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- Category: October 2018
If you walk across campus, it’s no secret that the Smoke Free UB Policy isn’t enforced.
Outside Lockwood Library, Capen Hall or pretty much any building on North Campus, countless students, faculty and staff smoke cigarettes throughout the day. Since UB is technically a smoke-free campus, there are no receptacles to throw away butts and thousands of finished cigarettes are littered across campus.
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- Category: October 2018
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- Category: October 2018
Germany's drug commissioner says that nicotine represents the country's biggest substance risk. She wants to ban outdoor advertising for cigarettes and tobacco, but some within her own party don't want to kick the habit. When German government point woman Marlene Mortler presented the official 2018 report on drugs and addiction in Germany, she did not stress opioids, cocaine, LSD or even cannabis. Instead, she stressed that nicotine remains the addictive drug that has cost the most lives in the country in recent years.
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- Category: October 2018
While electronic cigarettes are banned in Thailand, debate continues about whether to legalize them so the government can regulate a market that has now gone underground. The Ends Cigarette Smoke Thailand group, or ECST, has filed a request to the director of Law and Litigation Department in the Office of the Ombudsman Thailand, asking for the ban on e-cigarettes to be reconsidered.
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- Category: October 2018
Scientists at Scripps Research have successfully tested a potential new smoking-cessation treatment in rodents.
In a study published online [...] the scientists gave nicotine-dependent rats an engineered enzyme that breaks down nicotine in the bloodstream before it can reach the brain. Treatment quickly reduced the animals' motivation to take nicotine, reversed their signs of nicotine dependence, and kept them from relapsing when they were given access to nicotine again.
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- Category: October 2018
The science behind why it's so difficult to quit smoking is crystal clear: Nicotine is addictive—reportedly as addictive as cocaine or heroin. Yet any adult can stroll into a drug store and buy a pack of cigarettes, no questions asked.
"From a scientific standpoint, nicotine is just as hard, or harder, to quit than heroin but people don't recognize that," said Dr. Neil Benowitz, a nicotine researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
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- Category: October 2018
We hear a lot about how the ingredients in vape juice might be bad for us: the nicotine is addictive, for example, and the flavorings could be bad for lungs. But new research says that there are chemicals in e-liquids that we didn’t even know to worry about, because they form in the e-liquid bottle or pod after all the ingredients are mixed together.
Scientists have discovered that cinnamon, vanilla, and cherry flavors react with propylene glycol, a main ingredient in many vape juices, to create entirely new chemicals, [...]
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- Category: October 2018
Ian Power was among the first to buy legal recreational marijuana in Canada but he has no plans to smoke it. He plans to frame it.
Canada became the largest country with a legal national marijuana marketplace as sales began early Wednesday in Newfoundland. Power was first in line at a store in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
“I am going to frame it and hang it on my wall. I’m not even going to smoke it. I’m just going to save it forever,” Power said.
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- Category: October 2018
With federal prohibition still alive and well despite record public support for marijuana legalization, the cannabis industry in the United States remains a state-by-state business. The inability to cross state lines has led to a web of complex and disparate state laws and regulations for businesses to navigate. This forces cannabis producers to recreate their entire infrastructure in every new state, rather than scaling up production and shipping products across the country, [...]
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- Category: October 2018
One thing no one expected from Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s policy address was a frontal attack on Hong Kong’s long-standing commitment to free and open markets. However, in announcing a ban on the sale of e-cigarettes, she has delivered a mighty blow to this commitment, while providing a rationale that defies logic. The ban is based on some seriously flawed arguments if indeed, as claimed, it has arisen from public health concerns.
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- Category: October 2018
A new report shows an alarming spike in the use of an e-cigarette device called JUUL. Health experts are concerned about its popularity among kids.
At first glance, you may not know the device is a vape.
“JUULs have quickly overtaken in the electronic cigarette department as the most popular brand, because these juul electronic cigarettes look like flash drives. they’re very stylish, kids love them,” said LSU Health Professor and Cancer Epidemiologist Dr. Edward Trapido.
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- Category: October 2018
Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, were first explored in the 1960's, with the goal towards creating a cigarette whereby one could inhale nicotine without inhaling tobacco smoke. They were initially marketed as "safe cigarettes" to help cigarette smokers transition to smoking cessation. Indeed, studies did show that adult cigarette smokers who used e-cigarettes were more likely to have successful smoking cessation than those who used other types of nicotine replacement therapies. [...]
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- Category: October 2018
Two landmark reports about drugs and harm reduction have been released in the past few weeks: Regulation: The Responsible Control of Drugs by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, the organization of former world leaders; and No Fire, No Smoke: The Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction by Harry Shapiro on behalf of Knowledge-Action-Change, a health agency associated with the Global Forum on Nicotine. Both are grounded in the principles of harm reduction and human rights, and the acceptance that a drug-free world is a fantasy.
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- Category: October 2018
At midnight on Aug. 23, the second tranche of President Trump’s tariffs officially took effect, levying a 25% tax on 279 products from China, including electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). While politicians, pundits and economists argue about the diplomatic and trade value of such actions, convenience store and vape shop owners and operators brace for the probable financial fallout.
“It definitely will have an effect on profit margins, but to what extent I’m not sure yet,” said Tim Greene, [...]
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- Category: October 2018
Until now, much attention had been focused on the adverse effects of cigarette smoking by pregnant women on their children’s cognitive development. Some reports suggested that cigarette smoking during pregnancy can produce harmful effects in multiple generations of descendants (transgenerational effects). Not much had been known about the effects of paternal smoking, although more men smoke cigarettes than women. Our study shows that paternal nicotine exposure can be deleterious to the offspring in multiple generations.
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- Category: October 2018
The human brain contains specialized neurons that respond to cannabinoids. A reduction in the number of working cannabinoid receptors has been linked to both marijuana and alcohol dependence. However, many patients with psychiatric disorders also smoke tobacco, and it is possible that cannabinoid receptors also play a role in nicotine addiction.
To investigate these links, Hirvonen and colleagues [...] assessing the activity of cannabinoid receptors in the brains of smokers and nonsmokers using PET scans.
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- Category: October 2018
More than half of Canadian homeowners recently surveyed say they would be less likely to consider a property if they knew cannabis had been grown inside, according to a poll released Tuesday.
Real estate listings company Zoocasa, which commissioned the study, found that 52 per cent of homeowners would think twice about buying a home that had been used to grow even a legal amount of marijuana.
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- Category: October 2018
Over the past decade, hip-hop music has become a world-wide phenomenon and, in 2017, surpassed rock as the biggest music genre in the United States. Up until now little has been known about how often, or in what context, tobacco and marijuana products and imagery appear in hip-hop music culture. In order to get a better understanding of the presence of these products--and the potential public health threat they pose--a team of researchers [...] analyzed leading hip-hop music videos over the five years from 2013-2017.
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- Category: October 2018
LOCAL vaping groups are calling on the adoption of the same approach in tackling tobacco use in the United Kingdom, wherein the Parliament’s report urges the government to relax regulations on electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes).
“E-cigarettes are helping many people in the UK quit smoking. The government should seriously consider the UK tobacco control model in order to reduce the harms caused by conventional cigarettes to Filipino smokers,” said Peter Paul Dator, president of The Vapers Philippines.
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- Category: October 2018
British American Tobacco Plc said revenue from smoking alternatives will miss expectations this year as it issued a more pessimistic outlook for the tobacco industry’s new products than rival Philip Morris International Inc.
The maker of Lucky Strikes lopped 10 percent off its target for revenue from electronic and noncombustible cigarettes this year. BAT now forecasts 900 million pounds ($1.2 billion) after it recalled a device in the U.S. and Japanese demand for so-called heat-not-burn tobacco has gone flat.