Electronic cigarettes should be recommended more widely for helping some adults stop smoking tobacco, according to a new University of Michigan study. “Far too many adults who want to quit smoking are unable to do so,” said (TCORS 2.0 Co-Investigator) Kenneth Warner, dean emeritus of the School of Public Health. “E-cigarettes constitute the first new tool to help them in decades. Yet relatively few smokers and indeed health care professionals appreciate their potential value.”

New Zealand is “engaged in an extraordinarily important natural experiment to see if these significant policy approaches, which have not been implemented elsewhere, succeed in driving down cigarette smoking, as many experts think they’re likely to do,” said Clifford Douglas, director of the Tobacco Research Network at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.Thousands of people will live longer, healthier lives as a result of the legislation, New Zealand’s Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall said. She added that the country’s health system would save billions of dollars from the treatment of smoking-related illnesses.

The FDA has opened the public comment period for the agency’s proposed ban on menthol cigarettes. Epidemiology and global health professor Rafael Meza studies data modeling in disease prevention and cancer risk. David Mendez, who studies smoking cessation and tobacco control policies, is an associate professor of health management and policy. These University of Michigan researchers found that, in a 38-year period, African Americans suffered most of the harmful effects of menthol cigarettes. Now the researchers have developed a model to simulate the possible benefits of the menthol ban, based on studies of population trends in tobacco use. As experts on the behavioral and public health aspects of smoking, they explain the role of menthol in smoking-related illness and death.

“The premature demand that menthol be banned in all tobacco products, if implemented, risks handing almost the entire tobacco marketplace over to cigarettes, which kill half of long-term users. Science has demonstrated that a variety of noncombustible products offer reduced-risk alternatives for adult smokers who are either unable or unwilling to quit using nicotine completely. These range from e-cigarettes and oral nicotine lozenges and pouches to such products as a very low-nitrosamine smokeless tobacco called snus. Research to date suggests that retaining menthol in some or perhaps all of them could help adults quit smoking.” — Clifford E. Douglas, JD (Director, Tobacco Research Network; Faculty, University of Michigan School of Public Health)

We created this database to estimate the proportion of the US population covered by T21 laws over time. Other researchers can now link these data to other data sources, as we did recently in a paper examining the impact of T21 laws on youth smoking initiation.