News & Updates

There are 27 brick-and-mortar tobacco retailers for every one McDonald’s restaurant in the U.S., equaling 375,000 tobacco retail locations. Retailers are not equally distributed, but tend to be clustered in lower-income and minority communities. New research concludes that living near more tobacco retailers is linked with people being more likely to use tobacco and less [...]

Last month, Juul Labs agreed to pay North Carolina $40 million to settle the first of many lawsuits brought by states claiming the e-cigarette company’s marketing contributed to widespread nicotine addiction among youths. The settlement was announced as the Food and Drug Administration is deciding whether its vaping products can stay on the market. Read [...]

Data from more than 1,300 smokeless tobacco retailers in Oklahoma showed that convenience stores, found and used more often in rural than in metropolitan areas, are disproportionately more likely to engage in marketing strategies that could lure youth into smokeless tobacco use. Read the paper. [...]

A study from the University of Chicago examined JUUL’s advertising efforts in 2018 and 2019. Touted as an effort to combat underage use, in 2018, JUUL invested $30 million investment in ads, primarily promoting the products and emphasizing its role in smoking reduction. In 2019, the company spent $36.2 million in advertising. These marketing activities [...]

A study in Columbus, Ohio, examined whether compliance checks with Tobacco 21 were related to retailer characteristics, including neighborhood poverty level, in-store T21 signage, and cashier behaviors and perceptions of the law. The authors found that compliance with ID checks was lower in high-poverty neighborhoods and higher among retailers using scanners for ID checks. They [...]

A paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine based on the dissertation of ASPiRE’s Amanda Kong (UNC) found that the density of tobacco retailers, especially gas stations and convenience stores that sell tobacco products, was associated with adult smoking behaviors. Read the paper. Kong also posted a brief “tweetorial” about the data. [...]

ASPiRE’s Sarah Mills is the lead author of a newly published report on the efforts of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council to pass a prohibition on the sale of menthol cigarettes in San Francisco. The article, in Tobacco Control, narrates the Council’s work advocating for a comprehensive, flavored tobacco product sales prohibition. It [...]

A report in Tobacco Control by ASPiRE’s Lisa Henriksen, Trent Johnson, and Nina Schleicher looked at vape shop closures during COVID-19 in six metro areas (Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, San Diego, and Seattle) using data from the Public Health Law Center. They found that many vape shops did not comply with state COVID-19 orders. [...]

Researchers at Boston College examined the associations between tobacco control policies in several Massachusetts counties and adolescent tobacco use. They found that counties with greater implementation of flavored tobacco product restrictions were associated with a decrease in the level of cigarette use, with the largest reductions among 14- and 18-year-olds. Increasing flavored tobacco product restrictions [...]

A literature review in Health & Place by researchers at The Ohio State University School of Public Health synthesized evidence on density-reduction policies. Findings indicate that prohibitions on tobacco sales in pharmacies reduced retailer density, but perhaps not equitably. Prohibiting the sale of tobacco near schools produced greater density reductions in higher-risk neighborhoods, and a [...]