The Fresh Campus Campaign is a college advocacy campaign sponsored by the Louisiana Tobacco-Free College Initiative. The objective of the Fresh Campus Campaign is to make Louisiana college campuses 100% tobacco-free. The Fresh Campus Campaign is led by students in 10 colleges and universities in Louisiana, students who are standing up to make a difference where they learn, work, and live.
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FDA Releases New Warning Labels
By 2013, every person who buys a pack of cigarettes will get a very real reminder of exactly what sort of risk they take every time they smoke. This is because the FDA just released images of the new warning labels that will be required on every pack of cigarettes within 2 years.
The FDA whittled down their list of 36 potential warnings to the final 9 and recently published photos of those warnings. Unlike previous, small, text-only warnings these new labels are required to take up at least 50% of the pack’s space, making the warning a completely unavoidable point of focus. The FDA believes this will help increase desire to quit but they also admit that desire and actual quitting can be two very different things. However, being that smoking is still the #1 most preventable cause of death in the world, the hope is that the new warning labels will take a step in the proper direction; elimination of smoking.
Although the new labels will undoubtedly incur some opposition from smoking lobbyists and (dare I say it) smoking fans, keep in mind that this is still a tame approach compared to other countries. In Australia, for example, plans are currently being made to strip cigarette packs of any and all branding entirely. Every brand would come in the same plain packaging with only the brand name printed on it alongside a large warning.
The new warnings are expected to increase the number of quitters but the FDA does admit that the most effective method of getting people to stop buying cigarettes is to raise prices even more – an approach that FDA is currently working on.
E-Cigs Contain Untested Chemicals
Lets ask ourselves a rhetorical question. Why don’t we head out to the garage, pop the hood on our car and siphon out a nice, cool cup of antifreeze to sip on a warm summer day?
There’s no shortage of information available to smokers regarding the harmful and potentially deadly chemicals contained in cigarettes. We can attribute the E-cigarette’s recent climb in popularity to that abundance of health information and wide spread awareness of risks but despite the fewer chemicals used in an E-cig, newer studies are finding that while E-cigs do contain fewer chemicals than a traditional cigarette, scientists aren’t using the word ‘safe’ to describe their use.
In a recent news report on KCTV5 in Kansas City, Dr. Michael Liston (a cardiologist at Saint Mary’s Medical Center) explained that E-cigs contain many chemicals that have yet to be fully studied and tested. As a result, it’s not known what effects these chemicals can have on the human body once consumed. Of the many, yet-to-be-studied chemicals, E-cigs contain ethylene glycol, which is a component of antifreeze. Going back to that rhetorical question at the beginning of this article, we don’t drink antifreeze because it would kill us and would do so pretty efficiently. So, how safe could it possibly be to inhale its components?
Dr. Liston went on to urge those attempting to quit smoking to stick with scientifically and medically tested and approved approaches. These include patches, gums and doctor-prescribed inhalers among others.
The thing potential quitters need to never lose sight of is the fact that smokeless alternatives are, on the whole, produced by the same big tobacco companies that got them hooked on harmful products in the first place. So, if health isn’t a motivation for tobacco companies, then what i$?
