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Cigarette company Philip Morris tries to sell idea of 'safer' tobacco

Cigarette company Philip Morris tries to sell idea of 'safer' tobacco



When Philip Morris International took out an ad campaign in Britain claiming it wanted to “give up” smoking, American Lung Association CEO Harold Wimmer had a one-line zinger in return: “Stop selling cigarettes today.”To get more news about Hitaste p6, you can visit hitaste.net official website.

Now the tobacco company is asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to endorse what it claims is a "safer" tobacco product — heated tobacco.The FDA advisory committee meeting is being held Wednesday, the same day that the Lung Association releases its annual report on tobacco use in the U.S. — a report that finds too many people still smoke. The report calls on FDA to more strongly regulate tobacco companies and to more publicly question their claims.

Overall, the report finds, 16.4 percent of adults or about 39 million people Americans smoked cigarettes in 2016. But that percentage rises to 28.6 percent of Native Americans and Alaskan Natives.

“Americans who make less than $20,000 per year (26.7 percent) and Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Americans (23 percent) have some of the highest smoking rates, and as a result, are at the greatest risk for tobacco-caused death and disease,” the report reads. More than a third of adults who live in public housing smoke.Higher tobacco taxes and full funding of stop-smoking efforts both work well to discourage smoking and help people quit, but too few states are doing either, the report finds. The average state cigarette tax is $1.72. Connecticut and New York have the highest cigarette taxes at $4.35 a pack, while Missouri taxes each pack just 17 cents.

The 50 states take in $27.5 billion in tobacco taxes and restitution from the big tobacco companies. But they spend just 3 percent of that on tobacco prevention, the report finds.The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has taken the important step of proceeding with its rule requiring all federally-owned public housing to implement smokefree policies by July 31, 2018," the report reads.

"The rule will protect nearly 716,000 children and more than 320,000 senior citizens from secondhand smoke exposure in their own homes, as well as prompt many of the estimated 300,000 smokers living in public housing to make a quit attempt."

And while the Lung Association would like to see harm-free products on the market, it does not see either e-cigarettes or heated tobacco products as filling that role. Other medical groups also question whether burned cigarettes are less harmful.



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