The Smoking Cessation Leadership Center is pleased to co-host its next free webinar with the Association for the Treatment of Tobacco Use and Dependence (ATTUD).  Save the date for the webinar, “Behavioral Health & Tobacco:  The Final Frontier,” on September 29, 2011, at 1 pm central time (90 minutes).

Tobacco is a primary cause of death among people with addictions and/or mental health disorders and negatively impacts recovery from other substances. The Association for the Treatment of Tobacco Use and Dependence (ATTUD) developed a policy statement on integrating tobacco treatment into behavioral health services.  ATTUD is an organization of providers dedicated to promoting and increasing access to evidence-based tobacco treatment.

Webinar Objectives

• Describe the effects of tobacco among people with addictions and/or mental health disorders
  
• Understand key findings from the ATTUD position paper 
  
• Learn about relationships among tobacco dependence, withdrawal, outcome and response to treatment
  
• Learn specific action steps you can take to integrate tobacco treatment into behavioral health services  

Register now using and save the date.

Accreditation:
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians and allied health professionals.

UCSF designates this live activity for a maximum of 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 CreditsTM.  Participants who join the session on September 29, 2011, are eligible to earn up to 1.5 CME/CEU credits for a fee of $25 per CME/CEU certificate.  Physicians and allied health professionals should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the webinar activity.  

Certificate of completion will be available at no cost.  Please feel free to forward this announcement to your colleagues.  This webinar will be recorded and can be viewed online on the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center’s website beginning September 30, 2011.  For answers to other questions, contact Reason Reyes, SCLC director of technical assistance, at reason.reyes@ucsf.edu, or call toll-free (877) 509-3786.

When apartment tenants light up a cigarette, it's not just their neighbors who suffer. Landlords also suffer in higher cleaning costs. 

A new UCLA study shows that putting in place smoke-free housing policies could save owners of California multi-unit rental buildings up to $18 million a year statewide on the cost of cleaning apartments vacated by tenants who smoke. Importantly, these policies also protect their other tenants from the secondhand smoke that seeps between units. 

Secondhand smoke results in about 4,000 deaths each year from ischemic heart disease and lung cancer, and it causes about 31,000 childhood asthma episodes and 4,700 pre-term infant deliveries annually, the UCLA researchers said. 

Smoke wafts between units through shared airspaces and ventilation, hallways, cracks in walls and floors, electrical outlets, and plumbing fixtures, or from outside. 

"Secondhand smoke is an important cause of morbidity and mortality, and many current policy efforts are focused on encouraging owners and managers of multi-unit housing to implement smoking restrictions," said lead study author Dr. Michael Ong, an assistant professor-in-residence in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

This is the first study to take a systematic measure of smoking-related costs in multi-unit housing, as well as the first study of smoking and multi-unit housing to take into account small-scale multi-unit buildings — those with 15 or fewer units, according to Ong. About 66 percent of California Apartment Association (CAA) members own or manage small-scale buildings. 

Smoking-related costs for recently vacated units included cleaning, repairs and maintenance; painting and decorating; trash collection and fire damage; property and fire insurance; and legal, administrative and other operating costs. The researchers found that nearly half of the multi-unit housing properties owned or managed by CAA members had no smoke-free policies, but the smaller properties had a threefold higher rate of smoke-free policies than the larger ones. They also found that:

• More than 25 percent of multi-unit housing properties had smoking-related costs in the past year.
• One-third of multi-unit housing properties are currently completely smoke-free.
• For a single multi-unit housing property, the mean smoking-related cost was nearly $5,000 in the past year and the median cost was $2,000.
• The likelihood of incurring smoking-related costs was reduced by half with the presence of a complete smoke-free policy.
• Implementing complete smoke-free policies in California multi-unit housing could result in an estimated property savings of $18 million overall in the short-term.

The researchers caution that the survey response rate — 22.4 percent — was low, though it was similar to other CAA survey response rates. The study was published online August 18 in the American Journal of Public Health and will appear in the journal's October print issue.

Strategies put in place to provide smoke-free recreation areas are the topic of a September research article being published by, "Preventing Chronic Disease: Public Health Research, Practice, and Policy."

Localities in California have, since 2000, put in place hundreds of policies and ordinances to protect citizens from secondhand smoke. This research, conducted by Travis D. Satterlund, Ph.D., J.D.; Diana Cassady, Dr. Ph.; Jeanette Trieber, Ph. D.; and Cathy Lemp, looks at strategies used by state-funded local tobacco control programs to enact smoke-free policies involving outdoor recreational spaces.

The smoke-free recreation areas article is also available as download as a pdf file.

The questions come up often: What are electronic cigarettes? What actually happens when someone uses electronic cigarettes? Are they permitted under smoke-free air laws? Are they covered by FDA regulation of tobacco products?

The Public  Health Law & Policy Technical Assistance Legal Center has produced a fact sheet that addresses these questions about electronic cigarettes, and provides options for how electronic cigarettes may be regulated.

The fact sheet "Electronic Cigarettes: How They Are – and Could Be  – Regulated" is available for download as a pdf. The fact sheet also includes a graphic showing the construction of e-cigarettes.

The following is a statement by Matthew L. Myers, President, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids on the FTC Report on cigarette and smokeless tobacco advertising issued Friday.

WASHINGTON, DC (August 1, 2011) – The Federal Trade Commission on Friday reported that cigarette marketing expenditures in the United States declined from $12.5 billion in 2006 to $10.9 billion in 2007 and $9.9 billion in 2008.  The FTC also reported that smokeless tobacco marketing increased from $354.1 million in 2006 to $411.3 million in 2007 and $547.9 million in 2008.  When measured from 2005, smokeless tobacco marketing has more than doubled (from $250.8 million to $547.9 million).

While it is a positive step that cigarette marketing has declined, the tobacco companies continue to spend huge sums to market their deadly and addictive products. Counting both cigarette and smokeless tobacco marketing, the tobacco companies spent $10.5 billion on marketing in 2008 – nearly $29 million each day and 52 percent more than they spent at the time of the 1998 settlement of state lawsuits against the industry, which was supposed to curtail tobacco marketing.

Tobacco companies in 2008 spent 20 times more to market tobacco products than the states currently spend on programs to prevent kids from smoking and help smokers quit (the states spent $517.9 million on such programs in fiscal year 2011).  This huge mismatch between how much tobacco companies spend to encourage tobacco use and how much states spend to discourage it is a major contributing factor to the slowing of smoking declines in recent years.

It is especially troubling that smokeless tobacco marketing more than doubled from 2005 to 2008 and increased by 277 percent since 1998.  This has contributed to a 36 percent increase in smokeless tobacco use among high school boys between 2003 and 2009 (from 11 to 15 percent reporting smokeless tobacco use in the past month, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

Much of smokeless tobacco marketing in recent years has been aimed at enticing kids to start and at discouraging smokers from quitting, undermining efforts to reduce tobacco use.  Tobacco companies continue to aggressively market traditional smokeless tobacco products, often in kid-friendly candy and fruit flavors (such as vanilla, cherry and apple Skoal).  They have also introduced an array of new smokeless tobacco products, many like R.J. Reynolds’ Camel Sticks, Strips and Orbs that appeal to kids because they look, taste and are packaged like candy and are easy to conceal.  Increasingly, manufacturers have marketed smokeless tobacco as a complement to cigarettes in the growing number of places where smoking is not allowed.  Marketing for R.J. Reynolds’ Camel Snus has used the slogan “Pleasure for wherever,” specifically encouraging use of the product in offices, bars, airplanes and concerts.  Similarly, advertising for Philip Morris’ Marlboro Snus stated, “So next time smoking isn’t an option, just reach for your Snus.”  These products and marketing campaigns clearly discourage smokers from quitting – and truly protecting their health.

The continuing high level of tobacco marketing show why we need aggressive action by all levels of government to stop the tobacco epidemic. The Food and Drug Administration must effectively exercise its new authority over tobacco products and marketing, while the Administration and Congress should fund and implement the federal government’s new Tobacco Control Strategic Action Plan.  The states must pick up the pace of their efforts to increase tobacco taxes, enact smoke-free laws and fund tobacco prevention and cessation programs.

Tobacco use is the nation’s number one cause of preventable death, killing more than 400,000 people and costing $96 billion in health care bills each year.   These deaths and costs are entirely preventable if elected officials at all levels fight tobacco use as aggressively as the tobacco companies market their deadly products.

The amount spent on cigarette advertising and promotion by the largest cigarette companies in the United States declined from $12.49 billion in 2006 to $10.86 billion in 2007, and again to $9.94 billion in 2008, according to a report released Friday by the Federal Trade Commission.

The largest spending category in both 2007 and 2008 was spending on price discounts 
paid to cigarette retailers or wholesalers in order to reduce the price of cigarettes to consumers. This category accounted for $7.70 billion, or 70.9 percent of total spending on advertising and promotion in 2007, and $7.17 billion, or 72.1 percent of that total, in 2008.

The number of cigarettes sold or given away to wholesalers and retailers in the United States declined from 350.5 billion in 2006 to 342.8 billion in 2007, and to 322.6 billion in 2008.

A separate report on the major manufacturers of smokeless tobacco products in the United States found that their spending on advertising and promotion rose from $354.1 million in 2006 to $411.3 million in 2007 and to $547.9 million in 2008. The dollar value of sales by these manufacturers rose from $2.59 billion in 2006 to $2.70 billion in 2007, and $2.76 billion in 2008, and the amount by weight of smokeless tobacco sold rose from 115.82 million pounds in 2006 to 118.23 million pounds in 2007, rising again to 119.92 million pounds in 2008.

To read the full reports, click on Federal Trade Commission Cigarette Report for 2007 and 2008, and Federal Trade Commission Smokeless Tobacco Report for 2007 and 2008.

Promoting tobacco products at a music festival?

Giving away coupons for them?

Selling dollar-a-pack cigarettes?

Giving away design-your-own t-shirts?

Can anyone say, Big Tobacco alive and well in Omaha?

It’s all true, and it’s all happening now, as reported by the Omaha World Herald.

The Red Sky Music Festival in Omaha features music, a battle of the bands – and Big Tobacco.

That’s right. Marlboro has set up a trailer at the Red Sky Music Fesival.

At the trailer, Marlboro is presenting and providing coupons for its new product, snus. Snus is a moist powder tobacco product originated from a variant of dry snuff, that’s used by placing it under the lip.

The "Marlboro Experience" tent also offers cigarettes for sale at a discounted rate — $1 for a pack of any Marlboro variety, according to the World Herald.

“It's Marlboro's attempt to promote smoking,” wrote World Herald writer Josefina Loza.

The trailer also offers a design-your-own T-shirt station, where visitors can pick a shirt size, color and logo from a touch-screen computer and have the shirt screen-printed at the trailer.

And the Marlboro trailer sits next to a trailer for Playstation. Photos on the Playstation trailers’ Facebook page show young kids enjoying that trailer, just steps away from Marlboro, cigarettes and snus.

In Nebraska each year, 2,200 kids start becoming new daily smokers. The devastation tobacco causes is well known.

In a time where the dangers of tobacco use are well known, and when most people become addicted to tobacco products as kids, it’s disappointing that the Marlboro has been permitted to set up a trailer at a major music festival.

TD Ameritrade has a smoke-free policy for the stadium, and for that it should be commended. The next step is for that policy to be extended to include tobacco industry sponsors and vendors.

Would you like to share your thoughts on Marlboro visiting Red Sky 

For the first time since Gallup initially asked the question in 2001, a majority of Americans (59 percent) support a ban on smoking in all public places. At the same time, fewer than 2 in 10 support the idea of making smoking totally illegal in this country.

As Americans have learned more about the devastating health consequences of breathing secondhand smoke, support for laws that protect the right to breathe smoke-free air has grown.

Nebraska's smoke-free worksites law, which has been in place for two years, can be credited for Nebraska receiving its only "A" grade in the American Lung Association's latest report card on state activities to reduce tobacco use.

The American Lung Association has released the 2010 edition of State Legislated Actions on Tobacco Issues (SLATI). SLATI is the American Lung Association's annual summary and compendium of state tobacco control laws.  

The report grades four policy measures addressing tobacco use. Along with its "A" grade for smoke-free air, Nebraska received failing grades in tobacco prevention and control spending, which is listed at a total of $3.3 million; on the cigarette tax rate, which is 64 cents per pack and ranks 38th in the nation; and on smoking and tobacco quit programs. The 2010 SLATI report covers state tobacco control laws as they stood on January 1, 2011. 

You can download a PDF copy of SLATI 2010 from the American Lung Association. 

Below is a summary of Nebraska laws compiled by the ALA as part of its report.

Efforts to make Nebraska communities healthier will receive funding for the upcoming year from a grant program in its fourth year.

This year, 10 nonprofit organizations have been awarded a total of $100,000 in BlueHealth Advantage Wellness Grants from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska.

Since 2008, BCBSNE has awarded a total of $334,000 in wellness grants to 32 organizations in greater Nebraska. The grants help fund initiatives that promote healthy living and enhance the well-being of Nebraska communities. 

“As a Nebraska-based company, we are happy to recognize our grant recipients for their commitment to building healthier communities,” said Celann LaGreca, BCBSNE’s vice president of community investment. 

This year’s grant recipients each will receive $10,000. They are:

• Village of Culbertson, Two Rivers Walking Trail
• Central Nebraska Council on Alcoholism and Addictions, CATCH Kids Club (Grand Island)
• University of Nebraska at Kearney, Healthy Families (Holdrege)
• Good Samaritan Hospital Foundation, Fitness is Fun with Sam the Moose (Kearney)
• Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, At Ease Outreach (Lexington)
• North Platte Public Schools Foundation, Kids Walk
• Valley County Health System & UNL Extension (Ord)
• Northfield Elementary School, Wii are Fit (Gering)
• YWCA of Adams County, Girls in Action (Hastings)
• York General Health Care Services, York on the Move

BCBSNE representatives will travel the state this summer to visit the communities and deliver checks to the winners.