Elixir

With a stroke of his pen, President Barack Obama granted the Food and Drug Administration regulatory control over tobacco on June 22. His signature may snuff out the multi-billion dollar tobacco industry by 2047, according to two national tobacco experts.

Michael Fiore and Timothy Baker, director and assistant director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, Madison, Wisc., published “Stealing a March in the 21st Century: Accelerating Progress in the 100-Year War Against Tobacco Addiction in the United States” in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Their report analyzes data from the 1960s to today to chart milestones in the war against tobacco while presenting a battle plan to eradicate its use.

“Numerous observers have claimed over time that tobacco use has plateaued and progress against its use has stalled,” Fiore and Baker write. “However, the remarkable decline in rates of tobacco use since the 1960s belies this claim and underscores the remarkable success of tobacco control efforts to date.” Tobacco use has not dropped every year since 1965, but the overall rate of adults smoking has declined from 42 percent to 20 percent between then and 2007, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta.

The authors claim that the descent in smoking is a result of stricter public smoking laws, increased economic benefits to not smoking, more successful quitting tools and widespread dissemination of the destructive qualities of tobacco.

Fiore and Baker’s report calls for more. They ask for higher excise taxes on tobacco on both state and federal levels, a blanket ban on tobacco advertising and emphasis on preventing those younger than 17 from starting smoking. Research shows that nonsmoking by that age suppresses a strong genetic impulse that leads to addiction.

One of their biggest dreams became reality with President Obama’s support. The new law, among other things, bans the terms “mild” and “light” from tobacco marketing campaigns and further restricts marketing of tobacco products to kids. Fiore and Baker believe the law is another step in the inevitable, a tobacco-free America within the youngest generations’ lifetimes.

This entry was posted 1 year, 1 month ago on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 8:39 am and is filed under Doctor's Orders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.