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** 14 March 2022
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** UK
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** Under-25s could be banned from buying cigarettes (#1)
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** Repost: Vaping probably isn’t a gateway to smoking (#2)
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** Top NHS clinicians call for ‘addiction levy’ on gambling industry (#3)
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** International
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** British American Tobacco halts Russia sales after U-turn (#4)
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** UK
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** Under-25s could be banned from buying cigarettes
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** A ban on under-25s buying cigarettes is being considered by the new anti-smoking tsar, as he scrutinises whether national action on smoking goes far enough.
Javed Khan, a former chief executive of the children’s charity Barnardo’s, is leading an independent review of the government’s ambition to make England smoke-free by the end of the decade.
Before its publication next month, he told The Times that if “nothing different is done” in the approach to cigarettes then this target would not be met.
In his review, which has been commissioned by Sajid Javid, the health secretary, Khan said he was being “bold and brave” and had questioned whether the target of 5 per cent smoking prevalence by 2030 was ambitious enough.
Khan, who will report his findings on April 22, said a culture of thinking the “job is done” when it came to tackling smoking rates had led to some avenues of help being neglected. The review is targeting key groups, including pregnant women, young people and those from deprived communities.
The review is also looking at whether advertising campaigns on social media platforms used by young people, such as TikTok and Instagram, could be key to deterring them from smoking.
Source: The Times, 12 March 2022
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** Repost: Vaping probably isn’t a gateway to smoking
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** A new analysis of trends in nicotine use in England suggests that the so-called gateway theory of vaping isn’t the correct explanation, as the real reason for the association may be that teens who start vaping are the same ones who are likely to try smoking, regardless of whether they have ever had an e-cigarette.
Vaping is significantly less harmful for people’s health than smoking according to an estimate by Public Health England.
A key argument against making it easy to buy e-cigarettes is that young people who start vaping will get addicted to nicotine, and so will end up switching to traditional cigarettes for the faster nicotine hit. Several studies have shown that teenagers who try vaping are more likely to end up smoking. But these studies merely observe smoking rates in individuals who have vaped and those who haven’t. Such observational research can’t show that the first factor causes the second, only that the two factors correlate.
“It could be the case that there’s a common vulnerability that explains this association. That could be, for instance, because there’s some genetic predisposition to try different things or there’s environmental pressures to try things,” says Lion Shahab at University College London.
Instead of looking at whether individuals were likely to start smoking, Shahab’s team looked at how the rate of smoking among 16 to 24-year-olds in England has changed over the past 11 years, as vaping caught on. If there really was a gateway effect, then, as vaping rates changed, those for smoking also should have in a related pattern. In fact, while vaping in this age group jumped to about 5 per cent in 2013 and has hovered around there since, rates of regular smoking have fallen from about 30 per cent in 2013 to 25 per cent in 2018, the last year of the study.
The analysis can’t rule out, however, that vaping has a very small gateway effect, says Shahab.
Source: New Scientist, 10 March 2022
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See also: Addiction - Association of quarterly prevalence of e-cigarette use with ever regular smoking among young adults in England: a time–series analysis between 2007 and 2018 ([link removed])
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** Top NHS clinicians call for ‘addiction levy’ on gambling industry
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** The gambling industry should pay a new multimillion-pound statutory “addiction levy” to fund the prevention and treatment of gambling-related harm, senior NHS clinicians have said.
Prof Henrietta Bowden-Jones, the director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic, and Dr Matt Gaskell, clinical lead for the NHS Northern Gambling Service, are calling for a new independent health board to be created to tackle gambling addiction.
It would be funded by a statutory levy on gambling revenues on the “polluter pays” principle, under which the most harmful parts of the industry pay the most. That board would oversee the spending of levy money, which could reach tens of millions of pounds a year, with a target to reduce gambling-related harm by 50% within five years, starting in 2024.
In a paper for the Social Market Foundation thinktank, Bowden-Jones and Gaskell say the current voluntary arrangements for industry support for addiction services are failing badly.
“The current voluntary system has no integration of NHS services, no consistency in funding decisions, no independent evaluation of long-term impact or regulation via the Care Quality Commission, no coordinated oversight from research councils over research into harm, and serious questions have been asked about the independence of this voluntary system from the influence of the gambling industry,” they wrote.
The government is reviewing the UK’s gambling laws, with proposals to be published in a white paper expected within weeks.
Source: The Guardian, 13 March 2022
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** International
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** British American Tobacco halts Russia sales after U-turn
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** British American Tobacco has reversed its decision to continue selling cigarettes and other nicotine products in Russia, putting the sudden change of heart down to its “ethos and values”.
The owner of brands including Rothmans and Lucky Strike said it would pull out of Russia after all, two days after breaking ranks with companies such as Nestlé, Unilever, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s by refusing to quit its operations there.
BAT had previously said that, while it would scale back some of its activities, it would not stop selling its products.
On Friday afternoon, the London-based company said it would go further:
“Building on our announcement of 9 March 2022, we have now completed the review of our presence in Russia,” … “We have concluded that BAT’s ownership of the business in Russia is no longer sustainable in the current environment.”
“Today, we have initiated the process to rapidly transfer our Russian business in full compliance with international and local laws. Beyond continuing to pay our 2,500 employees, we will do our utmost to safeguard their future employment.”
“Upon completion, BAT will no longer have a presence in Russia.”
Source: The Guardian, 11 March 2022
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