FDA has scheduled a virtual meeting of its Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC) meeting for October 7, 2025, to discuss the modified risk tobacco product (MRTP) renewal applications submitted by Philip Morris Products S.A. for several IQOS heated tobacco products that is happening despite the government shutdown. (Participants can attend via a live webcast.) This meeting is required by law if FDA is to move forward on allowing Philip Morris to continue to make reduced exposure claims about IQOS.

My colleagues at UCSF and Stanford and I have submitted this public comment to the FDA on its prposed nicotine standard urging that the standard be extended to all tobacco products (PDF). The regulations.gov Comment Tracking Number: mfj-v5cz-15yf. The scope of FDA’s proposed tobacco product standard setting a maximum level of nicotine in tobacco products should be expanded to include all nicotine delivery products that are not authorized by the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research for cessation, including, but not limited to, e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches…

My colleagues at UCSF and Stanford and I have submitted this public comment to the FDA supporting a product standard limiting nicotine in tobacco products and opposing exceptions for heated tobacco products and waterpipe (PDF). The Comment Tracking Number in regulations.gov is mfj-vc5x-sbgb .FDA’s proposed tobacco product standard setting a maximum level of nicotine in tobacco products will help prevent youth from becoming addicted to conventional cigarettes, help adult smokers quit, and will reduce tobacco-related diseases and deaths…

In 2002 I developed an educational campaign called Tobacco Scam designed to counter tobacco industry propaganda directed at restaurants and to expose the industry’s cooptation of the state and national restaurant associations. It was called “Tobacco Scam” because it highlighted how the tobacco companies were scamming restaurants and bars into opposing smokefree laws based on bogus claims that such laws were bad for business and convincing them to install expensive ventilation systems that did not actually eliminate secondhand smoke.

Answering the question of whether inhaling cannabis increases the risks of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has been complicated by the fact that in the past almost all cannabis smokers also smoked tobacco, so it was difficult to determine whether the observed associations between smoking cannabis and these diseases was really due to their tobacco use (confounding…

I ran the Smokefree Movies campaign from 2001 through my retirement from UCSF in 2020. This education/advocacy campaign put pressure on the motion picture industry to stop promoting tobacco to young audiences through specific policy changes. We advocated for these policies though paid advertising in the trade and general press and the Smokefree Movies website. We website also used data collected by Breathe California to report which films did and did not have smoking every week and who was responsible for the smoking.

Jessica Mongilio and colleagues just published an innovative approach to assessing the association between e-cigarette use and smoking, the so-called gateway effect, that provides insights between the link between e-cigs and smoking and how it relates to changes in youth smoking prevalence over time. In their new paper "Risk of adolescent cigarette use in three UK birth cohorts before and after e-cigarettes…

Su Golder and colleagues paper "Vaping and harm in young people: umbrella review" sums up the large existing literature on e-cigarettes' effects on youth, defined as people under 25. In contrast to systematic reviews which find and draw conclusions based on summing up individual studies, this umbrella review is finds and sums up all the systematic reviews on a given topic available as of November 2024.

When people talk about the “gateway effect” of e-cigarettes, they are usually referring to the first gateway: the fact that never-smoking kids who initiate nicotine use with e-cigarette…

I previously suggested people provide public comments supporting the California Attorney General's procedures to create an Unflavored Tobacco Products List to facilitate implementation and enforcement of California's flavored tobacco product ban and indicated our preliminary ideas. Here is final submitted public comment (PDF): California’s Unflavored Tobacco List and its implementing regulations close gaps in federal and state regulation of flavored tobacco products…