Article Text
Abstract
Introduction The availability of flavoured tobacco products is associated with increased initiation and youth smoking. New York City prohibited all sales of flavoured cigars, cigarillos, little cigars, chew, snuff, snus, tobacco, pipe tobacco, roll-your-own tobacco, and dissolvables, excluding menthol, in October 2009; enforcement began in November 2010. This paper describes the sales ban evaluation.
Methods Data on retail tobacco sales of cigars, smokeless and other tobacco products such as pipe tobacco and roll-your-own, were analysed using interrupted time series methods, estimating changes in flavoured and non-flavoured tobacco product inflation-adjusted dollar sales overall, and by product type. Changes in ever use of flavoured tobacco products, any tobacco product use, and smoking prevalence among adolescents were estimated using multivariable logistic regression.
Results Sales of flavoured tobacco products declined overall (87%; p<0.001), and for flavoured cigars (86%; p<0.001) and flavoured pipe and roll-your-own (91%; p<0.001) following ban enforcement, while non-flavoured sales increased for cigars (5%; p=0.003) and pipe and roll-your-own (4%, p=0.030). In adjusted models, teens in 2013 had 37% lower odds of ever trying flavoured tobacco products (p<0.001), 28% lower odds of using any type of tobacco product (p=0.025), and a non-significant change in current smoking prevalence (p=0.114) compared with teens in 2010.
Conclusions Flavoured tobacco product sales and odds of ever using flavoured tobacco products or using any tobacco products among teens declined significantly after ban enforcement began. Collectively these findings demonstrate significant evidence that the flavoured tobacco products sales ban was successful in New York City, and could succeed elsewhere.
- Non-cigarette tobacco products
- Priority/special populations
- Public policy
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Footnotes
Contributors SMF designed the study, performed the analysis and drafted and edited the manuscript. MJ supported study design and analysis, and edited the paper.
Funding This study was supported by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and, in part, by Cooperative Agreement Number 1U58DP002419-01 from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—Communities Putting Prevention to Work and in part by Cooperative Agreement Number 5U58DP003689 from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—Community Transformation Grant. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Competing interests None declared.
Ethics approval NYC Department of Health of Mental Hygiene IRB.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement With appropriate review and approval, data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Youth Risk Behavior Survey are available on request.