Tobacco, nicotine and related products have and continue to change rapidly, creating new challenges for policies regulating their advertising, promotion, sponsorship and sales. This paper reviews recent commercial product offerings and the regulatory challenges associated with them. This includes electronic nicotine delivery systems, electronic non-nicotine delivery systems, personal vaporisers, heated tobacco products, nicotine salts, tobacco-free nicotine products, other nicotine products resembling nicotine replacement therapies, and various vitamin and cannabis products that share delivery devices or marketing channels with tobacco products. There is substantial variation in the availability of these tobacco, nicotine, vaporised, and related products globally, and policies regulating these products also vary substantially between countries. Many of these products avoid regulation by exploiting loopholes in the definition of tobacco or nicotine products, or by occupying a regulatory grey area where authority is unclear. These challenges will increase as the tobacco industry continues to diversify its product portfolio, and weaponises ‘tobacco harm reduction’ rhetoric to undermine policies limiting marketing, promotion and taxation of tobacco, nicotine and related products. Tobacco control policy often lags behind the evolution of the industry, which may continue to sell these products for years while regulations are established, refined or enforced. Policies that anticipate commercial tobacco, nicotine and related product and marketing changes and that are broad enough to cover these product developments are needed.

Background. Tobacco companies have actively promoted the substitution of cigarettes with purportedly safer tobacco products (e.g., smokeless tobacco, e-cigarettes) as tobacco harm reduction (THR). Given the tobacco, e-cigarette, and pharmaceutical industries’ substantial financial interests, we quantified industry influence on support for THR.Objectives. To analyze a comprehensive set of articles published in peer-reviewed journals assessing funding sources and support for or opposition to substitution of tobacco or nicotine products as harm reduction.Search Methods. We searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and PsycINFO with a comprehensive search string including all articles, comments, and editorials published between January 1, 1992, and July 26, 2016.Selection Criteria. We included English-language publications published in peer-reviewed journals addressing THR in humans and excluded studies on modified cigarettes, on South Asian smokeless tobacco variants, on pregnant women, on animals, not mentioning a tobacco or nicotine product, on US Food and Drug Administration–approved nicotine replacement therapies, and on nicotine vaccines.Data Collection and Analysis. We double-coded all articles for article type; primary product type (e.g., snus, e-cigarettes); themes for and against THR; stance on THR; THR concepts; funding or affiliation with tobacco, e-cigarette, pharmaceutical industry, or multiple industries; and each author’s country. We fit exact logistic regression models with stance on THR as the outcome (pro- vs anti-THR) and source of funding or industry affiliation as the predictor taking into account sparse data. Additional models included article type as the outcome (nonempirical or empirical) and industry funding or affiliation as predictor, and stratified analyses for empirical and nonempirical studies with stance on THR as outcome and funding source as predictor.Main Results. Searches retrieved 826 articles, including nonempirical articles (21%), letters or commentaries (34%), editorials (5%), cross-sectional studies (15%), systematic reviews and meta-analyses (3%), and randomized controlled trials (2%). Overall, 23.9% disclosed support by industry; 49% of articles endorsed THR, 42% opposed it, and 9% took neutral or mixed positions. Support from the e-cigarette industry (odds ratio [OR] = 20.9; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 5.3, 180.7), tobacco industry (OR = 59.4; 95% CI = 10.1, +infinity), or pharmaceutical industry (OR = 2.18; 95% CI = 1.3, 3.7) was significantly associated with supportive stance on THR in analyses accounting for sparse data.Authors’ Conclusions. Non–industry-funded articles were evenly divided in stance, while industry-funded articles favored THR. Because of their quantity, letters and comments may influence perceptions of THR when empirical studies lack consensus.Public Health Implications. Public health practitioners and researchers need to account for industry funding when interpreting the evidence in THR debates.

Planned obsolescence is the practice of deliberately designing products to limit their life span to encourage replacement. It is a common business strategy for consumer goods, with far-reaching ecological and social consequences. Here, we examine the definition, causes and consequences of planned obsolescence by using insights from corporate crime literature, integrated with environmental philosophy, management sciences, technology studies and law. Focusing on cases of planned obsolescence in consumer electronics, we show that the concept and procedure carries conceptual ambiguity and moral ambivalence, bearing diffuse harms, benefitting short-term corporate profit but undermining consumer confidence, and posing a major barrier to environmental sustainability. We discuss the system lock-ins driving companies to engage in planned obsolescence, and reframe the practice as a form of corporate environmental crime.

Growing research and public awareness of the environmental impacts of tobacco present an opportunity for environmental science and public health to work together. Various United Nations agencies share interests in mitigating the environmental costs of tobacco. Since 2000, transnational tobacco industry consolidation has accelerated, spotlighting the specific companies responsible for the environmental and human harms along the tobacco production chain. Simultaneously, corporate social responsibility norms have led the industry to disclose statistics on the environmental harms their business causes. Yet, independent and consistent reporting remain hurdles to accurately assessing tobacco’s environmental impact. This article is the first to analyze publicly available industry data on tobacco manufacturing pollution. Tobacco’s significant environmental impact suggests this industry should be included in environmental analyses as a driver of environmental degradation influencing climate change. Countries aiming to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals must act to reduce environmental harms caused by the tobacco industry.

American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA) Alert: Public Health Implications of Electronic Cigarette Waste, an article from American Journal of Public Health, Vol 108 Issue 11

Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of ‘plant neurobiology’ describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics.