Category: News This Week

The U.K.’s Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (Forest), last night celebrated its 40th birthday with a gala dinner in London.

The dinner, which was held at Boisdale, Canary Wharf, a traditional Scottish restaurant with cigar terrace, was attended by about 180 guests, who included members of parliament, parliamentary researchers and friends of Forest.

Simon Clark, director of Forest since 1999, told guests it had been his great pleasure to be the non-smoking director of Forest for precisely 20 years.

“Smokers must be one of the most vilified minorities in the country and I am proud to be involved in this small but important battle against anti-smoking zealots and an overbearing nanny state,” he said.

“Forest has always promoted choice, not smoking. Forty years on we are more convinced than ever that advocating freedom of choice and personal responsibility is a cause worth fighting for.”

Speakers at the dinner included Madsen Pirie, co-founder and president of the Adam Smith Institute, Mark Littlewood, director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Claire Fox, a member of the European Parliament and founder and director of the Academy of Ideas.

In the first-of-its-kind longitudinal study of lung health among millennials, researchers will be examining the long-term impact of vaping on the lungs, reports Medpage Today.

Scientists from Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, in partnership with the American Lung Association, plan to follow 4,000 healthy adults from the ages of 25 to 35 to gain insights into the causes of chronic respiratory diseases common in later life.

The first six years of the study will be funded by a $24.8 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

One of the goals of the study is to evaluate exposures relevant today as opposed to those that prevailed during the 1970s when prior studies were done, according.

Cigarette smoking among adults in the U.S. was 14 percent in 2017, compared with 33.2 percent in 1980. Vapor products, which are popular among young people today, did not exist at the time of the prior studies.

The study will also look at the impact of early-life air pollution exposures.

A new law in Thailand will make it illegal to smoke at home in a bid to reduce health problems caused by environmental tobacco smoke, reports The Bangkok Post.

The law, which goes into effect on August 20, will give smokers 90 days to break the habit, according to the 2019 Family Development and Protection Act. Those who violate the law can be tried in either the juvenile or criminal courts. While no penalty has been fixed yet, the court can order violators to stop smoking in the house and/or undertake a course to quit smoking.

“Last year 8,278 people died of second-hand smoke,” said Ronnachai Khongsakon, chief of the Tobacco Control Research and Knowledge Management Centre. He added that 33 percent of smokers smoke in their homes and almost 74 percent smoke daily.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair will give the keynote speech at the TFWA World Exhibition & Conference 2019, scheduled for Sept. 29-Oct. 4 in Cannes, France.

Blair will share his experience of working on the frontline of U.K. and international politics and offer his thoughts on Brexit, foreign policy and other pressing geopolitical matters.

Blair served as U.K. Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007. During his time in office, his New Labour government was responsible for implementing major domestic reform across Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with record investment in education and healthcare and transformational progress on equality and human rights.

On the global stage, Blair was instrumental in securing the Good Friday Agreement with Northern Ireland, created the Department for International Development to address extreme poverty around the world, and introduced landmark legislation to tackle climate change.

“As always at the TFWA World Conference, our aim is to engage speakers who can help us better understand the times in which we live and do business,” said Alain Maingreaud, president of the TFWA.

“Our keynote speaker this year is someone with unrivalled experience of regional and global politics, who is able to address the often-complex issues that are shaping the world economy. We are delighted to welcome Mr. Blair to Cannes and look forward to hearing his thoughts on a wide range of issues.”

Juul Labs has partnered with Better for You Corp., a subsidiary of JG Summit Holdings, to enter the Philippine market, reports The Business World.

The company presents its product as an alternative to traditional combustible cigarettes, saying that Juul use has contributed to a decline in smoking in the U.S. The Philippines is home to 16 million smokers, according to the company.

However, the Philippine Department of Health (DoH) insists that there is “no specific evidence to confirm the product’s safety and efficacy” and that e-cigarettes are not “proven nicotine replacement therapy.”

The DoH is drafting an administrative order regulating sales of electronic nicotine delivery systems and non-nicotine delivery systems.

Congress recently approved a higher levy on heated tobacco and vapor products. The measure is awaiting President Rodrigo Duterte’s signature.

Heated tobacco products such as e-cigarettes will be taxed PHP10 ($0.19) per pack beginning January 2020, which will be followed by yearly hikes of 5 percent starting 2021.

Also in 2020, vapor products, pods, cartridges and refills will be taxed PHP10 per 10 ml but those with volumes higher than 50 ml will be taxed PHP50 on top of the PHP10 per additional 10 ml. Excise for these vapor products will also increase annually by 5 percent starting 2021.

The excise taxes are on top of the existing 12 percent value-added tax.

Juul Labs’ entry into the Philippines follows its launch in South Korea last month. The company is set to introduce its products in Indonesia in the next few weeks.

Malaysia has lost MYR5.13 billion ($1.23 billion) in potential tax revenue to the black market for cigarettes, reports The Malaysian Reserve, citing Oxford Economics.

With illicit stock accounting for approximately 59 percent of domestic cigarette consumption, Malaysia’s black tobacco market is proportionally one of the world’s largest. The country ranks ahead of Brazil, where illicit cigarettes account for 50 percent of the market; Ecuador (41 percent), Panama (34 percent) and the United Arab Emirates (33 percent).

The main factor behind the rampant illegal cigarette trade is the high cost of legal cigarettes in Malaysia, according to Pete Collings, director of economic impact consulting for Europe and Middle East at Oxford Economics.

“On the demand side, what is feeding into whether a consumer opts for illicit or illegal cigarettes is going to be around affordability,” he told The Malaysian Reserve.

“(Cigarette) duties are pushing prices for legitimate brands far higher than the illegal prices. Therefore, it is far more affordable to go for an illegal cigarette.”

According to the report, a 20-stick pack of cigarettes retails at an average of MYR15 compared with MYR4.50 for illicit brands.

The cost of legal cigarette brands further comprised 7.1 percent of the mean household daily income in 2016 and 17.3 percent for the mean daily income for households in the bottom 40 percent income group.

This is against 2 percent and 4.8 percent for illicit cigarette brands in the respective categories, according to the report.

Legal cigarettes are also significantly more expensive in Malaysia than in they are in most neighboring countries.

The report was commissioned by the British American Tobacco.

The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) may have been less effective in reducing smoking than is often claimed, according to two studies led by health researchers at York University. In some countries, cigarette consumption has actually increased since the treaty’s adoption in 2003.

While high-income and European countries experienced a decrease in annual consumption by more than 1,000 cigarettes per adult since 2003, low- and middle-income and Asian countries showed an increase of more than 500 cigarettes annually per adult, according to the studies.

Researchers suggest that varied implementation of tobacco control policies and shifting trends in cigarette affordability across countries may have incentivized the tobacco industry to move its lobbying, marketing and promotion activities away from countries with strict guidelines and toward countries with less stringent measures.

“We found quantitative evidence that could support that idea: that tobacco companies, after the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, specifically went to jurisdictions that were not implementing proven tobacco control policies as rapidly as we saw in high income countries,” Steven Hoffman, lead author of the studies, was quoted as saying by MedicalXpress.

“If this is true, this means the FCTC could even have unintentionally caused harm by encouraging tobacco companies to target the many more people who live in these areas and Asian countries who would have fewer governmental protections against the companies’ efforts.”

Published in The British Medical Journal, the studies are the first scientific evaluations of the FCTC’s effectiveness on a global level.

“This study sets a new gold standard for how to evaluate international laws,” said co-author Poirier. “The FCTC was widely celebrated at the time it was launched and no one has actually evaluated that treaty on a global level until now.”

The government of Gujarat, India, plans to ban the sale and consumption of e-cigarettes, reports Business Standard.

“To ban the e-cigarettes, the home department will bring a bill in the upcoming session of the assembly to amend the law (the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products—Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution Act) which regulates the sale and consumption of such items,” said Minister of State Pradeepsinh Jadeja.

Gujarat would become the 13th state in India to ban e-cigarettes.