Society & Culture - Posted by Patric Lane-UNC on Monday, February 21, 2011 13:18 - 4 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Bans snuff out online cigarette shops
"Most Internet vendors offer tax-free cigarettes, making them cheaper than those sold at stores," says lead author Kurt Ribisl. "This undermines the impact that higher prices have on reducing smoking." (Credit: iStockphoto)
UNC-CHAPEL HILL (US) — The number of websites selling cigarettes has dropped in the wake of credit card and shipping bans, new research shows.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The study, published in the journal PLoS One, found that restrictions on purchasing cigarettes online with credit cards and shipping bans lowered the number of vendors offering cigarettes online and reduced consumer traffic to the most popular cigarette-selling websites.
“Most Internet vendors offer tax-free cigarettes, making them cheaper than those sold at stores,” says Kurt Ribisl, the study’s lead author and associate professor of health behavior and health education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “This undermines the impact that higher prices have on reducing smoking.”
Ribisl says that aside from violating tax laws, most online cigarette vendors have weak age verification and sell to minors. This led to landmark voluntary agreements in 2005 with major credit card companies and private shippers to ban payment transactions and bar commercial shippers from transporting all Internet cigarette sales.
Ribisl and colleagues studied the bans’ effectiveness by examining the sales practices of hundreds of websites one year before and two years after the agreements went into effect. They also compared the number of unique monthly visitors to the 50 most popular cigarette vendor sites to determine whether the bans altered web traffic.
The study found that following the bans, many websites closed down. There also was a 3.5-fold decline in traffic to the 50 most popular vendor sites, resulting in an estimated 1.25 million fewer visits per month before the end of the 2005. And although an influx of new vendors initially saw a net increase in the number of sites, their numbers fell markedly over the following year, resulting in an overall drop in the total number of vendors.
Researchers also found that the proportion of vendors accepting credit cards and PayPal dropped from 99.2 percent to 37.4 percent after the bans, and the proportion offering to ship via UPS, FedEx, and other commercial shippers dropped from 32.2 percent to 5.6 percent. However, there was a corresponding increase in vendors offering non-banned payment options (such as personal checks) and shipping options (including the U.S. Postal Service, which did not ban cigarettes).
This indicated that the Internet vendors actively exploited loopholes in the voluntary agreements, the study suggests, although a new federal law signed by U.S. President Barack Obama last year has strengthened the provisions of the voluntary agreements and made tobacco nonmailable matter through the U.S. Postal Service.
Ribisl says the strategies examined in the study could have wider public health applications.
“This promising approach to controlling the sale of restricted goods online has implications for regulating other products such as alcohol, firearms, quack cures and medicines sold without a prescription,” he adds.
The study was supported with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
More news UNC: http://uncnews.unc.edu/
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4 Comments
Bob
Bob
Johnson and Johnson, owning Pfizer, the makers of Chantix and Nicoderm, fund the bans through their Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-RWJohnsnF.html
Many tax exempt political action committees (charities?) received millions to lobby for smoking bans from the RWJ Foundation. These bans are nothing but clever marketing strategy, with lots of highly publicized “sky is falling” hype.
Tobacco control funding sources for “social change” to handle the “tobacco problem”
http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?ia=143&id=14912
Here are their tax exempt Political Action Committees. (PACs)
http://www.no-smoke.org/pdf/CIA_Fundamentals.pdf
Now they are being given grants to enforce their bans, admitting that bans don’t help business.
http://www.rwjf.org/applications/solicited/cfp.jsp?ID=21181
The bans are a resounding success, for Pfizer.
http://www.emoneydaily.com/pfizer-nysepfe-demand-soaring/6986272
The anti-smokers commit flagrant scientific fraud by ignoring more than 50 studies which show that human papillomaviruses cause at least 1/4 of non-small cell lung cancers. Smokers and passive smokers are more likely to have been exposed to this virus for socioeconomic reasons. And the anti-smokers’ studies are all based on lifestyle questionnaires, so they’re cynically DESIGNED to blame tobacco for all those extra lung cancers that are really caused by HPV. And they commit the same type of fraud with every disease they blame on tobacco.
http://www.smokershistory.com/hpvlungc.htm
http://www.smokershistory.com/SGHDlies.html
And, all their so-called “independent” reports were ring-led by the same guy, Jonathan M. Samet, including the Surgeon General Reports, the EPA report, the IARC report, and the ASHRAE report, and he’s now the chairman of the FDA Committee on Tobacco. He and his politically privileged clique exclude all the REAL scientists from their echo chamber. That’s how they make their reports “unanimous!”
http://www.smokershistory.com/SGlies.html
For the government to commit fraud to deprive us of our liberties is automatically a violation of our Constitutional rights to the equal protection of the laws, just as much as if it purposely threw innocent people in prison. And for the government to spread lies about phony smoking dangers is terrorism, no different from calling in phony bomb threats.
The new electronic cigarette is already a very popular item. Because of this, many different types have been created. This can be great because it offers many different options for all different types of people.
Electronic cigarettes
e-cigarettes
e-cigarette talk
reviews of electric cigarettes
They undermine the entire purpose of anti-smoking laws, the bottom line of Pfizer.