Imagine the following. A car company considers offering reinforced side panels as an additional safety component that customers can have for a price. An outside agency steps in and discourages them in part because the cars already have airbags and seat belts. But the overwhelming reason is “people won’t buy them”. Though in that example, […]
Monthly Archives: July 2010
This has only the slightest relationship to tobacco harm reduction issues but it is just too interesting not to mention. Just published in PLOS, the meta-review Social Relationships and Mortality Risks is bound to make the news for some time. And rightly so. While I can see many points of debate regarding the specifics within […]
Recently on DesignTaxi, there was a write up on Erik Askin’s idea on redesigning cigarette packs to make the act of getting a cigarette annoying enough to improve the chances of quitting. I think this is quite clever and a good option for those who think this might make the critical difference. I know that […]
At Sociological Images, they repeated a few of the recent comments about tobacco companies using color coding to distinguish their products and the idea that consumers would associate lighter colors with a safer cigarette. I think it is quite possible that smokers do associate lighter colors with a safer smoke. And it would be unfortunate […]
Every day a few more items pop up in the news about yet another company or campus sanctimoniously proclaiming that they will now be tobacco free. Typically this is accompanied with some sort of statement about it eventually resulting in lower health costs. First of all, unless the people actually quit smoking, and don’t just […]
“As perverse as it may seem, these many forms of creatively dodging the counterevidence represent a backhanded tribute to its importance. However much we ignore, deny, distort, or misconstrue it, evidence continues to matter to us, enormously. In fact, we ignore, deny, distort, and misconstrue evidence because it matters to us. We know that it […]
I really dislike both Paris and Perez Hilton. In fact, and though you may think I am being hyperbolic or fatuous, I really do think that culturally, they are corrosive elements, and personally, they diminish my quality of life. I would rather spend a day in a room blue with second hand smoke than a […]
First of all the misleading headline: US Teen Smoking On The Rise Again? And what does this headline represent? “The rate at which US high school students used cigarettes fell from 36 percent in 1997 to nearly 22 percent in 2003, but then the rate of decline slowed sharply, a report by the Centers for […]
If you have read us for any length of time, or perused our website, you have seen that we often refer to Michael Siegel’s excellent Rest of the Story, but just to stress the point, he is always worth reading. In his latest post, False Information from Center for Tobacco Products is Concerning; FDA Actions […]
In the ludicrously titled Movies Downplay Smoking Risk anti-tobacco activists once again try to formulate arguments for removing the very sight of people smoking. The title of the press release (because this qualifies as news in some quarters) in its departure from any connection to reality signals the tenor of the article itself. In short, […]
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