The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is rolling out a $68 million ad campaign designed to help smokers quit and for the first time ever, the advertisements are to include former e-cigarette users.
Presently, the electronic cigarette industry — which big tobacco companies like R.J. Reynolds, makers of VUSE e-cigs, are apart of — does not face the same advertising restrictions which have kept cigarette ads off television since 1971 when then U.S. President Richard Nixon signed a broadcast advertising ban aimed at stifling tobacco industry advertising efforts.
The new CDC ads aimed at e-cigarettes, which a recently published study in the journal PLOS One found to contain free radicals in the vapor they produce, come as an extension of the agency’s three-year-old “Tips From Former Smokes” series in which real people discuss the negative impact smoking has had on their lives.
R.J Reynolds spokesman Richard Smith was quoted in a Bloomberg Business report as having said that “adult tobacco consumers have a right to be fully and accurately informed about the risks of serious diseases, the significant differences in the comparative risks of different tobacco and nicotine-based products, and the benefits of quitting.”
The aforementioned Bloomberg report indicated that Reynolds and Lorillard are imploring regulators to approve a merger.
Lorillard is the tobacco company behind the popular Blu brand of e-cigarettes, which the tobacco company acquired in April of 2012.
A study published earlier this month in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that minors in the state of North Carolina attempting to purchase e-cigs over the Internet were likely to succeed as more than 90 percent of the vendors analyzed in the study did not comply with the 2013 state law requiring online e-cigarette sellers to verify the age of all of their customers at the point of order.
The new anti-smoking campaign by the Centers for Disease Control is scheduled to begin on March 30, 2015.
What are your thoughts on the CDC’s latest anti-smoking efforts targeting nicotine vaporizing electronic cigarettes?
