For years, opponents of tobacco harm reduction have insisted, with absolute certainty, that vaping is just as harmful as smoking. This myth has endured despite a perpetual lack of evidence. Still, people who despise vapes have maintained that one day science would vindicate them. So, when a group of Australian researchers published a paper that they proclaimed “the most definitive determination” to date that vapes cause cancer, the media  did not question that the moment had finally arrived.

Headlines around the world from nanny statists blared that vapes were linked to oral and lung cancer. Comment sections brimmed over with triumphant I told you so remarks. An accompanying video the researchers posted to YouTube claimed outright that “vaping causes cancer,” implying that this was based on “new findings.” It seemed as though the debate had been settled.

Except it hadn’t.

Strip away the media sensationalism, and the paper was simply a flimsy metareview of research conducted between 2017 and 2025. It contributed no new information at all. The authors claimed that vaping is carcinogenic and can “no longer be caricatured as safer than smoking,” but did not support this with anything resembling solid evidence.

The researchers merely recycled existing material, selectively interpreting findings and drawing conclusions that go far beyond what the underlying evidence actually supports. Nor did they evaluate the quality of that evidence. This included a handful of case reports of people who vaped and also developed cancer, an observation that means nothing.

“This is an un-systematic review,” states a comment on PubPeer, an anonymous post-publication review platform that’s highly regarded in the scientific community. “There appears to be no inclusion or exclusion criteria, or a preregistered protocol, or any justification for stopping the retrospective review at 2017. Consequently, no risk of bias assessment was conducted, there is no published protocol etc. Likewise, evidence is never sufficiently discussed in comparative terms to smoking cigarettes, the habit vaping is often designed to replace.”

The true cost of media credulity is not embarrassment, but harm.

The resulting message that vaping causes cancer, and is a public health threat as dangerous as smoking, became a masterclass in how weak evidence—amplified by eager media outlets—can hoodwink a credulous public.

There is a clear appetite in some quarters for bad news about vaping, an eagerness so strong that it overrides basic critical thinking. 

Ben Youdan of Action on Smoking and Health New Zealand warned that this kind of research contributes to the deeply inaccurate public perception that vapes are as harmful as cigarettes. If people who smoke believe there is no reason to switch to vaping, they will continue smoking. Combustible cigarettes cause the vast majority of the world’s lung cancer deaths, and are responsible for more than 480,000 deaths in the United States each year. The link between cigarettes and cancer risk is a textbook example of epidemiological evidence, which is precisely the kind of evidence that the Carcinogenesis paper did not have.

At some point, persistence in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence stops looking like a mistake. There is now more than two decades of research indicating that vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking, with a landmark 2015 review estimating a risk reduction of 95 percent. No one’s claiming it’s risk-free, but it should make the comparison clear.

The true cost of media credulity is not embarrassment—though there should be plenty of that—but real harm.

Image via City of Bridgeport, Connecticut

The post Despite Media Cheerleading, Vapes Still Not Shown to Cause Cancer appeared first on Filter.

Jackson said the idea came from a loved one of someone currently in Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) custody who’d been sanctioned for contraband tobacco possession.

“If people had access to cigarettes—which they would have on the outside, cigarettes are not illegal,” Jackson asked, “do you see a relationship between contraband tobacco and crime?”

GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver sees a relationship between the 47,000-plus of us currently in state custody and anything that sounds like it costs money.

“It goes back to, you know, the secondhand smoke issue and health-related issues that you’re going to have to pay for on the back end, allowing the tobacco to be inside the prisons …  the side effects that come with tobacco smoking,” Oliver replied. “So you kind of hear that point, but there’s also long-term effects.”

“Smokeless tobacco is a thing—is that not available as well?”

“Do we have smoke cessation programs available to folks who come in with that addiction?” Jackson asked. “Smokeless tobacco is a thing—is that not available as well? Are we concerned about mouth cancer, is that the problem?”

“Yeah, health effects. Long-term, you know, we’re paying a lot already,” Oliver said. “So you put that on top of those long-term effects for taking care of those individuals. Again, they’re coming to us a lot younger, they’re staying with us a lot longer, and to be aiding that wouldn’t be beneficial to the state.”

The discussion never turned to vapes, even though it’s normal to see a small number of them sprinkled into the more popular contraband such as cell phones, tobacco and more cell phones.

GDC purported to have a smoking cessation program, at least for some people in custody. The department did not respond to Filter‘s inquiry about such a program.

After prison systems across the country banned tobacco products, GDC was one where the contraband tobacco market remained robust. Staff aren’t permitted to smoke on the premises, but have certain designated smoking areas.

GDC officials told the committee that most of the contraband comes from visitors, despite the “propaganda” in the media. At least 360 GDC employees have been arrested for bringing in contraband since 2018, not including an additional 25 who were fired but not charged.

GDC is on track for a record body count in 2024. Homicides are up. Suicides are up. Anecdotally overdoses are up, at least in the medium-security facility where I’m currently incarcerated. More than 200 people in GDC custody have died since the beginning of the year, nearly half of whom have an as-yet undetermined cause of death. (GDC also appeared to confirm, very tentatively, that the June shooting deaths in Smith State Prison was the first incident of gun violence by someone incarcerated in a GDC facility.)

“If our prisons were fully staffed, at 100 percent, what do you imagine would be the contraband issue at that point?”

To end the bloodbath, the state needs to improve the physical conditions of its prisons. Not so that we’re more comfortable, but so that corrections officers stop walking off the job immediately after they start. As Oliver put it, “We don’t have a recruitment problem; we have a retention problem.”

“If our prisons were fully staffed, at 100 percent, what do you imagine would be the contraband issue at that point?” asked Jackson. She was referring to unsupervised prisoners regularly climbing up on the roof where drones would land carrying 50-lb payloads, or unsupervised prisoners popping out windows to simply pull the hovering drones inside.

“It probably wouldn’t be there as much, but it’d still be there I think,” replied GDC Assistant Commissioner Ahmed Holt. “There’s been contraband in prisons for as long as I can remember … they find a way to get something in.”

I did enjoy Majority Whip Randy Robertson weighing in to say explain how cigarettes could be used as currency, and so letting us have them could create a dichotomy of “haves and have-nots,” as if non-contraband smokes would be the thing that brings sex work and debt into a locked box of people crammed with people being slowly deprived of everything.

Allowing us to have cigarettes or less-harmful alternatives like vapes would not, of course, mean an end to needless deaths entirely. But the health harms Oliver is so concerned with are currently worse than if we had access to regulated cigarettes, let alone vapes or other smokeless options. There would be less contraband. Less violence. Less debt. Less suffering.

The committee had its first meeting August 23, and will disband by the end of 2024, having thought about us enough by then. Senator Jackson, thank you for asking. Everyone else, good riddance.

Image of senators Randy Robertson (left) and Kim Jackson via Georgia House of Representatives/YouTube

The post GDC Senate Study Committee: What If Prisoners Were Allowed Cigarettes? appeared first on Filter.

At this moment cigarettes are both contraband and currency in Gaza. Historically, Hamas has alternately banned tobacco products or taxed them heartily. But the unregulated cigarette market surged when the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023. Closed borders saw the price of Royal cigarettes, the preferred brand imported from Egypt, go from $0.70 USD to around $30 per cigarette. According to local reporters, many people are trying to smoke dried leaves because—while this does not produce the desired effect—“unfortunately, there’s no other solution.”

About one in three men in Gaza are estimated to use combustible tobacco. When the supply is controlled by greedy merchants in a time of shortage, prices will be inflated. Hamas has similarly inflated prices for basic food and humanitarian aid packages. What else can people do but pay for as long as they can?

In addition to searching essential supply trucks for contraband tobacco being smuggled in, Hamas also takes a hefty cut—reportedly 50 percent—of each legal tobacco shipment. So civilians without any political or ideological allegiance to Hamas, subjected to the IDF onslaught for close to a year now, must subsidize their ongoing oppression in order to make life slightly more bearable in the moment. The IDF cigarette drop appears to have been a one-time occurrence.

Here in the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) prison system, supplies are air-dropped to us quite often.

Pair of federal indictments charge conspiracies to use drones to deliver illegal drugs, contraband cell phones to Georgia prisons@DEAHQ @DEAATLANTADiv @JessSzilagyiTGV @eveyww @Georgia_AG @GA_Corrections https://t.co/iKZC4FFMFi

— U.S. Attorney SDGA (@SDGAnews) August 21, 2024

United States prisons are also captive markets of people who smoke heavily. In the 2000s when US prisons started banning tobacco—which long functioned as prison currency, and still does in many places there was an abundance of corrections officers to hunt for contraband. Sunday nights the prisoners who were bringing in tobacco would have fire sales, to mitigate losses from shakedowns during the coming work week.

Today, with half the corrections officer posts abandoned since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tobacco supply is unchecked and so are the price hikes. A tiny plastic cup, the kind made for dispensing medication, containing just 15cc of tobacco goes for $25. That’s about two commercial cigarettes, or six prison cigarettes on a good day. 

These are the kinds of conditions that lead desperate people to smoke plausible-looking plant matter, out of yearning for not just the physical component but the ritualistic one too. In prisons, dried banana-peel strings or other kitchen scraps are commonly salvaged in an effort to stretch a pinch of tobacco as far as it’ll go.

Living each day immersed in both violence and deprivation, and with the looming specter of death around every corner, tobacco becomes indispensable. If we have a cigarette to rise to in the morning, we feel hope that the new day can be better. Grief, hunger, bewilderment—all are held in check for a few moments, a feat that the breakfast here will never accomplish.

Prisoners often must choose between outrageously priced contraband tobacco and outrageously overpriced food sold at commissary.

Private vendors contracted by GDC control the prices on the food packages—the only other supply line of edible food we’re allowed to receive. They charge fees that amount to taxation on every dollar sent to us through formal channels. GDC helps itself to a 50-percent cut, while conducting searches for contraband like tobacco and cell phones—which is to say, streams of revenue that the department doesn’t control.

Of course, if GDC or any US prison system wanted to capture that revenue without exacerbating the prisoner population’s risk of lung cancer and other conditions we don’t get screened for, they’d busy themselves with getting legislators onboard with selling us overpriced vapes at commissary. GDC would profit, vendors would profit, prisoners would suffer less withdrawal and prisons overall would be less violent.

Of course, the idea may not appeal people to the underpaid corrections officers doubling their monthly earnings by bringing in cigarettes, or cell phones or whatever’s lucrative. But war profiteering is one of the more reliable professions on the planet. They’ll find another way.

Photograph of Gaza Strip via United States Representative Chellie Pingree

The post A New Gaza Strip Tobacco Market, and One in US Prisons That’s Getting Old appeared first on Filter.

My first incentive to smoke Camels was economic. I hadn’t preferred them to any other brand on offer from the vending machine at the pool hall of my early teens. But then I realized when you had the unfiltered cigarettes, people didn’t ask you for them as much. Camels were, in my opinion, the best to be had right then and there.

I was already smoking filtered Camels by the time R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company released Joe Camel into the United States consciousness in 1988, and as soon as the tuxedo-clad cartoon character was emblazoned on T-shirts, I was wearing them. I had them in different colors, a walking billboard anywhere I went. Friends would ask where I got them, and I’d point them to the local convenience store where they were sold, prepackaged with two packs of Camel Lights.

You also got a pack of Camels when you bought the Joe Camel coffee mug. There was a Camel-logo Bic lighter, a hoodie, a sweatshirt. In the 1990s there was even “Camel Cash” with which to buy these items.

After tobacco advertising was banned from televisions in the early 1970s, print campaigns were all the rage—magazine ads, billboards. Also merchandise. My generation took our cartoons seriously, and gladly bought up the swag and smoked our backs out. Joe was cool and we were too.     

Back then it seemed to me like people were just drinking the Kool-Aid when they talked about evil people sitting around a table, plotting the most profitable ways to introduce carcinogens to minors. The kids a few years behind me were already smoking, so it seemed to me that the game was to get a bigger share of the existing market, not to expand it. Surely the next generation would have been introduced to cigarettes anyway, with or without Joe?

Anti-vaping advocates will often point to Old Joe Camel and the bygone era of Big Tobacco advertising.

In 1997, the Federal Trade Commission would rule that Joe Camel was a violation federal law. Pressure had been mounting for a couple of years. Kids were buying the shirts even though they weren’t old enough to buy the product, legally that is. The FTC alleged that Joe Camel was intended to introduce the next generation to cigarettes, rather than poach consumers from competing brands.

“R.J. Reynolds has conducted one of the most effective advertising campaigns in decades,” stated FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Jodie Bernstein in May 1997. “Joe Camel has become as recognizable to kids as Mickey Mouse. Yet the campaign promotes a product that causes serious injury, addiction and death. It appeals to our young people. It is illegal and should be stopped. Joe Camel must grow up or go away.”

And he did, if not exactly willingly. The campaign was pulled and the T-shirts became kitschy memorabilia. Kid-friendly cigarette-hawking cartoons were banned from print ads entirely.

According to the FTC, Joe Camel made Camel cigarettes even more popular with minors than with adults. I don’t think Big Tobacco or anyone else should be marketing cigarettes to kids. But despite all the chatter about how Joe Camel got so many more kids to start smoking, from my perspective it seems more that he just got them to start smoking Camels. If he hadn’t come along, would they not have smoked something else?

Research is somewhat mixed as to what effect advertising actually has on youth smoking rates. The impact of another factor seems more clear, however. It’s the same thing that mattered most to my younger self when I was weighing the vending machine options at the pool hall: price. At the end of the day, access to the product is what matters,

Anti-vaping advocates will often point to Old Joe Camel and the bygone era of Big Tobacco advertising. They’ll say that vape manufacturers, including some of the companies that sell cigarettes, are using those very same tactics to irresponsibly drive an increase in youth vaping.

They leave out that while youth vaping has indeed become a thing, youth cigarette smoking is decreasing at the same time. Daily youth smoking—which, unlike vaping, actually kills people—has now fallen to a rate well below 1 percent.

There’s a taboo to condoning youth nicotine use of any kind. But what’s happening in the real world is that a new generation is choosing a much less harmful alternative to combustible cigarettes. My generation was just choosing between equally harmful brands.

The point of the outcry over Joe Camel and marketing tobacco to minors was supposed to be protecting them from harm. Since then, the public health mission seems to have shifted to protection from nicotine. If vape marketing took some of the market that would otherwise belong to cigarettes, isn’t that a good thing?

Top image (edited) via United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation. Inset image via Washington State Office of the Attorney General

The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, has received unrestricted grants from Reynolds American, Inc. Filter’s Editorial Independence Policy applies.

The post Joe Camel Wasn’t Why I Started Smoking. Or Even Smoking Camels. appeared first on Filter.

For the past decade or so, the main product that fills this gap has been Brown. So named for the brown 1-ply paper towels that form its base, Brown is infused with strong coffee, pressed, dried and portioned into individual rolling papers. Advertising the promise of a heightened buzz from smoking not just nicotine, but also caffeine. It’s a dubious marketing claim, but an effective one since cigarettes and coffee have always gone hand-in-hand.

“Hustling this Brown keeps me smoking,” Gene* told Filter during a recent visit to his cell, while he busied himself making Brown with kitchen coffee he’d saved from his breakfast.

“I have been smoking cigarettes all my life, but I can’t sell them because I smoke all my product and end up in debt,” Gene said. He moved some paper over to the windowsill to dry. “I haven’t had money on my commissary account in years.”

Wood pulp doesn’t regulate the heat as well as cellulose. Compared to commercial rolling papers, Brown papers make for a faster burn and heavier but they’re also about five times cheaper. Usually two for $1, or two for one soup in facilities on the soup currency exchange.

Unlike, say, moonshine, which someone running a homemade still in their cell every night can sell for $50 a soda bottle, Brown isn’t particularly lucrative. It’s a side hustle on par with making beds or cleaning sneakers, where usually one person in the living unit—maybe two—emerges as the person who does it the best. And Gene is ensured a steady customer base, as our exorbitantly priced tobacco supply continues arriving without the means to smoke it.

All the top-quality religious tomes printed on thin rice paper were smoked away years ago.

Quality hardback encyclopedias have a few transparencies in the biology sections, thin cellulose pages depicting the anatomies of leaves and such. All the top-quality religious tomes printed on thin rice paper were smoked away years ago, but my favorite was The Urantia Book, a soft-cover copy with about 500 pages of thin yellow rice paper. Prisoners new to the system, who never knew of rice-paper Bibles, still use the regular ones because they heard somewhere that “Bible paper” was the best-quality option.

Ink can be stripped from paper with acetone, which evaporates and doesn’t leave a bad taste behind. It doesn’t leave the page perfectly blank, but this isn’t about aesthetics.

The waxy paper covers from individual toilet paper rolls, crumpled up then flattened out, work great but taste awful. The paraffin coating from toilet paper roll covers can be removed with hot water, but if you just put it under a faucet it’ll tear. So you have to do it in a bowl with near-boiling water, and poke each individual square down to the bottom and watch the beads of come off patchily.

In dire straights—in the hole, when you have nothing else—you can use toilet paper itself. Three layers, dampened then dried. Rolled as tightly as possible, which isn’t very. You can twist off a small cone from the cardboard tube to make a mouthpiece. These burn fast.

The rarest are rerolls of cigar leaves, to make small blunts. But they come with an excess of leftover cigar tobacco that has to be wrapped in paper, or piped.

People tire of going through the process to remove ink and paraffin, and just smoke them.

Tobacco prices and paper shortages being what they are, many find pipes more appealing than cigarettes. The product lasts longer and is more enjoyable. But sourcing the materials tend to involve some combination of extra labor, expense and risk.

People who still care about their fingertips might make pipes from ink pen barrels. Every once in a while, someone assigned to a maintenance detail with access to the right size of brass fittings would make them into old-school straights. I have fond memories of a straight shooter pipe made from bamboo stalk, about as thick as your little finger. Cut it on either side of a joint and poke through the center with a tenpenny nail.

Eventually people give up on the ink pen smoking guards and just abide the burns. Prison’s many metal detectors spoil the fun of carrying a brass pipe, and my bamboo was confiscated long ago. People tire of going through the steps to remove ink and paraffin from the paper, and just smoke them along with the rest of chemicals.

The encyclopedias went fast, and it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever be replaced. Even without all the cigarette smokers reluctant to offend God, the chaplain could barely keep up with demand for the rice-paper Bibles. Eventually administration stopped giving them to us.

*Name has been changed

Photograph of Brown rolling paper courtesy of Anonymous. The pencil implement, or “popper,” is plugged into a wall outlet to function as a lighter.

The post A Wealth of Tobacco in Prison, and a Dearth of Ways We Can Smoke It appeared first on Filter.

When the American Bicentennial rolled around, I had just completed fifth grade and would be a big-shot sixth-grader come September, so I already knew it would be a very prolific time in my life. That first morning of summer vacation 1976, I woke up with anticipation coursing through me. It was going to be an epic summer; I was certain of it.

This was a time when TV Westerns were still popular, and quite formative for a 12-year-old such as myself. Smoking could have had no better ambassador than the Marlboro Man, riding off into the sunset on his mustang.

My best friend and I had 26-inch Huffy bicycles with banana seats, and our “horses” meant the world to us. We rode them to every remote corner of our Wild West suburban town, traversing treacherous paths like the rickety railroad bridge or the city dump.

During one such excursion, my buddy came to a sudden halt. He dismounted and picked up a red-and-white box of Marlboros from the side of the road. It wasn’t empty.

There, on the sandy hillside, we each lit our first-ever cigarette.

A mix of excitement and fear rose up within me as we beheld our contraband. We turned and charged off to the rock quarry, to get a better look at the pack’s contents far away from the prying eyes of the law, or our parents.

There, on the sandy hillside, we each lit our first-ever cigarette. We sat mostly in silence, except for all the coughing. We were radiating with the buzz of nicotine and doing something mischievous. With that first cigarette in my hand, I felt teleported into adulthood. I had arrived somewhere I never wanted to leave.

I thought of Becky, who’d sat next to me all through the fifth grade. Surely, if she could see me at that moment, there would be no doubt in her mind that I’d become the coolest kid in school. That thought stayed with me for years.

By the end of that first pack we had mostly learned how to inhale without coughing our lungs out. Now, we rode around town with a new mission. We surveyed roads and ditches, stopping to check each discarded cigarette box before riding on.

We were experiencing our first nicotine cravings, and those had to be dealt with. But we were also hunting for treasure.

We were experiencing our first nicotine cravings, and those had to be dealt with. But we also enjoyed hunting for treasure. Occasionally we’d find unsmoked cigarettes, but for the most part we saved the money from our paper routes and allowances and bought packs from the vending machine at the bowling alley. We figured by the end of summer vacation, we should try each of the different brands at least once.

We kept that first red-and-white box and would fill it with discarded cigarette butts whenever we came across them. Then later, at the rock quarry or in the woods behind the elementary school, we’d remove the filters and clumsily re-roll what remained, the way we’d seen older kids do.

Correction, August 14: This article has been updated to reflect an accurate time period for the TV commercial. The United States banned cigarette ads on January 2, 1971.

Image via Clallam County, Washington State

The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, has received grants from Altria, the parent company of Marlboro manufacturer Philip Morris USA. Filter‘s Editorial Independence Policy applies.

The post “Marlboro Kids” in the ’70s, in Search of Cigarettes and Adulthood appeared first on Filter.

In 2000, WDOC opened Stafford Creek Corrections Center and designated it the state’s first non-smoking prison. When I arrived at there in 2002, the top contraband on the compound was cigarettes.

By the time the ban appeared as promised, prisoners had been stockpiling tobacco for about six years. It was normal to see cells lined with 12 x 12 x 18 cardboard boxes, all filled with rolling tobacco. But after 2005 all our tobacco products were confiscated, even though the law didn’t explicitly require this.

The moment that legal routes to cigarettes were eliminated, an illicit market flooded in. Prisoners with the resources to bring in tobacco would do so, and prisoners without resources would buy it on credit. Debts mounted. Some people pay their debts with sex work. Some are unable to pay, and become targets for violence. Washington’s smoking ban made the community I live in less safe. Nicotine vapes, which are much less harmful than cigarettes, were never available in the first place.

At first, the corrections officers (COs) didn’t enforce the ban because they didn’t like it any more than we did. In some state prison systems, COs are still allowed to smoke; they just have to do it out on the grounds rather than inside the buildings. In WDOC, staff would in those early days have to leave the premises entirely in order to legally smoke during their smoke breaks. Department policy still upholds this, but in reality most COs were soon mandated to take their smoke breaks at their posts. That was the last of the smoking.

The void left by cigarettes has been filled by synthetic cannabinoids.

Many COs switched to chewing tobacco, of which they’re allowed one can each while on the premises. Prisoners don’t have this luxury, and have to make do with what they can pick up off the ground after the COs spit it out. This is broadly considered preferable to bringing in tobacco, because introducing contraband—no matter what it is—can mean new criminal charges. Picking up used chew, on the other hand, is punishable as merely an infraction.

Sometimes the used chew can even be dried out and smoked. People who miss cigarettes often miss not just the nicotine, but the physical process of smoking something. More than half the prisoners here who smoked cigarettes before they were incarcerated—especially those coming from other facilities where cigarettes may have been more accessible—end up smoking something else instead.

The void left by cigarettes has been filled by a new synthetic cannabinoid market. Spice, as it’s called here, skyrocketed in popularity about a decade ago. Some people like it; others like that the COs didn’t know what regulations to apply or how to test for it. Everyone liked having something to smoke.

At Stafford Creek, at least one person “bugged out” each day from the unpredictable effects. Many of them wouldn’t be using spice at all if they were allowed cigarettes.

The only prisoners who really have access to cigarettes are the ones who are near the end of their sentences and have been sent to work camp. These are the work details that take them outside the grounds—firefighting, flood work, road crews, fairgrounds cleanup. Camp prisons are the lowest-security facilities. When the prisoners housed there return for the night, they’re often caught with the cigarettes they brought back from their day jobs. They lose their work detail, the “good behavior” time they’d accrued, and are shipped back to a higher-security facility.

When staff don’t have tobacco as an outlet, they take out their frustrations on us.

WDOC is currently on a hiring spree. The pandemic caused a mass exodus of COs, and we’ve been understaffed ever since.

When the new recruits come through for training, we can smell the tobacco from the cigarettes or the sweet scent of the vapes they still use off-duty. These COs, many in their late teens or early 20s, are beginning their careers in an environment that looks nothing like it did before the pandemic. The veteran staff are burned out. The prisoners are less compliant. Tempers are shorter. Arguments arise more quickly.

Prisoners here are always in a bad mood; it’s prison. But COs are only sometimes in a bad mood, and those times tend to be when they’ve run out of chew. I’ve seen arguments between guards start when one asks a colleague for a dip and is denied. I’ve also seen guards walk over to an agitated colleague and offer a dip just to shut them up.

Nicotine is a handy outlet for the stress and tension that all staff and prisoners feel from the looming specter of violence we all face at all times. When staff don’t have that outlet, they take out their frustrations on us. The heightened level of day-to-day stress is taking a toll on all of us.

Washington State Department of Corrections actually used to issue prisoners free tobacco.

Washington rolled out restrictions for vapes in 2016 and banned flavors in 2019, but the state doesn’t ban vaping in public places the way it does smoking combustible cigarettes. WDOC, however, does not distinguish between the two. It prohibits vaping the exact same way it prohibits smoking.

Allowing prisoners to vape would go beyond just tobacco harm reduction. It would be a form of violence harm reduction. It would be harm reduction for synthetic cannabinoid use. It would reduce contraband, and by extension reduce the harms that come from further interaction with the criminal-legal system. It would make prisoner-guard interactions more functional and less dangerous.

Even if lawmakers don’t care about any of that, they’d at least be able to tax it.

In the early ’90s, before I entered the system, WDOC actually used to issue prisoners free tobacco. It would be delivered along with the correspondence materials like paper and envelopes; matchbooks too. The matchbooks continued for another decade, up until the smoking ban finally went into effect. They were great for sharpening the DIY syringes used here, and without them people will use less-effective surfaces like the floor and suffer more abscesses as a result.

There can be consequences for seeking medical care for injection infections, and so most people don’t. If we can’t smoke cigarettes, and we can’t vape, they could at least give us the matchbooks back.

Image via Carola68/Pixabay

The post Allowing Vapes in Our Prison Would Be Violence Harm Reduction, Too appeared first on Filter.

Smoking guided many of life’s big decisions. Not because I had no power over nicotine, but because through the decades society often sent those of us who smoked one way and those who didn’t another—and I had no objection to being swept in the direction that made sense to me anyway.

After high school, my friends and I planned to enlist in the military. Many of them did, and I had every intention of joining up until the moment I was told that I couldn’t smoke during basic training, which would be a couple of months. Forget that, said I, and decided the new life plan was attending the local community college. Around this time I picked up a deep-bowled corncob pipe at a yard sale; the new life plan was also to be mature and sophisticated. 

Though cigarettes were always my mainstay, the pipe lasted through college and into the construction jobs where I spent my 20s, mostly working on interstate highways. It was a great hand-warmer, useful on job sites when you didn’t have enough time between tasks for a cigarette—the deep bowl could be filled halfway and kept in a coat pocket, then relit when you had a few seconds for a puff or two.

Restaurants began to ask whether it’d be the smoking or non-smoking section. I did not understand the question.

I got engaged, but not married. The fiancée didn’t want to marry a smoker, and though I’d made a passing attempt or two at Nicorette, or some sort of nicotine replacement therapy I barely remember, at that time in my life I was never going to quit. Everyone in my family smoked, and none of us had ever questioned whether we should. I resented anti-smoking culture and still do. But the fact that I wouldn’t give up smoking for her convinced her I was more committed to cigarettes than to the relationship, and she wasn’t wrong.

In the early 1980s, restaurants began to ask whether it’d be a table in the smoking or non-smoking section. I did not understand the question. Who lives in a world where people are choosing the non-smoking section, and what makes it different? If one person’s smoking, everyone in the room is in the smoking section. And once I was sent to prison, everyone was always in the smoking section. 

Then came COVID. For most of March 2020, I could only get out of bed for bathroom breaks, of which there were very few thanks to fever sweats. Breathing was difficult, which meant smoking was difficult.

I considered the unfinished cig in the context of my finances. Being poor is expensive; being in a forced labor camp is very expensive.

When I lit a cigarette and took a tentative drag to see whether I was better yet, I felt a distinct sensation like there were four pinpricks at the back of my throat. I took a few more drags—to make sure I wasn’t better yet—then dropped the cig in the toilet and went back to bed.

The next day I tried again, lighting up a cigarette to watch the news. Cue the pinpricks, stubbing out the cig in an ashtray.

I then considered the unfinished cig in the context of my finances. Being poor is expensive; being in a forced labor camp is very expensive. Side hustles had allowed me to smoke and sometimes eat, and so two weeks of pandemic bedrest had taken a toll. The most prudent of my neighbors had six months in savings for just such emergencies, but I couldn’t remember the last time I was more than a week ahead; years ago, maybe.

Due to the vagaries of institutional living, tobacco prices fluctuated almost daily. A given week would see $40 dollars go toward an ounce of good loose leaf that usually lasted til the next resupply, but in prison (and elsewhere, one would assume) an ounce doesn’t mean 28.35 grams so much as whatever amount ends up in the bag.

I rolled a cigarette and took pinprick puffs—still sick, just making sure—while I weighed the situation. I hadn’t eaten in like 10 days. All roads seemed to lead to the same place. I rolled one last, generous cigarette that I saved to smoke later that night before bed, and set about selling the rest of my last ounce for food items. I could no longer afford to smoke, but at least I could eat while waiting for the craving to pass.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say it felt like divine intervention, but a few factors had aligned.

The cravings never came. I don’t mean to dismiss anyone whose “how I quit cigarettes” story involves a series of attempts that didn’t take. But in my case I simply decided to stop smoking, and I stopped, and that was it.

I’ve seen people drink water every time a craving hits, or do push-ups. The occasional vape makes its way into prison, but not because we hear anything about tobacco harm reduction. People who try to quit through much more effort than me—which is most of them—don’t have much support here.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say it felt like divine intervention allowed me to go cold-turkey, but a few factors had aligned. It of course helped that quitting was my idea. In a more tangible sense, being financially motivated worked out—not buying cigarettes meant I could incentivize not smoking with rewards, such as food.

Positive reinforcements tend to facilitate the behavioral changes our government attributes to punitive ones. After a week without cigarettes I splurged on the commissary ready-to-eat meatballs in spaghetti sauce, and wondered what I could get after a month. A new radio, it turned out. And of course the body still benefits from quitting no matter one’s age, but that was never my motivation.

I’d been meditating on and off for years even before prison, and that helped. So did writing—I never smoked while writing, but I’d always taken smoke breaks from writing. If stuck on a particular line or idea, a trigger in my brain would still direct me to smoke on it, but what this really meant was: Observe the idea, expand on it and see what comes of it. Purpose is a useful way to fill a void where addictive behaviors used to be.

The thought of cigarettes sometimes floats across my mind in time of stress or when someone nearby lights one within an especially rich aroma. But I’m content to enjoy it from afar. Cigarettes still shape the course of my life and relationships with the people around me: For four decades I smoked whenever and wherever I wanted without regard for the comfort of others, which turned me into a non-smoker who doesn’t mind when others do the same.

Photograph via Utah Office of the Attorney General

The post How I Quit Cigarettes in Prison, After Smoking for 40 Years appeared first on Filter.

The order concludes a long-standing civil racketeering lawsuit by the government against the largest US cigarette companies, which has been held up to varying degrees in court ever since 1999. It’s set to go into effect on July 1, 2023, and gives the relevant manufacturers—Altria, Philip Morris USA, R.J. Reynolds and ITG Brands (a subsidiary of Imperial)—a further three months to post the mandated “corrective statements.”

“Justice Department attorneys have worked diligently for over 20 years to hold accountable the tobacco companies that defrauded consumers about the health risks of smoking,” Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general, said in a press statement. “Today’s resolution implements the last remedy of this litigation to ensure that consumers know the true dangers of the smoking products they may consider purchasing.”

The signs include statements like: “More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined”; and “Smoking is highly addictive. Nicotine is the addictive drug in tobacco.” 

“It is critical that we use our expertise and the full power of the law to protect Americans from tobacco-related disease and death,” Brian King, the director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), said in a press statement about the DOJ’s action. “Today’s order further emphasizes the federal government’s commitment to take whatever steps that are necessary to protect public health, including preventing false and misleading labeling and advertising by manufacturers.”

It’s in the area of relative risk, among others, that some experts feel an opportunity to provide truly helpful information to the public has been lost.

Cliff Douglas, now the director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network, likely helped to originate the lawsuit many years ago, working with a journalist and a Reynolds whistleblower to show that tobacco companies had for decades been deliberately manipulating the nicotine content in cigarettes to dependence-forming levels.

He told Filter that the move was “not without significance.” But he stressed it was key to highlight this could help end smoking-related disease and death, as other forms of tobacco—like snus—carry far fewer harms than combustible cigarettes.

“It’s important to recognize that the original court decision, and the industry behavior it addressed, predated the emergence of e-cigarettes in the United States, and the mandated corrective statements importantly highlight the priority of dramatically reducing combustible tobacco use,” Douglas added.

But it’s in the area of relative risk, among others, that some experts feel an opportunity to provide truly helpful information to the public has been lost. One of the statements that will soon adorn retail outlets merely offers, for example: “It’s not easy to quit.” In line with federal agencies’ stance, it adds nothing about harm reduction, and options ranging from nicotine replacement therapy to—still more effective—e-cigarettes.

Another of the statements, reminiscent of the FDA’s misleading anti-youth vaping campaigns, reads: “When you smoke, the nicotine actually changes the brain—that’s why quitting is so hard.” (All psychoactive substances temporarily affect the brain, but implications beyond that would be disputed by many scientists.)

The statements’ heavy emphasis on nicotine—which does not, in the absence of tar, cause serious harms—will disappoint harm reductionists. But the messages have US public health authorities’ fingerprints all over them.

King, who has frequently described his short tenure as CTP director as a “baptism by blowtorch,” has come under fire for how adult nicotine users remain misinformed about relative risks. Before he had even assumed his new role, tobacco harm reduction (THR) advocates pointed out that King, as a higher-up at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was largely responsible for the misconception that “EVALI”—the string of vaping-related illnesses that cropped up in the fall of 2019—was linked to nicotine.

Though the CDC belatedly admitted to have found a “very strong culprit” for the “e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injuries”—vitamin E acetate, a cutting agent found in some illicit THC cartridges—it still has not bothered to drop “e-cigarette” from the name, let alone firmly correct the record. There has been repeated pressure to do so from some leading experts in tobacco control.

At the E-Cigarette Summit in May, many delegates took the opportunity to remind Matthew Holman—then the top scientist at CTP, but who would soon leave the FDA to work for Philip Morris International (PMI)—why the public is so massively misinformed about the relative risks of vapes and cigarettes. A recent study found that 60 percent of doctors believed all “tobacco” products to be equally harmful.

“If it formed the basis for truth-telling about the risky and safer options, it would actually be useful.”

On December 8, in a separate case, a federal judge blocked the FDA from enforcing a rule that would require tobacco companies to put graphic warning labels on cigarette packs—the latest episode in a lengthy battle between manufacturers like Reynolds and the agency, which had finally intended to put the rule into effect in November 2023 after more than a decade of legal and logistical hurdles. The tobacco producers most recently fought the rule with a First Amendment challenge.

Clive Bates, a THR advocate and former director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) in the United Kingdom, has previously called such labeling “essentially a stigmatizing measure designed to make smokers feel stupid and to force them to parade it as they smoke.” That’s on the basis that just about everyone believes—rightly—that cigarettes are deadly. What most people still don’t know is that vapes and other nicotine options are not.

Bates reacted similarly to the “corrective statements” that will soon be widespread in US stores. “Obviously it’s all about pointless symbolism and victories of style over substance,” he told Filter. “If it formed the basis for truth-telling about the risky and safer options, it would actually be useful. But that opportunity will definitely be squandered.”

Top photograph by Lindsay Fox via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0. Inset graphics via Department of Justice.

The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, has received grants from Altria, PMI and Reynolds American, Inc. Filter’s Editorial Independence Policy applies.

The post New Court-Ordered Cigarette Warnings Will Omit Harm Reduction appeared first on Filter.

Thankfully, by the turn of the millennium, high school smoking had dropped to about 20 percent. By 2011, high school smoking had dropped to 16 percent.

Then, over the past decade, US high school smoking dropped a further 90 percent. “Current use” of combustible tobacco cigarettes is now 1.9 percent. But for teens, “current use” means even one puff in the past month. “Frequent use” (20 or more days per month) is now 0.38 percent. Essentially nil.

We should all be dancing in the streets. Except we’re not. Because declines over the past decade coincide with the “e-cigarette era.”

Most smokers start in their teens. And teens basically don’t smoke now. Let that sink in. As this age group ages, the age of smoking will be over. Today’s teens will not die horribly from smoking-related cancer, heart and lung disease. We should all be dancing in the streets.

Except we’re not. Because declines over the past decade coincide with the “e-cigarette era.” Anyone glued to the media knows that US teen nicotine use from e-cigarettes has skyrocketed. So let’s take a closer look at that. I will use publicly available, easily obtainable data via the CDC National Youth Tobacco Survey (from 2001 to 2021) and NIH Monitoring the Future Survey (for the years prior to 2001). Spoiler: US teen nicotine vaping has gone up, down, up, and then way down.

Teen Vaping

US high school nicotine vaping began to creep up in 2012. By 2014, “current use” had reached 13.4 percent. It hit 16 percent by 2015.

Then, for some reason, high school nicotine vaping dropped back down to 11.3 percent in 2016 and stayed relatively low in 2017 (11.7 percent). Ironically, the only significantly relevant thing that happened just prior to that drop was Juul’s profoundly naïve 2015 launch campaign.

Teen vaping then began to rise again in 2018. “Current use” reached 20.8 percent and, in September 2018, the US FDA declared a “teen vaping epidemic.” High school nicotine vaping increased again in 2019, reaching 27.5 percent—something like the smoking rate had been in my teenage years. And that was the peak of the “epidemic.”

It is important to note that these numbers are for teen “current use.” Even during 2019, teen daily use of e-cigarettes was only 5.7 percent. 

It is strange that the FDA has not yet announced that the “epidemic” is over.

Thankfully, US high school nicotine vaping then dropped 60 percent. Down 29 percent by 2020 (pre-pandemic), and then another 42 percent during the pandemic. By 2021, it was 11.3 percent. That percentage is, coincidentally, exactly where we were in 2016. It is lower than where we were in 2014 (13.4 percent), four years before the FDA declared an “epidemic.”

So it is strange that the FDA has not yet announced that the “epidemic” is over. It is also strange that not one major US media outlet has emphasized this stunning 60 percent drop in just two years.

It’s also worth noting that there are 12 million adult vapers in the United States as of 2021 (out of 255 million adults). Adult current use means what intuition would suggest: “daily” or “some days” (basically, “regular use,” suggesting you own an e-cigarette and buy products).

Comparing that to teen “current use” is, of course, apples and oranges, because that’s “past 30-day ever-use.” US teen “current use” is now 2 million (out of 40 million middle and high school students). Teen frequent use (at least 20 days/month) may be closer in meaning to adult current use. These are the kids who may own an e-cigarette. That’s 0.8 million.

By either measure, the number of adults who own and buy these gizmos (the market) is far higher than the number of teens who use them. (Adults in the United States, of course, far outnumber children.) Still, you’d never know any of this from US media stories about e-cigarettes. And by the way, about 40 percent of adult current users have quit smoking completely (4.8 million). Another 30 percent may be “on the journey to quit” through dual use. And another 30 percent (at least) have quit smoking with e-cigarettes and then quit vaping.

To summarize: Teen nicotine use from deadly cigarettes is now near zero. And “current use” of e-cigarettes is 11.3 percent.  And most “current use” is infrequent experimentation. Daily use is 3.1 percent. 

Where Are We Now?

I am fully aware that everything you just read flies in the face of everything that the media has been telling you for several years now. I’m just not sure what to make of that. These are the facts. Fact-check me. The numbers are not difficult to extrapolate from NIH and CDC survey websites and CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR).

Teens should not vape or smoke. But because so few US teens now smoke and there is some dual use, total current US teen nicotine use from both sources is now 11.7 percent. Remember: Just 10 years ago, 16 percent of them were smoking and none vaped. And that 16 percent was much lower than previous decades.

The only thing that truly is way up is US adult moral panic over teen nicotine use.

There is no escaping this simple fact: Total teen nicotine use from cigarettes and e-cigarettes is lower today than any time in the past 50 years. So “what’s up with teen nicotine use?” The short answer is nothing. It’s way down. Like so many hot button issues in America today, there is a profound disconnect between public perception and reality. The only thing that truly is way up is US adult moral panic over teen nicotine use.

I believe this raises serious questions about the motivations of health “experts” who continue to insist that teen vaping is a gateway to smoking, that we’re in the midst of a teen vaping epidemic, and that a “whole new generation” is now “addicted to nicotine.” All of those claims bear an uncanny resemblance to 1930s Reefer Madness.

Photograph by Rawpixel/Public Domain

Both The Influence Foundation and INNCO, the organization led by the author, have received grants from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. The Influence Foundation has also received grants from Juul Labs, Inc. Filter‘s Editorial Independence Policy applies.

The post Why Aren’t We Celebrating the End of Teenage Smoking? appeared first on Filter.