EPA on the brink of 'regulatory capture'?: By avoiding input from career employees, promoting the views of industry leaders and proposing aggressive cuts to the agency's budget and staff, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has dramatically changed the agency, researchers with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative have found. The [...]
In recent months, cities ranging from Oakland and Los Gatos, Calif., to Minneapolis and St. Paul have passed laws limiting the availability of menthol cigarettes, which health advocates say have a particular appeal to beginning smokers.
Tobacco giants will launch a court-ordered national advertising campaign to end a massive fraud and racketeering case that the federal government brought against the industry nearly two decades ago. The ads will be “corrective statements” to rectify what the trial judge called “false, deceptive, and misleading public statements about cigarettes and smoking.”
Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds, the top seller of the menthol cigarettes favored by most black smokers, is seizing on the hot button issue of police harassment of blacks to counter efforts by public health advocates to restrict menthol sales.
Exponent, Inc. isn't a household name, but it is a go-to destination for major industries with liability problems.
Lorillard Tobacco gave campaign cash to half of all black members of Congress, as opposed to just one in 38 non-black Democrats, according to an analysis by FairWarning.
Public health groups are rejoicing over a trade deal provision barring the tobacco industry from using the treaty, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to stop member countries from enforcing tough anti-smoking measures.
Despite the flood of state and local laws since the 1990s to ban indoor smoking, millions of Americans still are exposed to secondhand smoke on the job.
Millions of smokers who were easiest to reach with anti-smoking messages have kicked the habit, leaving what authorities describe as a harder core of smokers with less ability or desire to quit.
On every package of the quit-smoking drug Chantix, a warning label alerts doctors and consumers that some people taking the tablets have reported “serious neuropsychiatric events.” Now, members of two Food and Drug Administration advisory panels rejected a bid by the pharmaceutical giant that sells Chantix, Pfizer Inc., to remove the so-called black box warning—the government’s strongest alert.
In 2009, Congress passed landmark legislation directing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, aiming to cut the toll from the leading preventable cause of disease and death. Three times since, however, cigarette and e-cigarette companies have filed successful legal challenges to thwart rules intended to make their products less appealing to consumers–and less accessible to kids.
It's hard to think of anything more reckless than adding a deadly carcinogen to a product that already causes cancer -- and then bragging about the health benefits. That’s what Lorillard Tobacco did 60 years ago when it introduced Kent cigarettes, whose patented "Micronite" filter contained a particularly virulent form of asbestos.
Should tobacco be like any other product in U.S. trade? The question bedeviled U.S. policymakers for decades, but it has now arisen again, with much controversy, in the context of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the pending trade deal between the United States and eleven other countries. The White House has [...]
Health advocates are blasting the Obama administration for watering down a proposal aimed at keeping the tobacco industry from exploiting trade agreements to fight tough anti-smoking rules.
Tobacco companies are using free trade agreements to challenge countries that adopt tough anti-smoking rules, charging them with violating treaty obligations.
