Assessing the Impact of an Interactive Mobile Game on Tobacco-Related Attitudes and Beliefs: The Truth Campaign's "Flavor Monsters".

Given that over 97 percent of American teens play videogames, it is not surprising that many "games for health" target youth. Although tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, few digital games focus on preventing this behavior. The aims of this study were twofold: (1) to determine if youth will play a game with tobacco-related information and themes and (2) to explain the relationship between the truth(®) (Legacy, Washington, DC) campaign's "Flavor Monsters" gameplay and shifts in game-related tobacco knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs. First, two versions of the game, with different amounts of tobacco-related content, were developed to examine the influence of tobacco-related content on player engagement, length of play, awareness of the truth brand, and receptivity to the game. No statistically significant differences were found for engagement (P=0.81), length of play (P=0.10), or awareness of the truth brand (P=0.67). Using an online survey through a preexisting online panel of 13-24 year olds, a longitudinal (n=693) design was used whereby exposure to messages varied naturally over time. Because of the large number of anti-tobacco industry attitude questions, we created an Anti-Tobacco Industry (ATI) Index based on the results of a factor analysis. Although gameplay was not a predictor of lower levels of intention to smoke, level mastered was a significant positive predictor of ATI Index attitudes score at 3 months, controlling for baseline ATI Index score, age, gender, and ever cigarette use (P=0.002). Longitudinal findings indicate a cumulative and enduring effect, suggesting that anti-tobacco content can be successfully integrated within a mobile game to help increase anti-tobacco attitudes.

The regulation of nicotine in the United Kingdom: how nicotine gum came to be a medicine, but not a drug.

This article explores the utility of actor-network theory (ANT) as a tool for socio-legal research. ANT is deployed in a study of the evolution of divided regulatory responsibility for tobacco and medicinal nicotine (MN) products in the United Kingdom, with a particular focus on how the latter came to be regulated as a medicine. We examine the regulatory decisions taken in the United Kingdom in respect of the first MN product: a nicotine-containing gum developed in Sweden, which became available in the United Kingdom in 1980 as a prescription-only medicine under the Medicines Act 1968. We propose that utilizing ANT to explore the development of nicotine gum and the regulatory decisions taken about it places these decisions into the wider context of ideas about tobacco control and addiction, and helps us to understand better how different material actors acted in different networks, leading to very different systems of regulation.

"We mentally ill smoke a lot": identity, smoking, and mental illness in America.

Most of the history of the tobacco industry over the last few decades has focused on the conflicts between tobacco industry leaders who promoted smoking and tobacco control advocates who warned of the health consequences. Yet a view of this conflict from the perspective of smokers who are also mentally ill raises questions about how to frame public health policy for these individuals. Mentally ill consumers wrote to the tobacco industry between the 1970s and 1990s and expressed their commitment to smoking and to cigarette companies, despite their awareness of the health risks. This paper explores the relationship between mentally ill consumers, the tobacco industry, and public health in the United States through letters written by mentally ill smokers.

El Habano and the world it has shaped: Cuba, Connecticut, and Indonesia.

In the half century since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, El Habano remains the premium cigar the world over; but both before and since 1959, the seed, agricultural and industrial know-how, and human capital have been transplanted to replicate that cigar in a process accentuated by upheavals and out-migration. The focus here is on a little-known facet of the interconnected island and offshore Havana cigar history, linking Cuba with Connecticut and Indonesia: from when tobacco was taken from the Americas to Indonesia and gave rise to the famed Sumatra cigar wrapper leaf; through the rise and demise of its sister shade wrapper in Connecticut, with Cuban and Sumatra seed, ultimately overshadowed by Indonesia; and the resulting challenges facing Cuba today. The article highlights the role of Dutch, U.S., British, and Swedish capital to explain why in 2009 the two major global cigar corporations, British Imperial Tobacco and Swedish Match, were lobbying Washington, respectively, for and against the embargo on Cuba. As the antismoking, antitobacco lobby gains ground internationally, the intriguing final question is whether the future lies with El Habano or smokeless Swedish snus.

Paradox of precision: bright tobacco as technology of transfer, 1880-1937.

This article compares two episodes of technology transfer in the 1890s: the movement of bright tobacco production technology to south-central Africa with the spread of the crop to eastern North Carolina and South Carolina. It finds similarities in the people who introduced the crop, but significant differences in the methods used to produce it. This is troubling because the type is defined by the cultivation and especially the curing techniques used to produce it; it is also often described in the historical literature as "Virginia tobacco," even when grown elsewhere. the technological differences are the product of different environments, which include not only the climate but also many elements of the technological system beyond immediate human control: the availability and organization of labor, differences in market structures and marketing institutions, and the government incentives provided to buyers. Therefore, this essay takes as its subject the paradox inherent in the official classification of tobacco types regulated by the USDA and argues that varietal types represent a form of market regulation disguised as botanical taxonomy.

Getting away with murder.

A review of Allan M. Brandt's The cigarette century: the rise, fall and deadly persistence of the product that defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

La lectura en las tabaquerías en Cuba / Reading in the Cuban cigar factories

Se examina el fenómeno de la lectura en las tabaquerías en Cuba desde sus orígenes hasta la actualidad; se abordan los inicios de la actividad, la lectura de tabaquería y los tabaqueros en las luchas sociales del siglo XIX, los tabaqueros emigrados y José Martí en la Tribuna Avanzada de la Libertad, la lectura en las tabaquerías de la república, así como la lectura en las tabaquerías en el período posrevolucionario.

The phenomenon of reading activity in cigar factories was studied from its origins to the present day; the starting of the reading activity at cigar factory; the involvement of workers in the 21ST century social struggle, the immigrant cigar factory workers and the work of José Martí in Tribuna Avanzada de la Libertad were addressed. An analysis was made of the reading activity at cigar factories at republican times and after the triumph of the revolution.

"Such a smoking nation as this I never saw...": smoking, nationalism, and manliness in nineteenth-century Hungary.

Tobacco smoking became an important marker of Hungarian national identity during the nineteenth century. this national symbol ultimately had an economic origin: Hungarian tobacco producers resisted the tobacco monopoly of the Habsburg central government, and led an ultimately successful consumer boycott of Austrian products. Tobacco nationalism, however, became a common theme in Hungarian popular culture in its own right, as tobacco use came to symbolize community and fraternity. The use of tobacco was also highly gendered; smoking as a metaphor for membership shows that the Hungarian nation was a gender-exclusive "national brotherhood."

The Canadian cigar and tobacco journal in the forties: a remembrance.

This paper is a period snapshot of the life and times of Canadian smoking culture, filtered through "The Canadian Cigar and Tobacco Journal" (the industry's trade paper) from 1943-1949. "The Journal" provided a vivid portrait of neighbourhood tobacconists, travelling salesman, wholesalers and factory workers, homemakers and entrepreneurs. I discuss the role of Jews in the industry, as manufacturers and retailers. "The Journal" evokes the dangers of the retail trade, such as armed robberies, as well as the dangers of wartime. There is also the parallel danger of tobacco smoking, which, although not explicitly defined as risky behaviour by physicians, nonetheless is apparent to consumers. World War II is a dominant feature of "The Journal," and the celebration of wartime tobacco consumption is epitomized by Winston Churchill and other heroic smokers. Women's increased economic participation during the war years, and postwar demobilization, is reflected in "The Journal." Finally I discuss the growing targeting of children as potential consumers of tobacco.

Red Star/Black Lungs: anti-tobacco campaigns in twentieth-century Russia.

This paper examines two major Soviet anti-smoking campaigns -- one in the 1920s and the other in the late 1970s. Each occurs in a period of demographic crisis as part of larger pubic health efforts. Each ultimately fails. In 1920, the leader of the People's Commissariat of Health, N. Semashko, began a campaign against tobacco with the support of V.I. Lenin. He proposed restrictions on access, use, and production of tobacco. Faced with the needs of the new state for economic stability, government officials abandoned the plan by 1921. In 1970, internal demographic concerns and increasing international evidence led the Ministry of Health to again attempt to stamp out tobacco. While policy was made, implementation was weak and the economic dislocations of the 1980s saw the vast importation of foreign brands to stabilize the government and the collapse of this second campaign against tobacco.

"Where there's smoke, there's fire": tobacco use and the construction of the Canadian citizen, 1890-1930.

This study explores the discourse around tobacco use, mainly cigarette smoking, as it related to changing values of citizenship in English Canada between 1890 and 1930. It focuses particularly on changing perceptions of working-class male youths who had taken up cigarette smoking in this period. Despite the general attraction of smoking to other sectors of the population after World War One, including middle-class male youths and adults as well as young women, this paper will argue that cigarette smoking had special symbolic meanings for those relatively disenfranchised from mainstream civic order and respectability. Conventional wisdom has long held that in addition to tobacco's threats, there are also certain benefits. These benefits have been presented as age-, gender-, and product-specific. After 1920, smoking represented different terrors for those establishing and monitoring Canada's civic norms, and different "performative" possibilities for those contesting them.