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Mummy Hair Reveals Drinking Habits By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Sept. 23, 2004 Mummy hair has revealed the first direct evidence of alcohol consumption in ancient populations, according to new forensic research.The study, still in its preliminary stage, examined hair samples from spontaneously mummified remains discovered in one of the most arid regions of the world, the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Peru. The research was presented at the 5th World Congress on Mummy Studies in Turin, Italy, this month. “ In modern human hair the levels would generally be in the ranges of social drinking, but we...

Gun control proponent David Hogg spoke at the June 11 March for Our Lives rally and suggested it is time to treat guns the way anti-tobacco activists treated cigarettes. “We need to treat guns the way we treated. “With cigarettes, we didn’t just change the laws, we addressed why people wanted to smoke in the first place.

“Understanding that an essential part of being America’s best means being a leader, Swedish Match worked diligently over the past several months to make changes in response to our heightened awareness and our desire to be more inclusive,” said Joe Ackerman, vice president of marketing. “Consumers and diverse agency partners were selected to participate in the rebranding research. It was critical and valuable for us to gain these insights and recommendations to develop America’s Best Chew packaging.”

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products. The ban, which goes into effect Jan. 1, 2023, ends the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. The ordinance does not ban the possession or use of flavored tobacco for those aged 21 and older.

The war on drugs is winding down, and the war on tobacco is ramping up. E-cigarettes, a safer nicotine-delivery alternative, have contributed to plummeting use of traditional cigarette smoking. Yet the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has effectively made it harder for cigarette smokers to switch by limiting vapes from the market. The agency also recently announced a ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, which will push more products onto the black market, with all sorts of unintended consequences.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to ban the use of menthol cigarettes in America, a move that had been called on by anti-tobacco groups, anti-teen smoking groups, racial justice groups in America. The move had been expected since the beginning of the Biden administration last year, when the President made it a priority to tackle upward trends in teen smoking. Menthol cigarettes - often colloquially referred to as just 'menthols' - are known for their mint-like flavor, and have been associated with the higher rates of smoking, and smoking-related illnesses, in black Americans over recent decades. Flavored...

"Long-awaited action" should reduce youth smoking, health disparitiesAfter more than a decade of discussing a ban on menthol in tobacco products, on Thursday the FDA finally proposed rules to eliminate menthol additives in cigarettes and all flavors other than tobacco in cigars. The rules would apply to heated tobacco products, although FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, MD, said in a press briefing that decisions about menthol electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS) products are pending. Those decisions will be based on data presented by each manufacturer that wants to keep their ENDS products on the market, he added. The actions against...

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, except when it's a "premium cigar." But what does "premium" mean, and do premium cigars affect people's health differently than other cigars, or cigarettes?These are just a few of the questions that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine tried to tackle in its report on "Health Effects and Patterns of Use of Premium Cigars." However, the 14-member committee that issued the report ran into some difficulties, one of which was determining what a "premium" cigar was."One of the challenges that we faced was that there was no single consistent definition of...

The agency ignores downward trends in both kinds of nicotine use and obscures the huge difference in the hazards they pose.The pandemic has given Americans ample reason to be skeptical of pronouncements by the Centers for Disease Control Prevention (CDC). A press release the CDC issued today reminds us that the agency's habit of misleading the public began long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. According to the latest results from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), the CDC says, "about 2.55 million U.S. middle and high school students reported current (past 30-day) use of a tobacco product in 2021."...

People currently aged 14 and under will never be able to legally purchase tobacco. New Zealand has announced it will outlaw smoking for the next generation, so that those who are aged 14 and under today will never be legally able to buy tobacco. New legislation means the legal smoking age will increase every year, to create a smoke-free generation of New Zealanders, associate health minister Dr Ayesha Verrall said on Thursday. “This is a historic day for the health of our people,” she said. ...

A Navajo who studies the use of cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and chewing tobacco by Native Americans commented on the Navajo Nation’s permanent ban on the sale of tobacco, a product first cultivated by Native Americans but was “colonized” by white farmers. “I think it’s just really educating our communities about what the industry – I keep saying the industry because it’s really them that has put these products in the hands of our young people,” Patricia Nez Henderson said in an interview with taxpayer-funded National Public Radio’s (NPR) Weekend Edition Sunday. They colonized a product that was sacred, right?” “And the...

An “expert” whose work on cybersecurity has been cited by the NY Times and the Washington Post announced on Twitter that the unvaccinated should be denied life-saving hospital treatment because they are “not fit for life on earth.” Chris Vickery, who describes himself as a “data breach hunter” also brags about how his “findings have contributed to investigations conducted by the FTC, FBI, SEC, Secret Service, HHS, SSCI, and more.” During an unhinged Twitter rant, Vickery asserted that a time limit of December 1st should be put on people refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. “Set a date now. After...

Smokers are less likely to test positive for the coronavirus, according to research that offers yet more evidence that the habit may be protective. Since the crisis spiralled out of control, researchers have seen unusually low rates of smokers with Covid-19 in hospitals - suggesting they rarely get severely ill. Now, for what is believed to be the first time, experts in Israel have found adults who smoke cigarettes are less likely to pick up the virus in the first place

Researchers discovered four charred seeds of a wild tobacco plant within the hearth contents, along with stone tools and duck bones left over from meals. Until now, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago. The researchers believe the nomadic hunter-gatherers at the Utah site may have smoked the tobacco or perhaps sucked wads of tobacco plant fiber for the stimulant qualities offered by the nicotine it contained. After tobacco use originated among the New World's native peoples, it spread worldwide following the...

Researchers have identified a potential reason why lower numbers of COVID cases have appeared amongst smokers compared to non-smokers, even as other reports suggest smoking increases severity of the disease. Researchers have identified two drugs that mimic the effect of chemicals in cigarette smoke to bind to a receptor in mammalian cells that inhibits production of ACE2 proteins, a process that appears to reduce the ability of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to enter the cell. The findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports on 17 August. Something of a paradox exists with respect to smoking cigarettes and COVID-19. Active smoking is...

Cigar diplomacy is back—and once again it is clouding the landscape for an American president. As the Cold War raged in 1962, a trade embargo against Fidel Castro’s communist government in Cuba was an easy political call for John F. Kennedy. The president had a personal conflict-of-interest, however: JFK loved a good smoke. So he quietly secured 1,000 of his soon-to-be-contraband favorite, H. Upmann Petit Coronas, for his personal humidor before taking “necessary actions to promote national and hemispheric security.” As a nonsmoker, President Biden has a clear conscience as the feds prepare to take on the tobacco industry of...

Recently, three major drug distributors and one drug maker reached a settlement proposal with attorneys general from a bipartisan coalition of states that would require the companies to pay approximately $26 billion to settle claims over their role in the nation’s opioid epidemic. Commentators have been quick to compare the recently unveiled terms to the 1990s tobacco lawsuit known as the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). They claim this is the “second-largest cash settlement ever, trailing only [the MSA].” Beyond the obvious of $26 billion being only 10.6 percent of what tobacco companies have paid out, the opioid lawsuit is nothing...

The chief executive of the company that makes Marlboro cigarettes was quoted by Britain’s Mail on Sunday as saying that the tobacco company foresaw an end to its sales of traditional cigarettes in Britain within 10 years. “I want to allow this company to leave smoking behind,” Jacek Olczak, the CEO of Philip Morris International, was quoted in the paper saying. “I think in the UK, ten years from now maximum, you can completely solve the problem of smoking.” […] For years, Philip Morris has said that its future will not include Marlboro cigarettes as it shifts to electronic devices....

On Tuesday, California moved another step closer to decriminalizing psychedelic drugs amid a debate over whether their prohibition is an outdated remnant of the “War on Drugs.” The bill cleared the Assembly Public Safety Committee 5-3, with proponents touting the benefits to military veterans and others they say can benefit from the use of psychedelics to treat trauma. The measure already passed the state Senate on a 21-16 vote and now heads to the health committee before it can go to the full Assembly, NBC Bay Area reports. If passed, Senate Bill 519 would allow those 21 and older to...

Since 2018, when then-U.S. surgeon general Jerome Adams declared a youth vaping epidemic, America has been engaged in the great American vape debate. In the three years since the infamous shot heard round the anti-tobacco control world, states and localities and the federal government have pushed to restrict adult access to e-cigarettes through taxes, regulations, and some have supported all out prohibitions. Over the past week, two notable events took place in the debate. On Wednesday, June 23, U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL.) chaired a House Oversight subcommittee hearing titled “An Epidemic Continues: Youth Vaping in America.” On June 28,...