The Los Angeles Daily News analyzed financial ties between drug manufacturers and doctors who prescribed psychotropic medications to California foster children from July 2009 to July 2014. The investigation found that drug makers, anxious to expand the market for some of their most profitable products, spent more than $14 million from 2010 to 2013 to woo the California doctors who treat this captive and fragile audience of patients at taxpayers’ expense. The drug makers distribute their cash to all manner of doctors, but the investigation found that they paid the state’s foster care prescribers on average more than double what they gave to the typical California physician.
The rise of electronic cigarettes and their impact on public health
Cross-posted from OUP Blog
Oxford Dictionaries has selected vape as Word of the Year 2014 and I wrote the following commentary for the OUP Blog.
A new report from the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention shows that use of e-cigarettes among high schools students has tripled in two years. The finding raises the question is vaping—the use of tobacco-free electronic cigarettes—an important tool for helping smokers quit or a ploy by Big Tobacco to addict another generation of young people to nicotine? Public health experts are poring over the modest evidence on the health consequences of e-cigarettes to find guidance for policy.
What is clear is that vaping—inhaling and exhaling vaporized nicotine liquid produced by an electronic cigarette—is on the rise not only in the United States but elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, the percent of current smokers had ever tried electronic cigarettes rose from 8.2 in 2010 to 50.6 in 2014.
Big Tobacco has jumped into the e-cigarette business with gusto. By the end of 2013, British American Tobacco, Lorillard, Philip Morris International and Reynolds—key players in the multinational tobacco business—had each bought e-cigarettes companies. While e-cigarettes still constitute a fraction of the tobacco business, their market share has grown rapidly. Retail sales value of e-cigarettes worldwide for 2013 was $2.5 billion and Wells Fargo estimates sales will top $10 billion by 2017.
Supporters of e-cigarettes argue that by satisfying the craving for nicotine these devices can wean smokers from tobacco, reducing the harm from inhaling more than 5,000 chemicals—many of them carcinogenic. Some studies have found that e-cigarettes were modestly effective at helping tobacco smokers to quit. Proponents believe that some tobacco use is inevitable for the foreseeable future so making e-cigarettes available helps reduce the world’s main cause of premature death. They compare e-cigarettes to offering injecting drug users free clean needles, a policy demonstrated to reduce HIV transmission.
Critics reject these arguments. They point to evidence that vaping exposes users to dangerous toxics, including cancer-causing formaldehyde. Of greatest concern, opponents fear that vaping will addict new users to nicotine, serving as a gateway to tobacco use. Some preliminary evidence supports this view. They also worry that e-cigarettes will re-glamorize smoking, undermining the changing social norms that have led to sharp declines in tobacco use.
The inconclusive evidence raises some basic questions. How do we make policy decisions in the face of uncertainty? In setting e-cigarette policy, what are appropriate roles for the market and government? Finally, in a political system where corporate interests have shown a growing capacity to manipulate the rules to achieve their goals, how can the public interest be best protected?
Over the past century, two warring principles have guided policy on consumer rights. The first, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, says consumers have the obligation to find out what they can about the products they choose to consume. The more recent precautionary principle argues instead that producers should introduce only goods that are proved safe. For e-cigarettes, this would put the onus on manufacturers to demonstrate in advance of widespread marketing that the alleged benefits of vaping outweigh its potential costs. Few researchers believe that such evidence now exists.
The history of Big Tobacco suggest that no industry is less qualified to set public health policy than the corporations that are buying up e-cigarette companies. In her 2006 decision in the United States racketeering trial against the tobacco industry, Judge Gladys Kessler wrote that the tobacco industry “survives, and profits from selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to … an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national health care system. Defendants have known many of these facts for at least 50 years or more. Despite that knowledge, they have consistently, repeatedly and with enormous skill and sophistication, denied these facts to the public, the Government, and to the public health community.”
Already the industry’s e-cigarette practices raise concerns. For example, companies have marketed products in flavors like cherry, vanilla, and cookies and cream milkshake. Their advertising has used the same sexual and risk-taking imagery employed to market tobacco to young people. Significantly, manufacturers decided not to promote their products primarily as smoking cessation devices, an approach that would have emphasized public health benefits, but instead as a glamorous, sophisticated new product. This strategy increases the likelihood that the product will create new generations of nicotine addicts rather than help smokers to quit.
Leaving e-cigarette policy in the hands of industry invites Big Tobacco to continue its deceptive practices and use its political resources to undermine public policy. The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gave the US Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco. In 2014, the FDA proposed new rules to regulate e-cigarettes. These rules would set the minimum age of 18 to use e-cigarettes, prohibit most sales in vending machines, mandate warning labels, and ban free samples. As these rules work their way through the system, advocates have suggested the need for additional rules including a ban on flavored e-cigarettes, limits on marketing, and strict oversight of the truthfulness of health claims.
Lax public health protection from lethal but legal products such as tobacco, foods high in sugar and fat, alcohol, firearms, and automobiles has produced a growing burden of premature deaths and preventable injuries and illnesses. Around the world, chronic diseases and injuries are now the main killers and impose the highest costs on health systems and tax payers. Allowing Big Tobacco to use e-cigarettes to write a new chapter in this sorry history would be a step in the wrong direction.
California can’t challenge ruling on concealed guns, court says
Relaxed rules for carrying concealed guns in public may not be challenged by California state officials or advocacy groups, a federal appeals panel decided, reports the Los Angeles Times. The decision was another victory for gun rights advocates, but it was not likely to be the last word. The state has the right to appeal Wednesday’s order and legal analysts expect the state to do so.
USA Today: Airbag Recall Deadly Slow
In an editorial, USA Today wrote, automobile air bags save about 2,300 lives each year, so when they instead turn deadly — exploding and spewing shrapnel into drivers’ bodies — you’d expect urgent action to get the defective products off the road. Instead, air bag maker Takata and its biggest customer, Honda, conducted glacial, piecemeal recalls that have left drivers in jeopardy.
Air Pollution Set to Soar as Vehicle Population Grows Exponentially in Indian Cities
International Business Times reports that the vehicle population on Indian roads will increase air pollution three to five times over, says a report from The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Under current trends of vehicle population, and existing fuel and emission standards, particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers will increase by a factor of three, while nitrous oxide emissions will rise by a factor of five.
Surprising Findings From a Comprehensive Report on Gun Violence
Background checks are back, reports Slate. Last week, Vice President Biden said that five U.S. senators—enough to change the outcome—have told him they’re looking for a way to switch their votes and pass legislation requiring a criminal background check for the purchase of a firearm. Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who led the fight for the bill, is firing back at the National Rifle Association with a new TV ad. The White House, emboldened by polls that indicate damage to senators who voted against the bill, is pushing Congress to reconsider it.
Five Questions for the Food Movement after Berkeley Approves a Soda Tax
On Election Day November 4th, Berkeley voters made their town the first in the United States to approve a soda tax, endorsing Measure D to levy a penny-an-ounce tax on soda by a 3 to 1 margin , 76% for and 24% against. The victory came despite the fact that Big Soda poured $2.3 million dollars into the campaign, about $409 per voter that sided with the industry position. For the food justice movement, the win demands a careful analysis of the lessons learned. I raise 5 questions to get us started in this analysis.
1. Everybody knows that Berkeley is the capital of the Left Coast but the town has set important national trends before. What are the characteristics of Berkeley and the campaign that may be generalizeable to other places in the US?
“We fully expect other communities to take on the soda industry and succeed,” said Yes on D Co-Chair Dr. Vicki Alexander after the victory. “Berkeley has a proud history of setting nationwide trends, such as nonsmoking sections in restaurants and bars, curb cuts for wheelchairs, curbside recycling, and public school food policies. But many communities have the same ingredients that made Measure D possible in Berkeley: proactive parents and community leaders who care about the health of their kids.” Yes on D built a broad, diverse and inclusive community coalition.
A report in the Contra Costa Times provided further perspectives on Berkeley’s role as trend setter rather than outlier. Tom Lochner wrote:
Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, is among those who believe the No on D camp is mistaken to view Berkeley as a stand-alone oddity. Rather, Goldstein describes Berkeley as “a pretty significant trendsetter for what happens in California and what happens in the country, on the progressive side.” “If you think about the Free Speech Movement, care and attention to people with disabilities, curb cuts for wheelchairs, indoor smoking ordinances, fast-food packaging — major environmental, social justice and public health movements have begun in Berkeley, and often, when they began, people saw them as radical,” Goldstein said. “But because they focused on justice and protecting people and the environment, those movements caught on, and spread across the country quite quickly.”
Dozens of local, statewide and national organizations supported Yes on D. We need to understand how the Coalition attracted this support and what other communities can do to replicate this success.
2. What can we learn about framing public health messages that counter Big Soda from the Berkeley campaign?
The Coalition, learning in part from the tobacco movement, painted Big Soda as the opponent. And obligingly, Big Soda did everything possible to live up to its stereotype—spending millions, suing the city, and distorting science. What will Big Soda learn from this defeat? Their public message is that no other town in America would ever follow Berkeley down this path but we can expect that they will vary their tactics on the next battle to incorporate what they learned here. Anticipating Big Soda’s next steps will help the food moment to get ready for the next campaigns.
3. In other places—like San Francisco – and on other issues—like GMO labeling—health advocates lost elections. What accounted for these losses?
In San Francisco, the soda tax measure also won majority support but to pass it required two-thirds approval in order to levy a tax that would be dedicated to health. To win in multiple settings, advocates will need to better understanding the ways that business and political elites set ground rules that thwart popularly supported measures and also to choose battles where the terms are most favorable. As Michele Simon has written, the GMO battles in Oregon and Colorado united four giants of the processed food/agribusiness industries– Dupont, Monsanto, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola were the largest donors to these campaigns—as well as to the efforts to defeat soda taxes in California. As Simon noted, “The good news is that the more we identify these shady lobbying tactics and dirty tricks and expose the moneyed interests behind them, the less effective the industry efforts will be.”
4. Taxes are one strategy to reduce soda consumption. What are others? How do we decide on the best portfolio of strategies?
From the tobacco control movement, we have learned that no single strategy can by itself diminish the toll from corporate promotion of disease. In tobacco, it was the combination of taxes, clean air laws, counter-advertising, litigation and community mobilization that led to the decline in tobacco use. Some in the food movement note the limitations of soda taxes but don’t always propose alternatives. Previously, I have described eight approaches to reducing sugar consumption. Now is the time to consider how to assemble the most effective portfolio of approaches to enable us to save lives in this generation instead of 40 years in the future.
5. What’s the potential –and limits—of reducing diet-related disease by taking on one product or one industry?
Current evidence suggests that no ingredient plays a stronger role in diet-related disease than sugar and no product more consistently delivers dangerous doses of sugar to broad sections of the population than soda and other sugary beverages. That’s the rationale for targeting soda and sugar for public policy and regulation. But it is also true that the more fundamental cause of the rise of diet-related diseases is a food production system that values profit over public well-being and highly processed food over whole food and that promotes the least healthy foods most heavily and the healthier ones almost not at all. The deepest solution, therefore, is not more regulation for each of the hundreds or thousands of harmful products but instead a transformed food system where making healthy food available to all is the priority. Charting the paths that can lead from incremental policies like soda taxes to transformational ones that move us away from our disease–inducing diets is the challenge of the day.
More on Soda Taxes and the California votes
Berkeley breaks through on soda tax. By Helena Bottemiller Evich in Politico.
Berkeley Wins: What’s Next for Soda Taxes? By Dana Woldow in BeyondChron the Voice of the Next.
Big Food Uses Dirty Tricks in Ballot Fights over GMO Labeling and Soda Taxes. By Michele Simon In Al Jazeera America
Yesterday’s elections: plenty of good news for the food movement. Food Politics By Marion Nestle
When Grassroots Protest Rallies Have Corporate Sponsors. Nightline ABC News
Big Food Uses Dirty Tricks in Ballot Fights Over GMO Labeling, Soda Taxes
Editor’s Note: In Tuesday’s election, voters in Colorado rejected a measure to require labeling of foods made with genetically modified ingredients. A similar measure in Oregon did better but appears likely to lose as well. And in California, Berkeley voters approved a soda tax, but San Francisco voters rejected such a tax. The story below, written by Michele Simon before the election, provides the background for these contests.
cross-posted from Al-Jazeera America
On Nov. 4, voters in three Western states will decide four food-related ballot measures that seem to have little in common: The two state-level measures (in Oregon and Colorado) would require genetically engineered (aka GMO) foods to be labeled as such, and two local initiatives in California (in San Francisco and Berkeley) would place a small tax on sugary soft drinks.
But they do have something in common. A large portion of the opposition for all four measures is being funded by two megacorporations: Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Moreover, the opposition is using many of the same tactics.
Let’s start with the money — and there’s lots of it. In Oregon the biggest donors to the $16.3 million fund opposing the GMO-labeling measure, after biotech giants Dupont and Monsanto, are PepsiCo ($1.4 million) and Coca-Cola ($1.17 million), according to reporting by The Oregonian. Supporters of the measure have raised a respectable $6.7 million so far.
In Colorado the opposition has raised more than $11 million so far, compared with only $440,000 by GMO labeling proponents. Again, Monsanto and Dupont are the largest donors to the “no” campaign, with PepsiCo coming in third, with $1.65 million donated so far, followed by Coca-Cola, with $1.1 million. PepsiCo has a huge stake in these battles. The largest food corporation in the nation, it owns far more than just beverages; the numerous brands under its Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats divisions will also be affected by the passage of GMO labeling laws.
Meanwhile in California, the beverage industry is spending a staggering amount of money to defeat the two soda tax measures. In San Francisco the “no” campaign has just topped $9 million, compared with only $225,000 raised by the measure’s proponents. Across the bay in Berkeley, Big Soda has raised $1.7 million, an astounding figure, given the city’s small size — about 100,000 residents. (Two years ago, industry giants spent close to $2.5 million defeating a similar measure in Richmond, also east of San Francisco.)
Clearly Big Soda — which likes to claim it cares about communities — has a lot of money to throw around to try to buy votes.
The best lies money can buy
So what does all that money get Big Soda? One big bag of dirty tricks.
For GMO labeling, the opposition was able to defeat other ballot measures in California and Washington State mainly by scaring voters into thinking food prices would increase dramatically if GMO labels were required, despite the lack of credible evidence to back up this claim. In Oregon and Colorado, the opponents are trotting out the same tired arguments, claiming the measures would increase grocery bills by hundreds of dollars per year. Never mind a recent report from Consumers Union that estimates that requiring GMO labels would cost only $2.30 per person annually.
Similarly, Big Soda is using money-related fearmongering to dissuade California voters from imposing soda taxes. In San Francisco the opposition is exploiting residents’ anxiety over the city’s affordability. The campaign’s website — tellingly named AffordableSF.com — declares, “The last thing we need is a tax that makes it even more expensive to live and work in San Francisco.” But as blogger Dana Woldow has pointed out at the alternative daily BeyondChron in her excellent series tracking Big Soda’s tactics, soda companies care only about getting low-income communities’ dollars, not about their health and well-being; just consider how the industry targets communities of color with excessive marketing. Moreover, many of these populations suffer disproportionately from health problems caused by drinking too much soda, such as diabetes.
In Berkeley the “no” side is engaging in similar scare tactics by calling the soda tax regressive, suggesting that higher prices will affect poor people the most. But as sustainable-food advocate Anna Lappé (and Al Jazeera contributor) pointed out in The Nation, “Big Soda seems to care about poor people only when a soda tax hits the ballot.”
The food and beverage industry buys credibility by paying others to carry its message to voters.
Hiding behind the locals
Another tactic being deployed in both the GMO labeling and soda tax battles is astroturfing, a common corporate strategy in which lobbyists hide behind a front group or other sympathetic representatives with local and grass-roots credibility. Given their obvious biases, the CEOs of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo can’t exactly go door to door or appear in TV ads to explain why voters should reject GMO labeling or soda taxes. Instead, industry buys credibility by paying others to carry their message to the voters.
In Colorado for example, the “no” campaign has Don Ament as its spokesman in a TV ad opposing GMO labeling. Ament is identified as a “former agriculture commissioner for the Colorado Department of Agriculture,” which is true. But his LinkedIn profile listed his role as a lobbyist for J. Andrew Green and Associates for the past 24 years. Apparently, once word of this got out, Ament scrubbed that job from his profile; an experienced lobbyist, after all, is out of step with the “farmer” image the ads try to portray. Last year in Washington the opposition similarly enlisted the former head of the state’s agriculture department to appear on TV ads urging people to vote “no.”
In the two soda tax battles, astroturfing has reached absurd heights. In San Francisco the industry front group, which calls itself the Coalition for an Affordable City, recruited campaign workers to march in the city’s Chinatown against the measure, posting photos to Facebook showing people holding signs and wearing pro-soda-industry T-shirts. Maureen Erwin, a political consultant working pro bono for the pro-soda-tax campaign, told me these marchers were paid for their appearance. To make the point, Erwin showed up at the rally carrying a sign that read, “This pretend rally is brought to you by Coke and Pepsi.”
And as I wrote in February, The San Francisco Bay Guardian caught Big Soda operatives signing up numerous unwitting local businesses to their list of supporters. In some cases, low-level employees signed on without authority and other businesses were no longer even open.
Finally, in Berkeley, Big Soda is paying young people to pass out literature at transit stations and go door to door. One group of canvassers shunned a Mother Jones reporter, saying they weren’t allowed to speak to media. In The Nation, Lappé described a neighbor’s experience with a canvasser: “He said he was working for a City Council member opposed to the tax, but when asked which one, he couldn’t come up with a name. The City Council is unanimously in support of the measure.”
But Lappé told me she thinks her neighbors are wise to what’s going on and is confident the measure will pass. “Across the board, the people I talk to here are feeling increasingly turned off by a soda industry that thinks it can buy our vote,” she said.
Much is at stake this November for the GMO labeling and soda tax efforts, on both sides. Some think if a soda tax measure can’t pass in liberal Northern California, then it can’t pass anywhere. Similarly, with two states having lost GMO labeling ballot measures already, the last thing that movement needs is another defeat at the polls. On the flip side, a loss for the food and beverage industry on any of these four measures will inspire more cities and states to take up the fight.
The good news is that the more we identify these shady lobbying tactics and dirty tricks and expose the moneyed interests behind them, the less effective the industry efforts will be.
2014 Sets New Record as Year of the Most Automobile Recalls Ever
A Ford announcement today recalling more than 200,000 of its vehicles for everything from gas leaks to stalling problems helped solidify 2014′s place as the year of the most-ever automobile recalls. Automakers have issued more than 550 recalls for more than 52 million vehicles, according to the Associated Press. The previous record, set in 2004, was 30.8 million recalled automobiles.
Evanston Raising Age for Tobacco Purchases
Starting Saturday, reports the Chicago Sun Times, you’ll have to be 21 to buy cigarettes and other tobacco products in north suburban Evanston, Illinois. The Evanston City Council passed an ordinance Oct. 27 raising the minimum age to buy and sell tobacco, which was previously set at 18, the city said in a statement.“This is a major step toward decreasing young adult chronic tobacco use,” said Evonda Thomas-Smith, director of the Evanston Health and Human Services Department.
Corporations and Health Watch 