, we saw just 20 people vaping: 15 in Paris, one in Lyon, one in Calvi, one in Barcelona and two in Madrid.
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Every traveller forms impressions about patterns of frequently or seldom seen cultural differences when visiting other countries. You see far fewer women than men on the streets of more conservative Islamic…
It’s fair to say Victoria’s ban on smoking in prisons has had some teething issues, but there’s strong evidence to suggest the move is doing the right thing by inmates, staff and the health system.
Smokers respond to more filtered or more diluted cigarettes by taking bigger puffs and more of them.
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Past tobacco control measures have changed the pack, while the cigarettes inside remain the same. A logical next step is to regulate how companies engineer cigarettes to promote their use.
Tobacco is sold in nearly every shop, on every street corner, in every neighbourhood.
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While tobacco demand-reduction strategies have been widely implemented in Australia and internationally, comparatively little has been done to control the sale and supply of tobacco products.
Smokers would not riot in the streets. Many would welcome it.
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I’m a regular drug user. Every morning I take a drug to manage blood pressure. I get my supplies from my neighbourhood dealer, but I can get the stuff almost anywhere.
The ban disadvantages smokers who may have difficulty quitting but want to reduce the risks of smoking.
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Australia’s ban on e-cigarettes is ethically murky. It’s a paternalistic policy that denies adult smokers the right to use a less harmful form of nicotine.