Philip Morris International has selected Aurora for a new manufacturing plant to make its popular ZYN nicotine pouches, a product marketed to people wanting to stop smoking or chewing tobacco.
PMI plans to invest $600 million in a new facility on empty land at 48th Avenue and Harvest Road. When it is up and running, the plant will employ 500 workers making an average annual wage of $90,000, according to the company.
“These 500 jobs are good jobs,” said Stacey Kennedy, CEO of PMI’s U.S. operations based in Stamford, Conn., at a news conference held Tuesday morning at the Colorado Freedom Memorial in Aurora.
Oakland police are investigating an unlicensed smoke shop in East Oakland where officers seized several illegal products earlier this week, including cartons of banned tobacco products from out of state and nearly 10 pounds of marijuana bud.
Police on Wednesday confiscated other items at the shop in the 2500 block of Seminary Avenue that included Psilocybin “magic” mushroom candy bars and close to 20 pounds of suspected THC products.
Officers with the police department’s Alcohol Beverage Action Team were following up on anonymous complaints about the shop. In addition to seizing illegal items, they detained a store clerk.
Items that police said were seized from a smoke shop on Seminary Avenue in East Oakland on July 10, 2024.
Oakland Police Department
No arrests were made, but the case will be forwarded to the Alameda County District Attorney’s office for further action, including civil charges and potential eviction, police said in a news release on Thursday.
Suspicious or illegal activities regarding sales of tobacco products and sales to minors in Oakland can be reported to the Oakland police ABAT Complaint Hotline at (510) 777-8677.
The rise in the U.S. calorie supply responsible for the obesity epidemic wasn’t just about more food, but a different kind of food.
The rise in the number of calories provided by the food supply since the 1970s “is more than sufficient to explain the US epidemic of obesity.” Similar spikes in calorie surplus were noted in developed countries around the world in parallel with and presumed to be primarily responsible for, the expanding waistlines of their populations. After taking exports into account, by the year 2000, the United States was producing 3,900 calories for every man, woman, and child—nearly twice as much as many people need.
It wasn’t always this way. The number of calories in the food supply actually declined over the first half of the twentieth century and only started its upward climb to unprecedented heights in the 1970s. The drop in the first half of the century was attributed to the reduction in hard manual labor. The population had decreased energy needs, so they ate decreased energy diets. They didn’t need all the extra calories. But then the “energy balance flipping point” occurred, when the “move less, stay lean phase” that existed throughout most of the century turned into the “eat more, gain weight phase” that plagues us to this day. So, what changed?
As I discuss in my video The Role of Processed Foods in the Obesity Epidemic, what happened in the 1970s was a revolution in the food industry. In the 1960s, most food was prepared and cooked in the home. The typical “married female, not working” spent hours a day cooking and cleaning up after meals. (The “married male, non-working spouse” averaged nine minutes, as you can see below and at 1:34 in my video.) But then a mixed-blessing transformation took place. Technological advances in food preservation and packaging enabled manufacturers to mass prepare and distribute food for ready consumption. The metamorphosis has been compared to what happened a century before with the mass production and supply of manufactured goods during the Industrial Revolution. But this time, they were just mass-producing food. Using new preservatives, artificial flavors, and techniques, such as deep freezing and vacuum packaging, food corporations could take advantage of economies of scale to mass produce “very durable, palatable, and ready-to-consume” edibles that offer “an enormous commercial advantage over fresh and perishable whole or minimally processed foods.”
Think ye of the Twinkie. With enough time and effort, “ambitious cooks” could create a cream-filled cake, but now they are available around every corner for less than a dollar. If every time someone wanted a Twinkie, they had to bake it themselves, they’d probably eat a lot fewer Twinkies. The packaged food sector is now a multitrillion-dollar industry.
Consider the humble potato. We’ve long been a nation of potato eaters, but we usually baked or boiled them. Anyone who’s made fries from scratch knows what a pain it is, with all the peeling, cutting, and splattering of oil. But with sophisticated machinations of mechanization, production became centralized and fries could be shipped at -40°F to any fast-food deep-fat fryer or frozen food section in the country to become “America’s favorite vegetable.” Nearly all the increase in potato consumption in recent decades has been in the form of french fries and potato chips.
Cigarette production offers a compelling parallel. Up until automated rolling machines were invented, cigarettes had to be rolled by hand. It took 50 workers to produce the same number of cigarettes a machine could make in a minute. The price plunged and production leapt into the billions. Cigarette smoking went from being “relatively uncommon” to being almost everywhere. In the 20th century, the average per capita cigarette consumption rose from 54 cigarettes a year to 4,345 cigarettes “just before the first landmark Surgeon General’s Report” in 1964. The average American went from smoking about one cigarette a week to half a pack a day.
Tobacco itself was just as addictive before and after mass marketing. What changed was cheap, easy access. French fries have always been tasty, but they went from being rare, even in restaurants, to being accessible around each and every corner (likely next to the gas station where you can get your Twinkies and cigarettes).
The first Twinkie dates back to 1930, though, and Ore-Ida started selling frozen french fries in the 1950s. There has to be more to the story than just technological innovation, and we’ll explore that next.
Here is a review of reviews on the health effects of tea, coffee, milk, wine, and soda.
If you’ve watched my videos or read my books, you’ve heard me say, time and again, the best available balance of evidence. What does that mean? When making decisions as life-or-death important as what to feed ourselves and our families, it matters less what a single study says, but rather what the totality of peer-reviewed science has to say.
Individual studies can lead to headlines like “Study Finds No Link Between Secondhand Smoke and Cancer,” but to know if there is a link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, it would be better to look at a review or meta-analysis that compiles multiple studies. The problem is that some reviews say one thing—for instance, “breathing other people’s tobacco smoke is a cause of lung cancer”—and other reviews say another—such as, the effects of secondhand smoke are insignificant and further such talk may “foster irrational fears.” And, while we’re at it, you can indulge in “active smoking of some 4-5 cigarettes per day” without really worrying about it, so light up!
Why do review articles on the health effects of secondhand smoke reach such different conclusions? As you can imagine, about 90 percent of reviews written by researchers affiliated with the tobacco industry said it was not harmful, whereas you get the opposite number with independent reviews, as you can see below and at 1:18 in my video Friday Favorites: What Are the Best Beverages?. Reviews written by the tobacco industry–affiliated researchers had 88 times the odds of concluding that secondhand smoke was harmless. It was all part of “a deliberate strategy to use scientific consultants to discredit the science…” In other words, “the strategic and long run antidote to the passive smoking issue…is developing and widely publicizing clear-cut, credible, medical evidence that passive smoking [secondhand smoke] is not harmful to the non-smoker’s health.”
Can’t we just stick to the independent reviews? The problem is that industry-funded researchers have all sorts of sneaky ways to get out of declaring conflicts of interest, so it can be hard to follow the money. For instance, it was found that “77% failed to disclose the sources of funding” for their research. But, even without knowing who funded what, the majority of reviews still concluded that secondhand smoke was harmful. So, just as a single study may not be as helpful as looking at a compilation of studies on a topic, a single review may not be as useful as a compilation of reviews. In that case, looking at a review of reviews can give us a better sense of where the best available balance of evidence may lie. When it comes to secondhand smoke, it’s probably best not to inhale, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:30 in my video.
Wouldn’t it be cool if there were reviews of reviews for different foods and drinks? Voila! Enter “Associations Between Food and Beverage Groups and Major Diet-Related Chronic Diseases: An Exhaustive Review of Pooled/Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews.” Let’s start with the drinks. As you can see below and at 2:51 in my video, the findings were classified into three categories: protective, neutral, or deleterious.
First up: tea versus coffee. As you can see in the graph below and at 2:58, most reviews found both beverages to be protective for whichever condition they were studying, but you can see how this supports my recommendation for tea over coffee. Every cup of coffee is a lost opportunity to drink a cup of green tea, which is even healthier.
It’s no surprise that soda sinks to the bottom, as you can see below and at 3:20 in my video, but 14 percent of reviews mentioned the protective effects of drinking soda. What?! Well, most were references to papers like “High Intake of Added Sugar Among Norwegian Children and Adolescents,” a cross-sectional study that found that eighth-grade girls who drank more soda were thinner than girls who drank less. Okay, but that was just a snapshot in time. What do you think is more likely? That the heavier girls were heavier because they drank less soda, or that they drank less sugary soda because they were heavier? Soda abstention may therefore be a consequence of obesity, rather than a cause, yet it gets marked down as having a protective association.
Study design flaws may also account for wine numbers, as seen below and at 4:07 in my video. This review of reviews was published in 2014, before the revolution in our understanding of “alcohol’s evaporating health benefits,” suggesting that the “presumed health benefits from ‘moderate’ alcohol use [may have] finally collapsed”—thanks in part to a systematic error of misclassifying former drinkers as if they were lifelong abstainers, as I revealed in a deep dive in a video series on the subject.
Sometimes there are unexplainable associations. For example, one of the soft drink studies found that increased soda consumption was associated with a lower risk of certain types of esophageal cancers. Don’t tell me. Was the study funded by Coca-Cola? Indeed. Does that help explain the positive milk studies, as you can see in the graph below and at 5:02 in my video? Were they all just funded by the National Dairy Council?
As shown below and at 5:06, even more conflicts of interest have been found among milk studies than soda studies, with industry-funded studies of all such beverages “approximately four to eight times more likely to be favorable to the financial interests of the [study] sponsors than articles without industry-related funding.”
Funding bias aside, though, there could be legitimate reasons for the protective effects associated with milk consumption. After all, those who drink more milk may drink less soda, which is even worse, so they may come out ahead. It may be more than just relative benefits, though. The soda-cancer link seems a little tenuous and not just because of the study’s financial connection to The Coca-Cola Company. It’s hard to imagine a biologically plausible mechanism, whereas even something as universally condemned as tobacco isn’t universally bad. As I’ve explored before, more than 50 studies have consistently found a protective association between nicotine and Parkinson’s disease. Even secondhand smoke may be protective. Of course, you’d still want to avoid it. Passive secondhand smoke may decrease the risk of Parkinson’s, but it increases the risk of stroke, an even deadlier brain disease, not to mention lung cancer and heart disease, which has killed off millions of Americans since the first Surgeon General’s report was released, as you can see below and at 6:20 in my video.
Thankfully, by eating certain vegetables, we may be able to get some of the benefits without the risks, and the same may be true of dairy. As I’ve described before, the consumption of milk is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer, leading to recommendations suggesting that men may want to cut down or minimize their intake, but milk consumption is also associated with decreased colorectal cancer risk. This appears to be a calcium effect. Thankfully, we may be able to get the best of both worlds by eating high-calcium plant foods, such as greens and beans.
What does our review-of-reviews study conclude about such plant-based foods, in comparison to animal-based foods? We’ll find out next.
Stay tuned for the exhaustive review of meta-analyses and systematic reviews on major diet-related chronic diseases found for food groups in What Are the Best Foods?.
Are the apparent adverse effects of heavy cannabis use on the bone just due to users being thinner?
It’s been recognized for decades that cigarette smoking can have “a major effect” on bone health, “increasing the lifetime risk of hip fracture by about half.” It also appears to impair bone healing, so much so that surgeons ask if they should discriminate against smokers because their bone and wound-healing complication rates are so high. What about smoking marijuana?
As I discuss in my video Effects of Marijuana on Weight Gain and Bone Density, “There is accumulating evidence to suggest that cannabinoids [cannabis compounds] and their receptors play important roles in bone metabolism by regulating bone mass, bone loss, and bone cell function.” Okay, but are they “friend or foe?”
“Results from research on cannabinoids and bone mineral density in rodent models have been inconsistent. Some studies show increased bone formation, others have demonstrated accelerated bone loss, and yet others have shown no association. This variation in results may be due [in part] to differences in the mouse strain, sex, age…” If you can’t even extrapolate from one mouse to another, how can you extrapolate from mice to human beings?
What if you just measure cannabis use and bone mineral density in people? Researchers tested thousands of adults and asked them about their cannabis use. There did not appear to be any link between the two, which is a relief. However, in this study, “heavy” cannabis use was defined as just five or more days of use in the previous 30 days. The researchers didn’t ask beyond that, so, theoretically, someone who smoked just five joints in their entire life could be categorized as a “heavy user” if they happened to use it five times in the last four weeks.
How about cannabis use on 5,000 separate occasions over a lifetime? Now that’s a heavy user—decades of regular use. In that case, heavy use was “associated with low bone mineral density and an increased risk of fractures”—about double the fracture rate presumably due to lower bone density in the hip and spine, although heavy cannabis users were also thinner on average, and thinner people have lighter bones.
Hip fracture risk goes down as our weight goes up. Nearly half of underweight women have osteoporosis, but less than 1 percent of obese women do, which makes total sense. Being obese forces our body to make our bones stronger to carry around all of that extra weight. That’s why weight-bearing exercise is so important to constantly put stress on our skeleton. When it comes to our bones, it’s use it or lose it. That’s why astronauts can lose a percent of their bone mass every month in “long-duration spaceflight.” Their bodies aren’t stupid. Why waste all that energy making a strong skeleton if you aren’t going to put any weight on it?
So, maybe the reason heavy cannabis users have frailer bones is because they tend to be about 15 pounds lighter. Wait a second. Marijuana users are slimmer? What about the munchies? “The lower BMI that was observed in heavy cannabis users at first sight seems counterintuitive,” given marijuana’s appetite stimulation, but this isn’t the first time this has been noted.
“Popular culture commonly depicts marijuana users as a sluggish, lethargic, and unproductive subculture of compulsive snackers,” and marijuana has indeed been found to increase food intake. A single hit can increase appetite, so you’d expect obesity rates to rise in states that legalized it. But, if anything, the rise in obesity appeared to slow after medical marijuana laws were passed, whereas it appeared to just keep rising in other states, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:45 in my video.
The reason pot smokers may be slimmer is because of the effect of smoked marijuana on metabolism. We’ve known for more than nearly 40 years that within 15 minutes of lighting up, our metabolic rate goes up by about 25 percent and stays there for at least an hour, as you can see below and at 4:04 in my video. So, that may be playing a role.
Is that why heavy cannabis use is associated with lower bone mineral density and increased risk of fractures? Because users just aren’t as overweight? No. Even when taking BMI into account, heavy cannabis use appears to be “an independent predictor” of weaker bones.
I originally released a series of marijuana videos in a webinar and downloadable digital DVD. There are still a few videos coming out over the next year, but if you missed any of the already published ones, see the related posts below.
For more on bone health, check out the related posts below.
Ancient types of wheat, like kamut, are put to the test for inflammation, blood sugar, and cholesterol control.
The number one killer in the United States and around the world is what we eat. As you can see in the graph below and at 0:15 in my video Friday Favorites: Are Ancient Grains Healthier?, our diet kills millions more than tobacco. What are the five most important things we can do to improve our diets, based on the single most comprehensive global study of the health impact of nutrition? Eat less salt, eat more nuts, eat more non-starchy vegetables, eat more fruit, and, finally, eat more whole grains. Any particular type of whole grains? What about so-called ancient grains? Are they any better than modern varieties? For instance, what about kamut, described as “mummy wheat” and supposedly unearthed from an Egyptian tomb?
After WWII, the wheat industry selected particularly high-yielding varieties for pasta and bread. Over the past few years, though, some of the more ancient grains—“defined as those species that have remained unchanged over the last hundred years” despite agricultural revolutions—have been reintroduced to the market.
As you can see below and at 1:13 in my video, nutritionally, kamut and einkorn wheat, which is the oldest wheat, have more eyesight-improving yellow carotenoid pigments, such as lutein and zeaxanthin, compared to modern bread and pastry wheat, because the pigments have been bred out of the bread intentionally. People want their white bread white, but modern pasta flour (durum wheat) maintains much of that yellow nutritional hue.
As you can see in the graph below and at 1:41 in my video, modern wheat may have less lutein, but it tends to have more vitamin E, as seen in the graph below and at 1:45. Based on straight vitamin and mineral concentrations, it’s pretty much a wash. Both modern and primitive kinds of wheat have a lot of each, but primitive wheats do have more antioxidant capacity, likely due to their greater polyphenol content, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:00 in my video. To know if that makes any difference, though, we have to put it to the test.
If you expose human liver cells to digested bread made out of ancient grains (kamut and spelt), heritage kinds of wheat, or modern strains, then expose the cells to an inflammatory stimulus, the modern wheat strains seem less able to suppress the inflammation, as you can see in the graphs below and at 2:09 in my video. The investigators conclude that even though these different grains seem to be very similar nutritionally, they appear to exert different effects on human cells, “confirming the potential health benefits of ancient grains.” That was in a petri dish, though. What about people? If ancient kinds of wheat are better at suppressing inflammation, what if you took people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and randomized them to receive six weeks of wheat products made out of modern wheat or ancient wheat—in this case, kamut? Same amount of wheat, just different types. If there is no difference between the wheats, there’d be no difference in people’s symptoms, right? But, when study participants in the control group were switched to the ancient wheat kamut, they experienced less abdominal pain, less frequent pain, less bloating, more satisfaction with stool consistency, and less interference with their quality of life, compared to the modern wheat. So, after switching to the ancient wheat, they had “a significant global improvement in the extent and severity of symptoms related to IBS…”
What about liver inflammation? The liver function of those with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease randomized to eat kamut improved, compared to those eating the same amount of regular wheat, suggesting kamut is superior, as you can see below and at 3:47 in my video.
People with diabetes, had better cholesterol and better insulin sensitivity on the same ancient grain, as shown below and at 3:57.
And those with heart disease? They had better blood sugar control and better cholesterol, as shown below and at 4:03.
And, people without overt heart disease had better artery function, as you can see below and at 4:06 in my video.
The bottom line is that findings derived from human studies suggest that ancient wheat products are more anti-inflammatory and may improve things like blood sugar control and cholesterol. “Given that the overall number of human interventional trials conducted to date are numerically insufficient, it is not possible to definitively conclude that ancient wheat varieties are superior to all commercial, modern wheat counterparts in reducing chronic disease risk.” However, the best available data do suggest they’re better for us.
Regardless of what type of wheat you may eat, a word to the wise: Don’t eat the plastic bread-bag clip. A 45-year-old man presented with bloody stools, and his CT scan showed the offending piece of plastic from his bag of bread, as you can see below and at 4:53 in my video. When the patient was questioned, he “admitted to habitually eating quickly without chewing properly.”
Whole grains—ideally intact ones and ancient and modern varieties alike—are an integral part of my Daily Dozen checklist, the healthiest of healthy things I encourage everyone to try to fit into their daily routines.
Whole grains are especially good for our microbiome. Learn more in the related posts below. What about gluten? Also, see the related posts below.
The cannabis industry has had a rough couple of years, but things are looking brighter. The one constant positive is consumer demand has continuously increased. You know it is good when Missouri has over $1 billion in sales last year. And, despite the struggles, the industry continues to grow. In fact, surpassing other job reports, the cannabis industry grew 5%. Around 440,000 work in market as of today. It is a clear indicator legal cannabis is here to stay.
While 440,000 is a big number – how big is it in relation to other industries? BDSA, an analytical firm who covers cannabis, reported the industry made $29.5 billion in the legal market. It would have been over $30 billion if not for the chaos and huge illicit market in New York. Like most industries, the weed one includes dispensaries, manufactures, some ancillary services, farmers and management. It is also a very small sliver of greater farming community. America’s farm families represent two percent of the population and help feed the other 98%.
Subway Sandwiches with a revenue of 16.5 billion employees roughly 410,000 including the franchises.
Grocer Kroger employs 430,000 in 36 states in 2,700 locations with sales of $150,000.
Target has 440,000 in their US retail stores with sales of $107 billion.
Starbucks and their famed coffee have 381,000 brewing almost $36 billion in sales at 16,449 locations.
Dentists, clocking in at half the number at 202,000, but if you fold in everyone in the industry including dental hygienists, they have 1,140,861 people employed in the US dental industry as of 2023.
CocaCola’s total number of employees in 2022 was 82,500. This helps drive the juggernaut of beverages with more than 1.9 billion servings of drinks sold in more than 200 countries each day.
The US alcohol industry supports around 4 million jobs, including employment in production, distribution, sales, bartenders and other related services. They help drive the drinks market of $183.5 billion last year.
Constellation, the alcohol company invested in cannabis has approximately 10,000 employees and Diageo has 3,100 people across North America.
Tobacco manufacturing in 2021 had 16,767 people and generated $886.09 billion in 2023.
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry employs over 1.3 million people. It is the largest pharmaceutical market generating over $550 billion dollars.
There are 29,711 people employed in the Strip Clubs in the US as of 2023.
Officers are cracking down on smoke shops selling illegal tobacco and cannabis products in Modesto, according to the police department. Video posted by the department to social media Thursday showed officers visiting six Modesto smoke shops and making multiple arrests. Police said the investigation stemmed from numerous complaints about the sale of cannabis-infused edibles and flavored tobacco products that targeted young people for their sales.“This crackdown serves as a reminder of the dangers and criminal activities associated with the illegal sale of such products. Not only does it pose risks to public health and safety, but it also impacts the quality of life for our residents,” wrote a spokesperson for the police department.Many of the products targeted in the crackdown were being packaged and sold as copycat versions of popular food and candy products. Officials said compliance checks were conducted at the following locations:- West Side Smoke Shop- J’s Smoke Shop- Smoke City- Maze Smoke Shop- Smoking Jay’s- Smoke City Building violations were located at all six locations, police said.Officials said the operation resulted in eight arrests. Over $10,000 from illegal gambling activities was seized.Officers confiscated thousands of dollars worth of illegal products, including flavored tobacco, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, cannabis-based products, psilocybin mushrooms and 10 gambling machines. Officers also found an illegal firearm, police said. “The Modesto Police Department extends a huge thank you to our personnel from patrol, Area Command, Investigative Services Division, and to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration for their dedication and hard work in ensuring the success of this operation,” a spokesperson posted to social media.Police said additional, future operations are planned.
MODESTO, Calif. —
Officers are cracking down on smoke shops selling illegal tobacco and cannabis products in Modesto, according to the police department.
Video posted by the department to social media Thursday showed officers visiting six Modesto smoke shops and making multiple arrests.
Police said the investigation stemmed from numerous complaints about the sale of cannabis-infused edibles and flavored tobacco products that targeted young people for their sales.
“This crackdown serves as a reminder of the dangers and criminal activities associated with the illegal sale of such products. Not only does it pose risks to public health and safety, but it also impacts the quality of life for our residents,” wrote a spokesperson for the police department.
Many of the products targeted in the crackdown were being packaged and sold as copycat versions of popular food and candy products.
Officials said compliance checks were conducted at the following locations:
– West Side Smoke Shop – J’s Smoke Shop – Smoke City – Maze Smoke Shop – Smoking Jay’s – Smoke City
Building violations were located at all six locations, police said.
Officials said the operation resulted in eight arrests. Over $10,000 from illegal gambling activities was seized.
Officers confiscated thousands of dollars worth of illegal products, including flavored tobacco, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, cannabis-based products, psilocybin mushrooms and 10 gambling machines. Officers also found an illegal firearm, police said.
“The Modesto Police Department extends a huge thank you to our personnel from patrol, Area Command, Investigative Services Division, and to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration for their dedication and hard work in ensuring the success of this operation,” a spokesperson posted to social media.
Police said additional, future operations are planned.
Weed, alcohol, tobacco, all the vices in indulged in by people. Tall, short, black, white, left or right handed – it has a mass appeal. But sometimes certain groups are attracted to a vice more. Generally, men (16.7%) tend to use all tobacco products at higher rates than women (13.6%). We know men are more likely to use weed over women. But who consumes more weed, LGBTQ or straights?
While most cannabis studies that look into the consumption habits of people rely on self-reporting and aren’t held within a controlled setting, different studies suggest that LGBTQ people have a more positive attitude towards the drug. A study, published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, found that gay men smoked approximately four times more than straight men. Lesbian women smoked six times more than heterosexual women.
These findings are also replicated in younger demographics, with teens that belong to the LGBTQ community being more likely to consume cannabis, while also being more inclined to consume other substances, such as alcohol and nicotine. Young LGBTQ members face more stressors than their straight counterparts, resulting in higher rates of suicide, bullying, and more.
There are many reasons why these results could be occurring, but experts believe it has something to do with the fact that people belonging to the queer community are more likely to suffer from anxiety and other mental health disorders.
Maybe members of the queer community find refuge in cannabis, using it as a source of relief. It’s more likely for them to encounter the drug earlier on, and to be less prejudiced than others. There’s also the fact that gay people have kids later in life compared to their straight counterparts, giving them more time to explore and use the drug.
More research is necessary to draw significant conclusions, but it’s interesting to wonder why the LGBTQ community seems to have such an affinity for the herb.
Last month, New Zealand scrapped a law that would have gradually prohibited tobacco products by banning sales to anyone born after 2008. But Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, will implement a similar scheme now that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (SJC) has cleared the way.
Brookline’s bylaw, which bans sales of “tobacco or e-cigarette products” to anyone born after 1999, is unlikely to have much practical impact, since the town is surrounded by municipalities where such sales remain legal. But it reflects a broader transition from regulation to prohibition among progressives who seem to have forgotten the lessons of the war on drugs.
The local merchants who challenged Brookline’s ban argued that it was preempted by a state law that sets 21 as the minimum purchase age for tobacco products. They also claimed the bylaw violates the Massachusetts Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection by arbitrarily discriminating against adults based on their birthdates.
The SJC rejected both arguments in a decision published on Friday. The court concluded that state legislators had left local officials free to impose additional sales restrictions. And since birthdate-based distinctions do not involve “a suspect classification,” it said, Brookline’s bylaw is constitutional because it is “rationally related to the town’s legitimate interest in mitigating tobacco use overall and in particular by minors.”
The striking aspect of Brookline’s law, of course, is that it applies to adults as well as minors. It currently covers residents in their 20s and eventually will apply to middle-aged and elderly consumers as well.
Since anyone 21 or older who wants to buy tobacco or vaping products can still legally do so across the border in Boston, Cambridge, or Newton, Brookline’s ban looks more like an exercise in virtue signaling than a serious attempt to reduce consumption. The same could be said of the outright bans on tobacco sales that two other wealthy and supposedly enlightened enclaves, Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach, enacted in 2019 and 2020, respectively.
The Beverly Hills ban makes exceptions for hotels and cigar lounges, and both cities border jurisdictions where tobacco sales are still allowed. But even as moral statements, these edicts are flagrantly illiberal, standing for the proposition that adults cannot be trusted to decide for themselves which psychoactive substances they want to consume.
Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach also prohibit marijuana sales, which are allowed under a California law that authorizes local bans. But they continue to tolerate liquor sales, and so does Brookline, where you also can legally buy marijuana.
The details may vary, but the busybody impulse is consistent. And the consequences of that impulse can be seen in Massachusetts, which has prohibited sales of flavored tobacco or vaping products since 2019, stimulating sales in neighboring states, black-market activity, and criminal prosecutions.
Cigarette smuggling spurred by high state taxes is a longstanding phenomenon, and the flavor restrictions that some jurisdictions have imposed compound that problem. Worse, the Food and Drug Administration plans to ban menthol cigarettes and limit nicotine content, and it seems determined to erase nearly all of the vaping industry by refusing to approve products in the flavors that former smokers overwhelmingly prefer.
Such policies hurt consumers by depriving them of products they want and driving them toward shady suppliers whose offerings may pose unanticipated risks. Prohibition also invites criminalization, which is why the American Civil Liberties Union opposes the menthol ban.
“Policies that amount to prohibition for adults will have serious racial justice implications,” the organization warned in a 2021 letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra. “Such a ban will trigger criminal penalties, which will disproportionately impact people of color, as well as prioritize criminalization over public health and harm reduction. A ban will also lead to unconstitutional policing and other negative interactions with local law enforcement.”
Progressives commonly recognize such problems in the context of the war on drugs. Expanding that war to include tobacco is bound to magnify them.
The white ash conversation has been positively insufferable. Heady bois and cannabis connoisseurs from coast to coast have been posting videos of their ash on Instagram for what feels like years now, indicating that they’re smoking top shelf product solely based on the color of the ash.
As much as I hate to disappoint, not only is white ash not an accurate metric of quality, it can be easily faked, gamed, cheated, duped and bamboozled using particular cultivation techniques, smoking methods, and as shown by recent court documents: adding small amounts of chalk to the rolling paper.
Recently unsealed documents from a years-long court battle between Republic Technologies LLC and BBK Tobacco & Foods, LLP revealed the ingredient lists used to make OCB Rolling Papers, including one particular additive that Big Tobacco has been familiar with for years which weed smokers might not be aware of: calcium carbonate.
Chalk-Infused Papers
Court documents from 2014 with regard to OCB rolling papers showed that varying amounts of calcium carbonate were used in some of their rolling papers, specifically the following: OCB No. 1 Single Wide, JOB Tribal King Size, OCB Slim, OCB Red 1 ¼, JOB Gold 1.25, OCB Organic Hemp 1-¼ and OCB Organic Hemp King Size Slim.
Snippet taken from court documents in the case of Republic Technologies LLC vs BBK Tobacco & Foods, LLP.
According to the National Institute of Health, calcium carbonate is an inorganic salt found all over the world in rocks like limestone as well as in the shells of many marine organisms and crustaceans. It’s the main ingredient in chalk, antacid medications like Tums, and as it turns out, it has also been used as a whitening pigment in cigarette rolling papers for decades. I was able to find three different patents, two of which date back to the 90’s, from tobacco companies including Phillip Morris all listing calcium carbonate as a way to make cigarette ash more “attractive.” A study by the Cooperation Centre for Scientific Research Relative to Tobacco describes how calcium carbonate can affect the color of ash:
“Generally, as the size of the precipitated calcium carbonate particle decreased, the ash became more cohesive. As the particle size decreased, the ash became slightly whiter until an optimal particle size was reached at about 0.3 microns,” the study said. “Further reductions in precipitated calcium carbonate size caused the ash to become grayer.”
Calcium carbonate is not necessarily a harmful substance to include in rolling papers, but the material safety data sheet of calcium carbonate does classify it as a potential respiratory tract irritant. A National Institute of Health study of autopsies in smokers versus non-smokers also found that the elemental components of calcium carbonate are found in the lungs of smokers but not in non-smokers, meaning it potentially leaves residual particles in the lungs.
“Potassium carbonate, sulfate, and chloride were not identified in any lung. The percentage of quartz was the same in both smoker and nonsmoker lungs,” the study said. “However, lungs from smokers contained a large percentage (average 23% of all particles) of particles composed of calcium, carbon, and oxygen (probably calcium carbonate) in all sample sites, whereas lungs from nonsmokers usually contained no such particles or only minute numbers (average 0.1%).”
Moving away from the ultra-sciency talk, cigarette companies have added calcium carbonate to their papers for years to make the ash whiter (please google Marlboro white ash ads and you’ll see this conversation goes all the way back to the 1950’s). Whether or not OCB papers are trying to gain the favor of weed smokers looking for white cannabis ash, I haven’t the foggiest idea, nor would I want to insinuate such a thing for fear of incurring a lawsuit I absolutely cannot afford. The point is that if a substance this common can be added to rolling papers, it would be very easy for an unscrupulous marketing team to use this knowledge to their advantage to sell more cannabis via using these particular papers in pre-rolls or to roll with when making smoking videos for the company Instagram, etc.
I Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription is More CalMag
It doesn’t stop there. I’ve been told by growers that you can also add greater concentrations of CalMag to flowering cannabis plants to achieve the white ash effect, which would make sense because CalMag is, somewhat redundantly, a mixture of calcium and magnesium. Calcium carbonate concentration is also, as far as I know, not included on any cannabis lab test COA, so there’s no concrete way for the consumer to tell if this method was utilized in the grow room. Again, not necessarily a harmful practice as far as I know but also not an accurate measure of quality.
You can also achieve the white ash effect by rolling and smoking the joint in a particular way, which I’ll describe for you now in an effort to illustrate that you can absolutely, positively fake this shit for Instagram: Roll a full eighth into a joint as tightly as possible without suffocating it (see Doja Pak rolling tutorial from First Smoke of the Day for further reference). Now go buy yourself one of those mini torches that crack smokers use to heat up their pipes, the sketchier looking the better. Torch the end of your joint evenly and slowly. If it catches fire, gently blow it out and continue torching for a minute or two until you have a nice even cherry. Now you’re gonna want to hold the joint upside down, very gently so that the smoke drifts upwards through your hands. Take a long, slow hit and return the joint to the upside down position. Rinse and repeat, torching more if necessary until you have a nice white ash pile. Take your picture, post it to Instagram and receive a well-deserved pat on the back from your CEO.
Granted, you need at least somewhat decent weed to achieve this effect even with the described method above. I will also fully admit I have never smoked a joint that burned completely black which I would describe as quality weed. The point I’m trying to make here is there are well-known schemes afoot to fool you into thinking you’re smoking good weed when that is not necessarily the case. Some people have purported that white ash is an indicator the cannabis was dried and cured properly, which has some truth to it because the moisture content of the flower needs to be within an ideal range to achieve a proper burn, but all the white ash really means is that the weed has burned completely, a process known as “carbonization.” An excerpt from “Whiteness of Cigarette Ash” written by Isao Kanai in 1959 (again, please note the date) explains further:
“The whiteness of cigarette ash plays an important role to the burning quality of cigarettes, and it is considered to be related with the degree of carbonization of organic materials, the combustion-zone temperature of cigarettes, and other complicated ‘combustion phenomena’ of Cigarettes,” the report said.
A cursory Google search will also populate about 50 different explanations from various tobacco clubs and tobacco companies explaining that white ash is related to combustibility and levels of calcium and magnesium in the soil the tobacco was grown in. The same can be said for cannabis.
Fire is in the Eye of the Beholder
So where does that leave us? Well, here’s where it’s gonna get a little subjective on my part. Quality cannabis ultimately comes down to user experience and user preference. There are certain markers that may suggest a particular batch of cannabis can be considered a quality product, but it’s a multi-faceted conversation. There is no single metric that can tell you if flower is good. It comes down to several key factors including, but not limited to: appearance, ash color, density, taste, smokability, cultivation methods (this is a lesser point but while I’m on the subject, the living soil versus salt-nutrients conversation is equally as pointless as the ash conversation), plant genetics, a proper dry and cure cycle and in my opinion the most important factor: effects. Individual microbiome, how one person’s body reacts to cannabis versus another’s, also plays a huge role.
What I will say, and I’m shamelessly stealing this point from our fearless leader Jon Cappetta, is that a better ash-related metric for quality weed is how the ash stacks up on itself (a metric also stolen from age-old tobacco-funded studies, I might add). If you can smoke most of the joint without the ash falling off (infused products don’t count), it means there’s a lot of resin in the flower causing it to stick together. If the ash is speckled or white on top of that, all the better. Oil ring to boot? Fugedaboutit.
There’s a certain threshold I think we can all agree on that flower has to reach to cross over from bad to mids but past that threshold, as we’ve all witnessed, we all start to argue as a community about mids versus fire and the conversation ultimately devolves into silly, unimportant metrics like “whose ash is whiter.” I think in general the key here is just awareness of what we’re consuming, and the knowledge that our own personal experience with the plant is all that really matters at the end of the day. Don’t let flashy Instagram videos or age-old Big Tobacco schemes fool you into consuming a particular brand or strain. Smoke what feels good to YOU and spread awareness wherever you can so we as a community can properly identify true fire. Past that, I only ask that we all stop arguing online about white ash because it makes the cannabis community look like a babbling gang of rabid hyenas.
Should you pass on that morning bowl of cereal or oatmeal?
Thatâs what some people may be asking in light of a study released this week by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on agricultural and chemical-safety laws in the U.S. The study looked at the prevalence of a pesticide called chlormequat in oat-based food products, including cereals like Cheerios and Quaker Oats.Â
The EWG said it found detectable levels of the chemical in 92% of nonorganic oat-based foods purchased in May 2023.
âStudies in laboratory animals show that chlormequat can cause harm to the normal growth and development of the fetus and damage the reproductive system,â Olga Naidenko, vice president at the EWG, told MarketWatch. Those risks, the EWG report noted, can include reduced fertility.Â
It has not been proven that the substance affects humans in the same way the studies cited by the EWG found it does lab animals, and there are other studies that have found chlormequat had no effect on reproduction in pigs or mice, or any impact on fertilization rates in mice.
The EWG is still advocating that concerned consumers buy organic oat products as an alternative, however.Â
âCertified organic oats are, by law, grown without synthetic pesticides,â Naidenko said.Â
Representatives for General Mills GIS, +1.28%,
the company that makes Cheerios, and PepsiCo PEP, -0.92%,
which owns Quaker Oats, didnât immediately respond to a request for comment.Â
“âAny family raising kids or thinking about starting a family should do whatever they can do to avoid chlormequat. Itâs not a safe product.â”
â Charles Benbrook, a scientific consultant who focuses on pesticides
The EWGâs recommendation to go organic was echoed by experts that MarketWatch contacted.Â
Charles Benbrook, a scientific consultant based in Washington state who focuses on pesticides, said heâs an oatmeal eater who chooses organic oatmeal âwhen I can get it.â
Regarding chlormequat, Benbrook said, âItâs not a safe product.â
âAny family raising kids or thinking about starting a family should do whatever they can do to avoid chlormequat,â he said.
Melissa Furlong, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Arizona, said itâs important to note that chlormequat is not the only pesticide that is found in oat-based cereals. Thereâs still much we need to learn about the health effects the substance might have on humans, she added.
âThatâs not to say it isnât the worst [pesticide]. We donât really know,â Furlong said.Â
Chlormequat has not been approved for use on food crops grown in the U.S., according to the EWG, but it can be found in oats and oat products from other countries. Under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency started allowing imports of such products into the U.S., the EWG noted, which is why chlormequat can be found in some cereals sold in this country.
The EPA is considering approving chlormequat for use on crops grown in the U.S., according to the agencyâs website. In a call for public comment on its proposed decision, the agency said, âBased on EPAâs human health risk assessment, there are no dietary, residential, or aggregate (i.e., combined dietary and residential exposures) risks of concern.â
The EPA didnât respond immediately to a request for comment.
For her part, Furlong said that while she usually buys organic oat products, she isnât rigid about it â and she might still buy the occasional box of Cheerios.
McDonald’s Corp.’s stock fell 1.3% in premarket trading on Monday after the fast-food giant missed Wall Street analysts’ estimates for revenue and same-store sales, while citing an impact from war in the Middle East.
The global fast-food giant said it expects “macro challenges” to persist in 2024.
McDonald’s MCD, -0.35%
said its fourth-quarter net income rose by 7% to $2.04 billion, or $2.80 a share, from $1.9 billion, or $2.59 a share, in the year-ago quarter.
McDonald’s said the latest quarter’s results included 15 cents a share in one-time charges.
Breaking those charges out, McDonald’s would have earned $1.95 a share. Analysts expected McDonalds to earn $1.83 a share, according to FactSet data.
Revenue rose 8% to $6.41 billion, short of the FactSet consensus estimate of $6.45 billion.
Fourth-quarter global comparable-store sales increased by 3.4%, including a 4.3% rise in the U.S.. Analysts expected same-store sales growth of 4.7%.
McDonald’s said its comparable sales fell in the Middle East as a reflection of war in the region since Oct. 7.
All other same-stores sales rose in international developmental licensed markets.
Total international developmental licensed markets same-store sales rose by 0.7%, well below the result in the previous quarter, which saw a 10.5% increase.
Looking back at the balance of 2023, McDonald’s said its net income rose by 37% to $8.47 billion.
Revenue jumped by 10% in 2023 to $25.49 billion.
Free cash flow for 2023 increased to $7.25 billion from $5.49 billion.
Before Monday’s moves, McDonald’s stock was up by 10.9% in the past year.
Less than three months after launching an attack on energy drinks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has a new target: Zyn nicotine pouches.
In a press release Sunday, Schumer labeled Zyn a “quiet and dangerous” alternative to vaping, claiming that with the decline in smoking, tobacco companies are adapting by focusing on new products like oral nicotine. Zyns are small pouches of nicotine meant to be placed between the lips and gums. Two strengths of the product are available at three and six milligrams of nicotine, and they come in several flavors.
Schumer’s ire appears to have been raised by the rapid growth in sales of nicotine pouches and so-called “Zynfluecers” on TikTok promoting the product. Schumer fears nicotine pouches could become a teen trend, as vaping did in 2019 before rapidly declining as the tobacco age was raised to 21 and schools became more aware of the problem. To head off a potential increase in youth nicotine addiction, Schumer wants the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration to investigate the marketing of Zyn and potentially restrict their flavors.
But Schumer’s framing has the story backward. Zyn is not a dangerous alternative to vaping but a dramatically safer alternative to smoking. One of the reasons smoking has declined substantially over the last decade is because safer nicotine alternatives like vapes and Zyn are switching smokers away from cigarettes. The closest equivalent for which we have decades of data is an oral smokeless tobacco called snus. Snus is most prevalent in Sweden, and not coincidentally, Sweden has the lowest smoking and lung cancer rates in Europe because those interested in using nicotine do so in a much safer form.
Schumer is right that nicotine pouches are enjoying enormous sales, but he would be wrong to assume nicotine-naive youth are driving these sales. According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey, only 1.5 percent of middle and high schoolers use nicotine pouches, and just 2.3 percent have ever tried a nicotine pouch. Even among the minority of young people who use products like Zyn, most are not nicotine newbies. A study of adolescents and adults aged 15-24 who used nicotine pouches found the vast majority were smokers or had smoked cigarettes in the past at 73 percent and 81 percent, respectively. Just like with e-cigarettes, nicotine pouches disproportionately appeal to people who are already using nicotine most often in its most dangerous form, which is cigarettes.
Schumer’s concern that Zyn comes in several flavors like cinnamon and citrus is also misguided. For one, Zyn has already applied to the FDA to be authorized for sale, and the agency will determine whether it presents a net benefit to public health. But suppose flavors in nicotine products are inherently youth-appealing, as Schumer suggests. In that case, he should be just as outraged that nicotine gums, which have been around for decades, are sold in flavors like “cinnamon surge,” “fruit chill,” and “spearmint burst.” Nicotine flavor bans have a poor track record in improving public health, with bans on flavored vapes associated with an increase in cigarette sales.
Schumer’s intervention drew mockery on X (formerly known as Twitter), including from Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators defending Zyn. The reaction is perhaps unsurprising, given that Tucker Carlson is the most famous Zyn consumer.
The most worrying aspect of Schumer’s demonization of Zyn is that it contributes to the false impression that just because something contains nicotine, it’s a threat to public health. What makes cigarettes so lethal is not nicotine but setting tobacco on fire and inhaling the smoke.
Divorced from smoke, nicotine is a relatively benign stimulant with a similar risk profile to caffeine. Most adults incorrectly believe vaping is just as bad or worse than smoking. If these misperceptions were replicated for products like Zyn, the most likely effect would not be saving kids from the grips of nicotine addiction, as Schumer hopes, but to keep smokers smoking. Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer of the Cato Institute lamented the constant fearmongering around nicotine, writing, “I can only think of one explanation: an unfounded and irrational fear of nicotine. I call it nicotinophobia.“
The number of adult tobacco users has dropped steadily in recent years, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, but it warned Big Tobacco is working hard to reverse that trend.
In 2022, about one-in-five adults around the world were smokers or consumed other tobacco products, compared to one-in-every-three in 2000, the United Nations health agency said.
A fresh report looking at trends in the prevalence of tobacco use between 2000 and 2030 showed that 150 countries were successfully reducing it, the WHO said.
Caution advised
But while smoking rates are declining in most countries, the WHO warned that tobacco-related deaths were expected to remain high for years to come.
Currently, tobacco use is still estimated to kill more than eight million people each year, including an estimated 1.3 million non-smokers who are exposed to second-hand smoke, WHO statistics show.
“Countries implementing strong tobacco control measures can expect to wait about 30 years between turning the prevalence rate from increasing to decreasing and seeing an associated turnaround in the number of deaths due to tobacco,” Tuesday’s report said.
And while the number of smokers has steadily shrunk, the WHO said the world was set to miss its goal of a 30-percent drop in tobacco use between 2010 and 2025.
Fifty-six countries around the world are expected to hit that target, including Brazil, which has already slashed tobacco use by 35 percent since 2010.
Six countries have seen tobacco use rise since 2010 — the Republic of Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Moldova and Oman.
Overall, the world is on track to shrink tobacco use by a quarter over the 15-year period to 2025, the report said.
Big Tobacco not sitting idly by
While celebrating the advances that have been made, the WHO warned that the tobacco industry was intent on rolling them back.
“Good progress has been made in tobacco control in recent years but there is no time for complacency,” said Ruediger Krech, director of the WHO’s health promotion department.
“I’m astounded at the depths the tobacco industry will go to pursue profits at the expense of countless lives,” he said.
“We see that the minute a government thinks they have won the fight against tobacco, the tobacco industry seizes the opportunity to manipulate health policies and sell their deadly products.”
The WHO urged all countries to maintain and strengthen control policies and to fight “tobacco industry interference”.
A particular focus, it said, should be on gathering better data on tobacco use among adolescents, especially for newer so-called smokeless products.
The report said that on average, around 10 percent of 13- to 15-year-olds globally use one or more types of tobacco.
That amounts to at least 37 million adolescents, including at least 12 million who use new smokeless tobacco products.
But the report stressed these numbers were an underestimate since more than 70 countries provide no data.
This was worrying because “countries need these data to counter tobacco and associated industries’ claims that adolescents are not being targeted as new clients,” it said.
The available data suggests the industry attempts to undermine countries’ efforts to dissuade young people from using tobacco products.
“Young people are still reporting regular use of the products, easy access to purchasing them and low concerns about becoming addicted,” the report said.
“Gathering data from adolescents on their knowledge, attitudes and practices is the most powerful way to combat the industry and shape effective policies that prevent initiation of tobacco use.”
New Year, new you – everyone attempt to do a personal make-over with resolutions. The most popular include:
Improve fitness.
Improve finances.
Lose weight
Make more time for loved ones
Stop smoking
The 5th one is very common, since millions still smoke cigarettes, unfortunately it is also one of the hardest to keep. Tobacco is one of the top causes of heart disease and cancer and causes a variety of lung ailments. In the U.S. alone, more than 40 million adults have a nicotine addiction. Worse yet, tobacco addiction therapies don’t seem to be efficient, for the most part.
Smoking cessation drugs don’t bring assured results in the long run. But there is a promising solution to this problem. CBD (cannabidiol) is an active ingredient derived from the hemp plant and widely used for medical purposes today. So can it cope with tobacco addiction? How to quit smoking cigarettes with the help of CBD oil? Read further to find all this out.
Is CBD Addictive?
As most of us know, smoking marijuana leads to addiction. Is CBD addictive then? In reality, it’s not. Cannabidiol belongs to non-toxic cannabis ingredients and doesn’t alter your brain function. Therefore, you can’t develop a CBD addiction. Additionally, cannabidiol can alleviate the psychoactive effects of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the main active ingredient of recreational marijuana.
How CBD Helps You Quit Smoking
Photo by Michal Wozniak via Unsplash
1. CBD Battles Tobacco Withdrawal Symptoms
Nicotine is as addictive as hard drugs like cocaine. That’s why it’s so hard to quit smoking. Once you try to cease this deadly habit, you will face an almost impenetrable barrier of withdrawal symptoms. It’s not just the urge for another cigarette. Tobacco withdrawal develops within several days and involves headaches, increased appetite and irritability, anxiety, insomnia, high blood pressure, and depression.
The worst part is that you may feel this nightmare for weeks. If it was easy to withstand this period, smoking would not become a global concern.
So how can CBD help you overcome nicotine addiction? The matter is that CBD regulates the sleep/wake cycle, pain, mood, and satiety. It combats headaches, promotes restful sleep, and regulates blood pressure. Given that, CBD can relieve some physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal, helping you get through this period without much struggle.
2. CBD Cigarettes Can Ease Tobacco Cravings
You pull out a cigarette from the pack, light it, and take a peaceful, long, and warm puff. You have been doing this for years, day after day. Stopping this is unimaginable: this ritual is engraved in your mind. It’s a part of your identity. But you could try a CBD cigarette instead of a regular one if you feel a desperate urge to smoke. It can become your first step toward overcoming tobacco addiction. Additionally, CBD prevents most nicotine withdrawal symptoms from devastating your body and mind.
Therefore, you can preserve the smoking habit while replacing regular cigarettes with a much healthier alternative. It’s much easier to quit smoking this way than just bring a sudden drastic change to your routine.
Photo by Irina Kostenich via Unsplash
3. CBD Helps You Relax
Cannabidiol has evident, well-studied anxiolytic properties. Both animal and human studies show that CBD reduces anxiety equally to diazepam, a common sedative drug. For instance, CBD brings relief to people with public speaking anxiety. Also, cannabidiol shows immense efficiency against post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
All in all, it’s a powerful stress-relieving supplement that will help you cope with panic attacks and depression resulting from smoking cessation.
4. CBD Reduces Cigarette Consumption
Researchers revealed a direct dependence between CBD intake and cigarette consumption. Thus, a study showed that tobacco-dependent individuals reduced cigarette consumption by an impressive 40% while taking CBD. Furthermore, CBD minimizes the pleasure of smoking cigarettes. In other words, nicotine won’t give you that pleasure if you take CBD.
Another study has shown smokers who took CBD felt less motivated to smoke cigarettes.
Under this trial, 30 smokers took 800 mg of CBD after overnight cigarette abstinence. The participants reported that they felt less pleasure from watching other people smoking. In other words, it was easier for the participants to ignore cigarette stimuli.
As for cigarette cravings and withdrawal, there was no significant difference between CBD and placebo treatment whatsoever.
However, researchers investigated short smoking abstinence periods (11 hours). It’s an insufficient time for the most physical nicotine withdrawal symptoms to occur. It might be a possible reason for such observations on CBD efficiency against tobacco withdrawal within this study.
Photo by an dooley via Unsplash
How to Take CBD for Tobacco Addiction
So, as we’ve found out, CBD helps you quit smoking. But how to take cannabidiol to overcome nicotine addiction? Here’s a step-by-step guide:
Choose High-Quality Products
There is one rule you should always follow: buy CBD cigarettes, tinctures, vape oils, and other products from reliable and reputable brands. For this, you have to check:
The THC content in each product. It must be less than 0.3%.
The hemp source. Prioritize brands with in-house hemp fields in the US or Western Europe.
Certifications and drug tests. It’s always better to choose certified products that meet the US hemp cultivation standards and undergo regular third-party lab tests.
Adjust CBD Doses Gradually
‘How much CBD should I take to combat my tobacco addiction?’, you may ask. The accurate dosage depends on your metabolism, weight, and the intensity of cigarette withdrawal complications like headaches, poor sleep, high blood pressure, etc.
Thus, you should consult your practitioner to decide on the initial dose and increase it slowly for better results. You can start with 12-15 mg of CBD per day to see how your body reacts to cannabidiol. If such a dose works fine for you, you can begin taking more CBD to reduce salience of cigarette stimuli.
CBD can become a viable solution for cigarette quitters. First, cannabidiol fights several tobacco withdrawal symptoms like anxiety, insomnia, headaches, and high blood pressure. Second, it helps you ignore cigarette cues. Third, CBD cigarettes can become a temporary healthy alternative to regular cigarettes on your way to smoking cessation.
Finally, CBD reduces stress, helping you cope with the emotional pressure. Given that, CBD is your option to break the suffocating chains of addiction and breathe freely in all senses of this word.
The Hoover City Council on Monday night gave its approval for tobacco sales at a new CBD, smoke and vape shop in The Village at Lee Branch off U.S. 280, but the real estate management company for the shopping center says it has a problem with the store.
Scott Laslo, a representative for Crawford Square Real Estate Advisors, told the City Council the new store, H.H. Smoke Shop, is violating the shopping center’s covenants and restrictions with at least one of its uses and said the management company intends to take legal action if the shop doesn’t remedy the violation by mid-January.
Laslo said the shop is doing something that was never brought to the attention of the management company for approval and said the management company does not intend to give approval. In an interview after the council meeting, he declined to say exactly what the CBD shop is doing that violates restrictions.
Hoover City Attorney Philip Corley said the covenants and restrictions are a private matter between the two private companies and separate from the issue that was before the council. The only issue before the council was whether H.H. Smoke Shop should be allowed to sell tobacco.
Henry Dailey, a Greystone resident who owns the shop, told the Hoover Planning and Zoning Commission last month that he already has a business license to sell CBD (cannabidiol) products legally in the city of Hoover and that the only reason he was coming to the city was because tobacco sales require…
The damage to the lungs and heart, the smell, the breath are all reasons to quit smoking. It is a tough habit to break, but critical for long term health. It is a tough journey to get it fully out of the system. But why do people gain weight after quitting smoking? While people tend to chalk it up as replacing one habit with another, or as an expression of anxiety, a study provides some much-needed scientific explanations.
Published in the Nature journal, the study suggests that the gut’s microbiome plays a part in the association between quitting smoking and gaining weight. Still, the mechanisms as to why this occurs are not clear.
Scientists devised a variety of tests involving mice, exposing them to smoke and then noting their fluctuations in gut bacteria. The first results showed that mice exposed to cigarette smoke resisted gaining weight when consuming a diet containing high fat. When the smoke was halted and the mice continued to eat the same diet, they gained weight.
Photo by brazzo/Getty Images
Subsequent studies proved gut bacteria’s importance in this situation; scientists provided antibiotics to the mice, depleting their microbiome, and found that it could impact their weight gain. Lastly, scientists transplanted fecal samples of the mice exposed to the smoke towards regular mice, finding that the regular mice experienced weight fluctuations as well.
Researchers then pinpointed the elements in the microbiome responsible for this change, calling out dimethylglycine (DMG) and acetylglycine (ACG) in particular. By enhancing and reducing these elements in mice, they found that even mice who weren’t exposed to smoke experienced weight fluctuations. Healthy mice with DMG supplements gained weight, while healthy mice with ACG supplements lost it.
Ninety-six human participants also took part in this study, all of whom displayed similar results as the mice. While this isn’t a complete win in terms of understanding how smoke influences our stomachs, it’s a significant first step, one that might help people understand the impact of cigarettes on gut health and might even provide a few solutions in the future that might encourage people to quit the habit without having to worry about the possible side effects.
A friend calls this day “Thanksscrapping.” He may have a point.
My favorite Thanksgiving story happened at a dinner on Park Avenue about 20 years ago when a lady with a large bouffant and a genial manner — let’s call her Mrs. Anders — raised a glass. Knowing I grew up in Dublin in a Catholic family, she said: “…and I’d like to raise a glass to Fair Eire and hope that the six counties of Northern Ireland are one day free from the British!” She did not realize that the host’s in-laws were Ulster Protestants. They were not amused.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton warned that President Joe Biden‘s push to ban menthol cigarettes could create a “huge black market” for groups like Hezbollah to sell in the United States.
The White House has long sought to ban menthol cigarettes, which health advocates say can be more addictive and harder to quit than other tobacco products. But Biden’s administration has faced pushback on the plan from both sides of the aisle, including recent critics who warn that the ban could worsen the illegal drug market in the U.S.
In a post to X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday, Cotton, of Arkansas, claimed that Biden’s plan to bar menthol cigarettes was “paternalistic” and “hypocritical,” and raised concerns about how the ban could impact national security.
Senator Tom Cotton is pictured at the U.S. Capitol on February 9, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Cotton warned on Wednesday that the Biden administration’s push to ban menthol cigarettes could open an opportunity for Lebanon militant group Hezbollah to trade contraband cigarettes in the U.S. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
“Joe Biden wants to ban menthol cigarettes, which are favored by black smokers,” Cotton wrote. “Meanwhile, he wants to legalize weed for white college kids and mail out free crack pipes.”
“The administration’s ban is paternalistic, it’s hypocritical, and it creates a huge black market for Mexican cartels and Hezbollah,” Cotton added. “And all because Mike Bloomberg told him to.”
Newsweek reached out to the White House Press Office via email for comment Wednesday evening.
The Food and Drug Administration sent final rules to the White House Office of Management and Budget regarding a ban on menthol cigarettes in October. As CNN reports, advocates for the ban say that restricting menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars could save hundreds of thousands of lives.
Hezbollah, a militant group in Lebanon that the U.S. State Department characterizes as a terrorist organization, has previously been linked to illegal cigarette smuggling schemes both within the U.S. and abroad. In the 1990s, U.S. officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (AFT) discovered that a portion of the profits made from a contraband cigarette scheme sold between North Carolina and Michigan were being put toward funding Hezbollah.
A similar scheme was discovered in New York in 2013, CNN previously reported, when 16 Palestinian men, some of whom had ties to known terrorist organizations, were indicted for smuggling contraband cigarettes across several state lines.
Tensions between militant groups such as Hezbollah and the Western world have risen in the past month after Palestinian militants Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel October 7, subsequently launching the Israeli government’s heaviest-ever military response on the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah leadership has touted that the group has a “plan and vision” for its involvement in the war, and conflict between the Israeli military and Hezbollah has escalated along the northern border of Israel.
Cotton’s statement on Wednesday arrived a day after Republican Congressman Andrew Garbarino, of New York, and Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz, of Florida, signed a joint letter that warned the pending FDA ban on menthol cigarettes could lead to “unintended national security consequences.”
“If there was ever a moment to pause and reevaluate the potential impact of every U.S. policy choice on our national security, this is the time,” the lawmakers wrote.
“It is well-documented that Hezbollah is a leader in the illicit cigarette trade—not halfway around the world but right here in the Western Hemisphere,” the letter continued, which was addressed to Biden.
“There have been cases in which Hezbollah and Hamas cells have smuggled cigarettes into the United States to send the revenue overseas,” read the letter. “Given Hezbollah’s established cigarette business and its ties to the Mexican drug cartels, we cannot discount the potential for this FDA-proposed rule to open a massive revenue stream for this Hamas-allied foreign terrorist organization.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
