Altria celebrated the enactment of FDA tobacco legislation by introducing a new Marlboro menthol cigarette brand.
Altria Introduces 'Richer, Bolder' Marlboro Menthol Cigarette
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/
ne...id=a6wck3.5_LIM
"These benefits include establishing a common set of high standards for all tobacco manufacturers ..."
What could these high standards be? But of course this is part of PM's new marketing campaign. I'm sure we will soon hear PM claim that their cigarettes are FDA approved ...
"You can always trust the other fellow to put his/her own best interests first."
Of course, this statement applies to most people in the public health community as well.
It is obvious PM intends to follow the highly touted example set by decades of FDA partnerships with the Drug industry.
A story explaining that special relationship broke today, as coincidence would have it;
http://www.thestar.com/article/654423
"From the creation of fake academic journals, to bogus stories submitted to real journals, to falsified results in some of academia's most respected publications – the pharmaceutical industry has been rocked by allegations that the world's biggest drug companies put public relations above public safety.
As consumer advocate Peter Lurie put it recently: "I've seen no shortage of creativity emanating from the marketing departments of drug companies."
The allegations have come to light thanks to lawsuits in the United States and Australia seeking compensation for drug costs that the plaintiffs claim were too high. The suits allege the drug companies skewed academic investigations into their products, thereby driving up the price they could charge.
Trudo Lemmens, an associate professor of medical law at the University of Toronto, says it should not be left to the civil courts to uncover what he calls "publishing as marketing."
"You have to ask yourself, why isn't there more regulatory control?""
Big Pharma has it all figured out.
If you can't get favorable research reports, invent a non profit or charity to sell your wares and make up anything they like, because no one can be held responsible for what ever they say or do.
If you can't get published because of that bothersome editorial ethics nonsense, or the peer review thing. No problem just start your own journal and the airwaves will resound with your special wisdom.
TC replicated many of the sins of their masters, however to my knowledge, they never actually created a medical journal, although they likely added a large proportion of the filler in the bogus journals.
As the world learns more about the bogus journals, how many lies did TC contribute, that will now fall to closer scrutiny?
Good luck with that TC, just enough rope...
Can anyone name a stunt pulled by "the evil tobacco industry" in the past twenty years on par with this?
http://thestar.blogs.com/ethics/...bles-
mount.html
"The move comes just weeks after a former research subinvestigator at Vivra Asthma & Allergy, an asthma research and treatment centre, went public with allegations that its Singular trails were knowingly skewed and falsified.
Trials of Singular, Serevent, Foradil, Flovent, Xolair, Accolate, and Xopenex conducted at the Tucson, Ariz., facility of Vivra Asthma & Allergy were corrupted by protocol violations and outright falsifications, says Robert Davidson, M.D., a former clinical research subinvestigator (SI) at the facility. ...
Davidson charges that during aggressive recruitment schemes in the late 1990s, patients with abnormal EKGs, multiple risk factors for coronary artery disease, arrhythmias, pulmonary embolisms, rheumatic fever histories, acute illnesses, and even pituitary tumors were enrolled with impunity in trials that earned investigators as much as $10,000 per patient.
Patients were “prescreened” for asthma drug trials with medically unnecessary pulmonary function tests (PFTs) without their knowledge or consent and had medication dosages reduced in apparent efforts to qualify them for the lucrative trials.
Staff could be seen entering rooms where placebos and real drugs were mixed and unblended, invalidating entire studies sent to the FDA as data for new drug applications.
The brazen “study buddy” and “crossover” arrangements, as staff referred to them, included churning or serially enrolling patients into clinical trials despite risks to their health and early terminations, coercing unwilling patients to participate, and directly falsifying patient study diaries, say documents filed by Davidson in a federal complaint.
Merck stands by its drug."
Totally OT:
Kevin and (I think it was) Iro.
I'd asked about whether or not Canadian tribal brands were "fire safe" You each had different answers. I noted what I thought was an 800 phone # on a pack of same ( it said "TL," before the number) but the number itself had only 6 (as opposed to US's 7) digits and... it didn't work. So my q's are:: are Canadian 800 #s (this one, an 889 "area code"), only 6 digits or does TL, in Canada, not mean "tel" but something like Tobacco License?
:
Walt;
Reserve smokes are for the most part produced under a government license. Canadian phone numbers are exactly the same as they are Stateside 3 numer area code and 7 digits with a 1 to indicate long distance.
In the same month the government of the day paid 500 million dollars to start a provincial campaign to promote TC in Canada, they licensed a number of [six I believe]these operations on Indian lands.
[BTW; Health care matters are normally out of the federal domain and are exclusively provincial territory, meaning the feds signed the tobacco treaty without legitimate authority]
We see three varieties of native brands in Ontario they come in waves one month all you can buy are bags with American Surgeon General's warnings on the bags and the next you would see the bags with Canadian silly pictures covering a quarter of the bag accompanied by a TC slogan announcing one big lie or another. Some months all you get is a clear bag and all the unlabeled ones seem to be of the Canadian RIP variety.
For the past six months or so I have only seen the Canadian scenic picture version. Obviously most of the American made products are not fire safe and are not exactly legal for sale on the Canadian reserves. The Canadian brands have been of the fire safe type for as long as the law made the highly taxed varieties sold in the stores elsewhere RIP.
The imported look a likes you can buy openly in many of the so called multicultural [ghetto]communities, mostly from China, India and Russia are not RIP as far as I know.
Most of the kids, in this neck of the woods at least, are smoking the lookalikes and hopefully avoiding RIP although considering the origin and growing conditions, I hate to imagine what they are smoking tobacco wise in the non RIP varieties.
OT
This is a hopeful sign
Few psychiatric units have banned smoking
"Few psychiatric units in England have fully implemented a total ban on smoking nearly a year after it came into effect, according to a survey by the Mental Health Foundation.
The results, published in a report – Death of the smoking den: The initial impact of no smoking legislation in England in 2008 – show that 85% of the 109 units that responded said the ban had been implemented only partially, or not at all, effectively. The ban came into effect on 1 July 2008.
Respondents indicated many practical problems arising from the ban’s implementation such as a rise in ‘secret smoking’ and occasions where staff felt they needed to ‘turn a blind eye’, particularly when patients are very unwell.
Additionally many units lacked a safe outdoor space where patients can smoke. Even where such a space existed, respondents said the need to escort patients outside to smoke was a considerable drain on staff time.
Respondents also reported feeling uncomfortable with their enforcement role. Some staff reported feeling more like police than nurses, while others cited incidents of aggression linked to the ban"
http://www.nursingtimes.net/what...le?
referrer=RSS
For whatever reason,I am very glad that not everyone has been "only obeying orders".
"The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Mil...gram_experiment
Philip Morris is a friend of tobacco control, Philip Morris has always been a friend of tobacco control. Goldstein and his cohorts have sabotaged us by putting up all those anti-Philip Morris banners!
TC! TC! TC! TC!
Walt, I don't know about Ontario where Kevin's from, but in Quebec any native cigarettes I have come across carry the Surgeon General's warning and are not RIP's.
And as Kevin answered, Cdian phone no.s are identical to the states, so I have no idea what this TL stands for.
This is what native cigarettes with the Surgeon General's warning look like on the shelves of the smoke shacks of the 2 reserves close to Montreal: http://forces.org/News_Portal/ne...wer.php?
id=1113
They used to sell for 6 00 $ a baggie (a baggie contains 200 cigarettes), then they went up to 10 $ and a friend that smokes them (I don't because I find them too harsh) has advised me that they now go for 15 $.
The bigger native reserve - Kahnawake - has its own tobacco association that makes its own rules and determines retail prices. http://www.kahnawaketobaccoassoc...ssociation.com/
Kevin, Iro:
Until last week, this brand was called Opal and the pack simply said "made in Canada." No indication of RIP on the barcode but an SG warning about smoking while pregnant. Suddenly-- tho the pack has the same design, colors, even the same fonts and the same warning to the fecund, the name has changed to Seneca, and now, right above the "made in Canada" it also says "made under the authority of Tobaccoville USA, Inc. USA." If it's still not (or now not) RIP, then possibly that's because it's not yet federal law, but only law in some states. They don't seem to go out but will happily smoke themselves if you leave them alone to play. Proving, I guess, that cigarettes are addictive-- even to cigarettes!
If the above gives you any insights or clues, please let me know. Otherwise, you can drop it. But thanks for your help.
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