Filtered cigars that resemble cigarettes in appearance, if not taste, are fast gaining appeal with smokers struggling under budgets strained by tobacco tax hikes.

For $1.28, shoppers at the Cigarette Outlet, 1404 First Ave. NE, could pick up a pack of 20 Wrangler brand filtered cigars last week, one of several brands available.

The filtered cigars come in a 20-pack about the size of a cigarette package, and are similar in appearance. But they cost $2.48-per-pack less than one of the more popular budget cigarette brands, Hy-Val. They’re priced a stunning $4.30-per-pack less than Marlboro, one of the mainstay cigarette brands after tax.

“These (filtered cigars) have blown up in the last six or seven months,” said Andrew Beaupre, manager of the Cigarette Oulet on First Avenue. ”I mean, they’re $1.27! “Who’s not willing to try something new for $1.27 with what they’re paying for cigarettes?”

The price difference between the filtered cigars and cigarettes wasn’t always so wide. It began recently as the tobacco industry responded to tax hikes that took place to fund the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that was signed into law in February 2009.

Realizing that sales would be hurt by the higher taxes, some manufacturers increased the weight of their small cigars by adding more tobacco, according to Darryl Jayson, vice president of the Tobacco Merchants Association.

By getting the weight above the 3-pounds-of-tobacco-per 1,000 cigars level, manufacturers could get their cigars reclassified from the higher-taxed small cigar category to the lower-taxed regular cigar category, Jayson said.

It’s a big difference. Cigars that contain three pounds of tobacco per thousand are taxed the “little cigar” rate of $1 per pack by the federal government and $1.36 per pack by the State of Iowa.

The federal tax on big cigars is only 50 percent of the product price and the Iowa tax is 50 percent of the product price. That was a considerable drop for a product that costs less than $1 per pack.

Beaupre predicts that the government will soon act to close down the cigar classification loophole that the filtered cigar makers have used. It’s already starting in some states, according to Dawn Johnson, cigarette and tobacco tax examiner for the Iowa Department of Revenue.

“Because they’re so much cheaper, a lot of states are looking at going after the filtered cigars,” Johnson said.

Filtered cigars aren’t without health concerns, Jayson said, but they are made with cigar tobacco, a different plant with a much stronger taste.

“Cigars aren’t inhaled,” Jayson said. “You keep it in your mouth.”

As The Boondocks continues to amaze and keep people laughing harder, the latest episode definitely showcases creativity.

With heavy references to films and characters such as Mike Myers in Halloween and Bishop in Juice, Aaron McGruder is truly showing innovation and a seamless way of interweaving in story-telling.

For those that didn’t know, the character Lamilton Taeshawn takes pages from the real-life Latarian Milton. Do your homework and look up the actual story of a kid gone bad.

After being accused of smoking marijuana by a drug dealer/thief that stole her purse last year, Kirsten Dunst is firing back.

At a re-trial, the “Spider Man” actress testified in court earlier today (June 1) that she does not smoke pot and that the purse snatcher, James Jimenez and his friend, Jarrod Beinerman were never invited to her suite.

Although Ms Dunst denied it, she did admit that her personal assistant was a pot smoker. “I know she smoked pot,” Dunst, 28, said under questioning by the defense – even though the judge had ruled she didn’t have to answer.

Bienerman pleaded guilty, while Jimenez’s first trial ended with the jury deadlocked on two charges.

During the first trial, Jimenez’s defense was that he was too dumb to realize his buddy was staging a burglary.

Kristen Stewart, who is known to be the main star in the Twilight series together with fellow star Taylor Lautner was confirmed to be in Sydney Australia on Sunday to promote their movie Twilght Saga: Eclipse.

Kristen Stewart 20 years old and who appears to be a conservative person in her movie Twilight series, was seen smoking a cigarette on her hotel balcony in Sydney Australia. Not only was the Twilight star smoking she gave the paparazzi one hell of a dirty finger as a sign saying that she was not impressed with the attention shes having.

After this, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner went out to the seas and had a cruise on Sydney Harbour. After the cruise, a fan approached her for a picture and sorry to the fan but Kristen Stewart refused her request.

After docking, Stewart had another run in with the paparazzi.”She was just in a bad mood because of the photographers. She was swearing at them and tried running into a restaurant, but the door was locked.” the poor fan said.

Well hopefully Kristen Stewart will be in a good mood soon.

A $1.3 million cut in funding for the Missouri Division of Alcohol and Tobacco Control will eliminate the agency’s ability to do field enforcement of laws designed to prevent minors from drinking or smoking.

As of June 15, the agency will cut back from 41 to 17 employees, with a single field officer stationed in five district offices, including one in Cape Girardeau, said Mike O’Connell, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety. The Southeast Missouri region from Jefferson County to the Bootheel currently has three field agents.

As a result of the cutbacks, the field agents will no longer be able to participate in efforts to check whether bars or retailers are selling drinks or tobacco to underage people. Those duties will become the responsibility of local police, which, O’Connell said, have already been handling most of the burden anyway.

The agency will continue to monitor reports from local police about incidents at bars such as fighting, after-hours sales or sales to minors, O’Connell said. Those violations will continue to result in license warnings, revocations or suspensions, he said.

“There is a difference between regulatory enforcement and criminal enforcement,” O’Connell said. “The division shares criminal enforcement with local police, and local law enforcement is doing many of these functions now.”

Cape Girardeau police chief Carl Kinnison said the cuts have been expected because of a severe drop-off in state tax receipts.

Lawmakers cut $1.4 million in state tax money from the agency’s budget, which was $2.9 million in the fiscal year that will end June 30. The alcohol enforcement agency expects to see federal funding increase by $140,000, but that is not enough to offset the cuts.

The cuts follow reductions made several years ago that limited the division’s participation in enforcing liquor and tobacco laws, Kinnison said.

“We have been accustomed to stepping up,” Kinnison said. “The levels of enforcement you counted on from the state before just aren’t there.”

Compliance checks are one of the most visible ways of enforcing liquor and tobacco laws. The division or a local agency sends minors into a bar or retailer with instructions to attempt to make a purchase but to not lie about their age or present fake identification.

Cape Girardeau has for several years been using grant money to pay officer overtime and the minors used in the compliance checks, Kinnison said. “We will continue to do some level of enforcement and anything beyond that we are just going to have to work our way through.”

The state agency had used two federal grants, one administered by the public safety department’s Juvenile Justice Program and another funded through the Missouri Department of Transportation, to pay agents overtime hours during sting operations. The money also supported “shoulder tap” enforcement, where agents ask drinkers at bars or special events to show they are 21 or older, and server training programs.

Those programs won’t go away, there just won’t be any state agents involved, O’Connell said. “ATC will work alongside these police chiefs and sheriffs on what is the best way to utilize that money,” he said.

The MoDOT program, with $300,000 available annually, will be in limbo until its rules are redesigned, said program manager Bill Whitfield. The money will now be awarded to local agencies but no decisions on how the money will be distributed have been made, he said.

“It is a little premature to say how that is going to work,” he said.

Kinnison said he needs reassurance that regulatory enforcement will continue as before. The city has been reluctant to revoke or suspend liquor licenses, preferring that the state take the lead.

“If we need to take our own initiative in the city to do that, we will,” Kinnison said.

By Rudi Keller, Southeast Missourian

Leonardo DiCaprio puffed away on a cigar while watching the Lakers-Jazz game at an LA sports bar with buddies on Saturday night. He’s a proud supporter of the city’s athletic teams, recently sporting a UCLA hat while running errands with Bar and sitting courtside during the Lakers playoff games. Yesterday, however, it was all about his favorite women as he and Bar paid a Mother’s Day visit to his mom in Malibu. Leo’s entering the final stretch of downtime before he hits the road this Summer promoting Inception — Buzz has a new trailer for the mind-bending movie which has most of you more excited than ever for its July 16 release.

NAOMI Campbell once claimed she preserved her good looks by smoking, drinking occasionally and never dieting.

Eleven years later, the supermodel has to work rather harder at maintaining her beauty.

Campbell, who turns 40 this month, has revealed that she diets on a cocktail of maple syrup, cayenne pepper, lemon juice and water.

“I try to do this three times a year,” she said. “The most I’ve ever done it for is 18 days. It’s good just to clean out your body once in a while.”

Her comments, made in an interview with chat show host Oprah Winfrey are a far cry from her remarks in 1999.

Then, she told Playboy magazine: “I never diet. I smoke. I drink now and then. I never work out.”

Critics of the maple syrup diet, which involves consuming under 600 calories a day, believe it may be bad for your health.

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But Campbell said her devotion to the diet is fully supported by her long-term partner, the Russian multi-millionaire Vladimir Doronin.

Indeed, Mr Doronin, whom she calls her fitness guru, has been an ally in helping her resist the temptations of food. “If there is bread on the table, he says: ‘Don’t eat bread’,” she said.

Campbell also revealed a skipping rope has helped her keep the weight off.

“The rope is great for your face; you lose a lot on your face when you do the rope,” she said.

Campbell, who has repeatedly made headlines for her temper tantrums, is not the first celebrity convert to the maple syrup diet.

American pop star Beyonce Knowles, 28, lost 8kg in two weeks for her role in the 2006 film Dreamgirls by following the same diet.

Gwyneth Paltrow, 37, has also been an intermittent follower. In her email newsletter, the actor said: “It was not what you would characterise as pretty. Or easy. It did work, however.”

Maybe we should call Missouri the “Smoke Me” state.

Whether it’s at home or at work or at the convenience store checkout counter, Missourians live in a state that is one of the most tobacco-friendly places in the nation. That’s according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that ranks states on their tobacco control efforts.

At just 17 cents per pack, Missouri has the second-lowest state tobacco tax, after South Carolina, the CDC statistics show.

Missouri workers are more likely to be exposed to tobacco smoke than any workers outside of Nevada. And Missouri families are more likely than others to welcome smoking in their homes — 69.5 percent of households in the state maintain no smoking rules, compared with the national average of 77.6 percent.

This nonchalance doesn’t come without cost. An estimated 307 adults out of every 100,000 in Missouri die each year due to smoking. Only nine states had higher rates.

The CDC’s numbers for Kansas were nothing to be proud of either, but its rates of adult smoking and smoking-related deaths were closer to the national averages than those of Missouri.

So what keeps Missouri smoking?

“There’s a real lack of political will and a lack of investment in tobacco control,” said Douglas Luke, director of Washington University’s Center for Tobacco Policy Research in St. Louis. “The shame is that it costs us both in money and lives.”

Missouri doesn’t have a clean indoor air law, Luke said. That leaves many workers in bars, restaurants and casinos exposed to second-hand smoke.

And Missouri spends just 1.7 percent of the amount the CDC recommends for tobacco prevention programs such as anti-smoking media and education campaigns. Only Mississippi and Tennessee spent less.

“It’s not that we’re trying and failing,” Luke said. “It’s that we’re not even trying.”

Kit Wagar, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, acknowledged that more could be done to discourage smoking. But there have been successes, he said.

“Nobody here is under any illusions that we’ve done enough. This is a huge public health problem,” Wagar said. “We’re working as hard as we can with the resources we have. We think we are making progress.”

Missouri has successful prevention programs in schools, Wagar said.

And when the state teamed up with the Royals and Cardinals last year for anti-smoking public service announcements, calls by smokers to the state’s “quit line” more than doubled.

Luke is heartened by the growing number of localities in Missouri, such as Kansas City, Kirksville and Columbia, that have enacted indoor smoking bans.

“I have a lot of hope things will continue to improve and there will be discussion of doing something statewide,” Luke said. “Do we want to be known as one of the most unhealthy places in the country?”
By ALAN BAVLEY
Kansas City, May. 06, 2010

In April 1994, tobacco industry executives testified under oath on Capitol Hill that nicotine wasn’t addictive – and that cigarettes didn’t kill.

That hearing was memorable, and a turning point for tobacco companies. It opened the spigot of litigation and legislation. Since then, the tobacco industry has paid out hundreds of billions of dollars in lawsuits and settlements. Now the federal government is regulating cigarettes under a law passed last year.

The Goldman Sachs executives testifying today before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations could take a lesson from the tobacco industry’s experience. “Goldman Sachs is to Wall Street as Philip Morris is to tobacco,” said one former tobacco industry executive who was at the Congressional hearing sixteen years ago. At that time, Phillip Morris held an estimated 45 percent share of the U.S. cigarette market.

His advice to Goldman Sachs executives: “If these guys come across as arrogant or confrontational, it won’t be good for them.”

Fabrice Tourre said in his testimony today that “to the average person the utility of these products may not be obvious.” But viewers of his testimony may hear a different message – that the average person isn’t smart enough to understand what Wall Street does.

To the former tobacco executive, it doesn’t sound much different than the message some in the tobacco industry sent back in the 1990s. “What people heard from big tobacco was ‘if you’re stupid enough to believe us when we say cigarettes don’t kill, that’s your own problem.’”

Of course, cigarettes aren’t Collateralized Debt Obligations. Lung cancer is easier to understand than a CDO or derivative. It’s too early to know if public outrage, Congressional investigations, lawsuits and regulatory reform will change change the culture and incentives of Wall Street, but the road ahead for investment bankers could be bumpy.

This month’s Vogue carries an interview with the A-list actress and Coldplay wife Gwyneth Paltrow. She has a film to promote, a cookbook, a website, an exercise “empire”, a toned body, but most of all, Gwynnie is advertising her full and active sex life. Or rather, in time-honoured tradition, a series of well-placed friends are jostling to do it for her. “I’m sure 90% of her relationship with her husband is physical,” whispers one. “She loves food and wine and sex,” says another. And at a sleepover party to launch a hotel, Gwyneth and Chris are witnessed joking about “all the rampant naughtiness” in store. Got that? Gwyneth and Chris are having lots and lots and lots of sex. Everyone knows she loves it. Because — as we are quickly discovering — Oscars, beauty, wealth and a happy family are all very well, but if you want to be a serious contender you must have proof of a smoking sex life. Especially if you are married.

The truth is, in most houses, marriage plus kids equals an ever-so-slight reduction in a couple’s enthusiasm for sex. But celebrities can’t afford to admit to doing what everyone else does — plan a sex night, then drink too much and accidentally fall asleep in front of Outnumbered (the episode in which they plan to have sex, open a bottle, then decide they don’t have the energy). Celebs need to be seen to be hotter, more sensual and throbbing with desire than mere mortals. They are competing with kids, such as the luscious Amanda Seyfried, who aren’t yet hitched, and divorcees like Madonna with twentysomething lovers, so what are they going to do? Bar making their own sex tape and putting it on YouTube, their only option is to talk about how much they like it, whenever the opportunity arises.

This is why the Beckhams are letting it be known that Victoria demands her five a day, and we’re not talking superfoods. It’s why Sandra Bullock mentioned her love of food and sex in her Critics’ Choice acceptance speech, and at the Screen Actors’ Guild awards she referred to her “really hot” husband, adding: “I want you so much.” (Note: “Thank you for your love and support” is no longer sufficient. “You are great in the sack” is more the order of the day.) It’s why Nicole Kidman talked about exploring “strange sexual fetish stuff” last year, having never felt the need to mention it before, and why Madonna bragged about married sex with Guy in the song Incredible. Marital-nooky boasting is not new, but now that the competition is stiffer, so to speak, it has become a compulsory part of the deal, like getting your teeth done. And if you’re approaching 40, as Gwyneth is, it’s probably written into your contract.

Obviously, nooky boasting does not necessarily equal nooky having. It is well known that men who bang on about their sex lives are invariably covering up some inadequacy, and married women who feel the need to tell everyone what terrific sex they’re having are even more suspect. Besides, you can tell if people are having a lot of sex just by looking at them. They glow, they flirt, they laugh a lot, they look sort of loose — the opposite of uptight. Gwyneth doesn’t need to talk up her sex life, she already has the moves. VB, nice try.

After President Obama’s negative comments about Sin City and his subsequent mea culpa (“I love Vegas — always have!”), I realize that this might not be the most prudent way to start a column. But how do you fire up a discussion about smoking in hotels without mentioning America’s capital of secondhand smoke?

Azita Arvani recently returned from a trade show in Las Vegas, where she requested a nonsmoking room at her resort. It didn’t matter.

“Smoke came in through the central air conditioning units,” said Arvani, a Los Angeles technology consultant. “I usually don’t have any problems with hotels and smoking. Except when I go to Las Vegas.”

That makes two of us. I’ve never been to Nevada’s largest city without spending at least a few moments of every day gasping for fresh air.

And that includes my last visit in January, when I couldn’t escape the cloud of carcinogens that seemed to follow me almost everywhere I went.

There’s good news for nonsmoking hotel guests: The scales are about to tip in your favor this summer when Wisconsin’s Act 12 takes effect, and the Badger State becomes the first in the nation to ban smoking in all hotels. Wisconsin joins a long list of other states that have, to one degree or another, limited hotel guests’ lighting up. In fact, only 13 states have no smoking restrictions, according to Ryan Patrick, an analyst at MayaTech Corp. in Silver Spring who tracks state legislation for various public buildings, including hotels.

“Many hotel chains have also banned smoking at their hotels voluntarily,” he said. Among them are Westin Hotels & Resorts, which became the first smoke-free brand in early 2006. Marriott followed later that year, and Sheraton Hotels & Resorts put up the “no smoking” signs in 2008.

Not everyone is happy with the limits. Some hotel owners, for example, believe that going smoke-free might hurt business. The Wisconsin Innkeepers Association, a trade group for the state’s hotels, is trying to amend Act 12 to allow hotels to designate up to a quarter of their rooms as smoking.

“Customers are asking for smoking rooms,” said Trisha Pugal, the association’s president. “We’re afraid if there are no smoking rooms, they’ll go over to another state or they will smoke in the rooms, anyway.”

Guests who smoke aren’t likely to be pleased, either. “With any rule or regulation, someone will find a way around it,” said Derek McElroy, the general manager for the Doubletree Hotel Boise Riverside in Boise, Idaho.

Here’s how smokers circumvent the rules: After checking in, they light up in their rooms and flush the evidence down the toilet. Then they phone the front desk to complain about the odor of cigarette smoke, and when an employee offers to move them, they decline, saying they’ve already unpacked.

“However, the guest has just established that it was a previous guest who smoked in the room — not they — and any chance of charging the smoking fee has gone out the window,” McElroy told me. “And God save the poor desk clerk who goes back in the records to back-charge the previous guest who stayed in that room.”

Nonsmoking guests in adjoining quarters don’t have a lot of options when they’re hit with noxious fumes, even with the new laws, said Kathleen Dachille, director of the Legal Resource Center for Tobacco Regulation, Litigation and Advocacy at the University of Maryland School of Law. Your best bet is to complain immediately.

Typically, a hotel will offer to move you to another room or, if the property is full, send you to another hotel without charging you extra, a process known as “walking” in the hotel industry. “If none of these remedies work, you send a letter to corporate and they’ll send you a voucher for a free room,” Dachille added.

Given the new rules, can an aggrieved guest find relief in court? Not really, Dachille said. You might have a claim under the Americans With Disabilities Act, involving so-called “third-hand” smoke, or smoke residue left on surfaces and objects even after a cigarette has been extinguished. But it would be a tough fight and probably not worth the effort, she said.

Still, on balance, more hotels than ever are in the nonsmoking camp today.

“Smokers are a dying breed,” said Travis Johnson, who manages the Morgan hotel in San Simeon, Calif., and who notes that cigarettes can be an expensive habit for the unfortunate traveler with a nicotine addiction. If guests at the Morgan are caught lighting up, they’re charged a $150 cleaning fee.

I, for one, am breathing easier now that smoking in hotels is on its way out. I’ve lost count of the number of smoking rooms I’ve stayed in. The odor of stale cigarettes takes weeks to wash out of my clothes. I don’t begrudge smokers their right to puff away — just please, not in the bed I’m about to sleep in.

Turns out that even some Las Vegas resorts are sensitive to their image and are doing everything they can — short of banning cigarettes — to ensure that nonsmoking guests don’t have to breathe lungfuls of toxic air.

The hotel I stayed in, the upscale Aria Resort & Casino in the gleaming new CityCenter, reportedly has a special ventilation system that’s designed to keep cigarette smoke away from blackjack dealers.

I’d call that a winning hand.

By Christopher Elliott, Washingtonpost
March 28, 2010

Hundreds of inmates at Canada’s biggest prison, calling themselves “scum of the earth,” have failed in a strange bid to join a court battle over smoking.

The federal court of appeal will hear an appeal this morning by the Correctional Service of Canada. It is seeking to overturn another court decision of last October that tossed out the prison service’s smoking ban.

Corrections Canada banned smoking by convicts inside buildings and on the property of the country’s 58 penitentiaries in May 2008.

The nearly 600 convicts at Warkworth Institution, a medium-security prison 100 kilometres west of Kingston near Campbellford, wanted to join the court fight. They filed more than 130 pages of unusual material with the court, invoking the Bible and the Magna Carta, and citing doc-u m e nt s they obtained from Buckingham Palace.

“It’s definitely a different approach,” said Mark Doyle, a lifer at Warkworth and chairman of the elected inmate committee. He said they had hoped to add their novel arguments to the case but their application was denied,” according to Chantelle Bowers, a spokeswoman for the court.

The appeal is scheduled for 9:30 this morning.

It involves Corrections Canada and 19 inmates imprisoned in Quebec who won the smoking ban reversal last year. The group includes notorious mobsters, gang members and killers.

They complained that the total ban led to anxiety, weight gain and ill-health. The decision overturning the ban was suspended until the appeal was heard.

The Warkworth inmate population includes child killers, drug gang hitmen and multiple murderers, including Doyle, who is serving life for two counts of second-degree murder.

He acknowledged that he and his fellow prisoners won’t get a lot of sympathy from law-abiding citizens.

“Definitely not, particularly from non smokers,” said Doyle, in a telephone interview from the prison.

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“We’re not looking for sympathy. We’re just looking for our right to choose to be reinstated and we believe that, in accordance with law, we have that right. We retain certain rights, even in prison.”

The inmates argue that God decreed that all plants and herbs were put on Earth for the enjoyment of all and that enjoyment cannot be restricted by others.

In the material filed with the court, the inmates quote liberally from Bible passages.

“As scum of the earth, the petitioners use, consume and enjoy the herb or plant-bearing seed commonly known as ‘tobacco’ in full accordance with ‘the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel’ to which they and each of them subscribe in good faith and conscience,” states a preamble to the signatures.

Doyle said it’s essentially an argument that their freedom of religion is being infringed.

“Any Christian faith, I think, is entitled under their constitutional right to be able to smoke, whether they rigidly adhere to any religious dogma or not,” he said.

He noted that Aboriginal offenders are still permitted to smoke, for religious reasons.

The Warkworth convicts also argue that they are entitled, under ancient law that flows from the Magna Carta, an 800-year old English legal charter, to petition their Sovereign for relief from bad policy.

They claim the smoking ban is bad policy, so they’re petitioning the Queen to overturn the decision of the government. The petition is signed by nearly 230 inmates.

They also reproduced in their court material a copy of the oath sworn by Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, which they obtained by writing directly to Buckingham Palace in England.

“In my opinion, there’s some substance to it,” Doyle said.

The package filed with the court contains an affidavit from Warkworth inmate Dwight Creelman, who claims the smoking ban damaged his health.

He claims he had no medical problems during roughly 24 years behind bars until the ban took effect in 2008.

“I enjoyed tobacco daily,” Creelman states. “I enjoyed smoking for its spiritual effect.”

After the ban, Creelman said he began overeating and bingeing on soda pop to compensate for the loss of nicotine.

He was eventually diagnosed with Type II diabetes.

Creelman, who is serving life for murder and aggravated sexual assault, said his weight shot up by roughly 100 pounds so that he now weighs 300 pounds.

Doyle said the inmates aren’t giving up, despite being shut out at the federal court of appeal.

They’ve collected cash from prisoners in a legal fund and eventually hope to hire a lawyer. In the meantime, they’ll try their religious and royal arguments in another forum.

“A lot of (inmates) have been charged institutionally for smoking and we’re going to use the same material that we would have used during the appeal through the institutional process,” he said.

Doyle said he’s confident that smoking will be restored in prisons, even if it is limited in some way.

“I’m a smoker now for 30 years and I feel it’s my choice whether I smoke or not,” he said. “They’ve taken that right away and at the same time they’ve provided a space for staff to continue to smoke.”

By ROB TRIPP, THE WHIG-STANDARD

In the heyday of cigarette smoking, a pack a day was “just what the doctor ordered.” Of course, the purported health benefits of smoking have been largely debunked, and cigarettes today are associated with serious health hazards.

But smoking may still have at least one advantage: protection against the development of Parkinson’s disease. A large-scale study published in Wednesday’s online edition of the journal Neurology further bolsters the connection and concludes that the longer you smoke, the less likely you are to develop the illness.

In 2007, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health analyzed 11 separate studies and concluded that cigarette smoking protected against Parkinson’s but that benefits waned once a smoker quit. But the effect was a strong one: Smokers were 73 percent less likely to suffer from Parkinson’s than those who’d never lit up.

The latest study, while showing less dramatic results, offers a larger sample of subjects and could yield new clues about the mechanism by which cigarettes improve the brain’s resiliency to Parkinson’s.

A team at the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences examined 305,000 men and women over age 50. At a 10-year follow-up, half of 1 percent of the study’s participants had developed Parkinson’s.

More years of smoking were associated with less risk. Those who smoked for less than a decade had a 4 percent lower risk than nonsmokers, compared with a 41 percent reduced risk among participants who’d been lighting up daily for more than 30 years.

The number of cigarettes smoked didn’t appear to have any effect.

The study’s lead researcher, Dr. Honglei Chen, said he doesn’t foresee tobacco or other cigarette ingredients being considered as potential treatments for Parkinson’s. But the information “could guide the development of studies on various tobacco components … to help understand the relationship between smoking and Parkinson’s disease,” he told Health Day.

Further research could determine which chemicals are responsible for bolstering the brain against the illness, which targets the central nervous system and causes dozens of symptoms, of which physical tremors are the most obvious.

The cause of Parkinson’s still eludes researchers, but some suspect exposure to environmental toxins is to blame. One study of 143,000 adults concluded that those who’d been exposed to heavy doses of pesticides were 70 percent more likely to develop the disease.

The new research is good news for ongoing efforts to better understand Parkinson’s disease. But the cons of smoking still outweigh the pros, so the study’s authors are advising against lighting up as a preventive measure.

www.jwhomes.com
Posted By – Paul Crawley – Updated On: 3/9/2010 6:02:34 PM

ATLANTA – One day after about 100 supporters urged the Georgia State Legislature to pass an extra dollar cigarette tax, another group of 100 or so rallied against it at the State Capitol — that and any other tax increase.

Sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, Tuesday’s group included many tea party activists as well as several conservative Republican lawmakers.

Even though the General Assembly is wrestling with balancing a budget with a hole of more than $1 billion, the protestors said raising taxes is not the answer.

“Step one is don’t raise taxes. Step two is stop the bleeding. Stop spending people’s money so much,” said national anti-tax activist Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, the keynote speaker.

While Tuesday’s crowd also railed against President Obama and the U.S. Congress, who don’t have to balance the federal budget, they also called for no tax hikes and less spending in Georgia.

Some conservatives in the Republican controlled legislature are split over whether to raise the cigarette tax or to accept GOP Governor Sonny Perdue’s call for a hospital bed tax.

Smaller government is a long held dream of GOP conservatives, some of whom feel their day has finally come now that Georgia’s tax revenues continue to tank.

“I certainly believe there’re areas that state government needs to shrink,” says State Representative Tom Graves (R-Ranger), who attended the anti-tax rally.

“We’re for less spending in all levels of government and we’re certainly for reducing the tax burden on individuals here in Georgia,” Rep. Graves added.

Sponsors of a higher cigarette tax had accused the organizers of Tuesday’s rally of accepting money from the tobacco industry.

Monday they circulated a news release promoting the anti-tax rally that was paid for by Altria Client Services on behalf of Philip Morris, USA, the nation’s large cigarette maker.

But after the anti-tax rally, organizer Virginia Galloway of Americans for Prosperity said the news release was not theirs, but one put out by the cigarette company itself.

“It caused some confusion, unfortunately, and a lot of people got the idea that we were sending out that invitation and that Altria was paying for us to send out that invitation, which was not the case at all,” Galloway told 11Alive News.

On Monday House Speaker David Ralston, who opposes a higher cigarette tax, told 11Alive News he’d been invited to the rally, but wasn’t aware of any possible connection to Philip Morris.

Rep. Ralston said that would not change his plans to attend, but he was noticeably absent.

Some who attended the rally said they had a photo made with Ralston inside the capitol earlier in the day.
By Paul Crawley
3 March, 2010

St. Louis, MO. February 15, 2010 – St. Louis, Missouri will be a center of the pipe smoking world at noon this Saturday, February 20.

That’s when International Pipe Smoking Day will be celebrated at the 22nd Annual Gateway Area Pipe Show at the Heart of St. Charles Banquet Center. Local briar lovers will be raising their pipes in a salute to their pipe smoking brothers and sisters around the world as a show of friendship and unity that reaches across all borders, according to the Bob Callaway, spokesperson for the St. Louis Pipe Club, sponsor of the show.

International Pipe Smoking Day was designated by a group on Smokers Forums three years ago as a day on which pipe smokers everywhere could tell their story and educate others about the rich history and traditions of the noble art of pipe smoking. The group dedicated it to the worldwide community of pipe smokers that is bound together by a shared love of pipes, pipe collecting and the social aspect of pipe smoking. They respect informed choice and the responsible adult use of smoking tobacco and envisions a world where governments act in good faith and integrity.

“International Pipe Smoking Day provides an opportunity for briar lovers everywhere to stand up and demonstrate with pride that we are still enjoying our pipes despite all the restrictions and increased tobacco taxes that the anti-tobacco forces have imposed on us. They just don’t understand the significant benefits that pipe smoking offers,” Callaway said.

International Pipe Smoking Day is supported by the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association of some 2,000 retailers of premium tobacco products; the International Committee of Pipe Clubs, which has members in more than 25 countries; and by the United Pipe Clubs of America, with its more than 20 member clubs in the United States. Many other pipe clubs in this country and abroad also will hold special events on or around February 20 to mark the day.

“Our motto is ‘Relax with Your Pipe’ and that’s the idea we want to get across,” says Vernon Vig, President of UPCA which, according to the organization’s website was founded in 2002 to promote and protect the interests of the American pipe smoking community.

“Pipe smokers are mature, considerate adults. We don’t want to bother anyone, and all we ask in return is a little common sense and consideration on the part of others,” said Vig.
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For more information, go to www.ipsd.eu; www.unitedpipeclubs.org, www.smokersforums.co.uk and www.pipeclubs.com.

Contact: Bob Callaway, 636-946-8555

Vernon Vig. 646-823-4543
vervig37@gmail.com

Tony Tortorici, 678/493-0313
tony@tortoricipr.com

Restaurant workers and patrons in Lebanon are being exposed to hazardous levels of tobacco smoke, thus prompting researchers and business owners at an AUB conference to call for complete smoking bans in closed public areas.

Organized by the AUB Tobacco Control Research Group, the conference, which was recently held in Gefinor-Rotana Hotel, assessed smoke-free policies in indoor areas at four educational institutions, five private offices and companies, and nine food and drink establishments. The conference also presented the findings of a 2008 air quality survey at 28 different venues in Lebanon—including restaurants, pubs, and hospital cafeterias—which was conducted by the National Tobacco Control Program at the Ministry of Health.

“More than 90 percent of the venues surveyed had unhealthy to hazardous air quality,” said George Saade, who heads the program. Saade, who is also a cardiologist, said that in several venues, especially in Ramadan tents that fog up with nargileh smoke, the aerosol monitor they were using would lock, indicating that the air pollutant levels were higher than the maximum level it could measure—or 400 times higher than acceptable levels set by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The aerosol monitor was placed at the venues under study for a minimum of 30 minutes, during peak hours.

With more than 135,000 individuals working in the restaurant business in Lebanon and millions of tourists and locals who are patrons at such venues, immediate action is needed, said Saade.

“Policies and laws that ban secondhand smoke from public areas are an effective strategy to reduce workers’ exposure to this toxin,” said Saade. “This, in turn, may translate into improved health outcomes for these employees.”

Secondhand or passive smoke contains nearly 5000 chemical compounds, at least 172 toxic substances, including 67 known human or animal carcinogens, said Saade, adding: “There is no acceptable exposure level to secondhand smoke.”

Assessing smoke-free policies at schools and universities, a team led by assistant research professor Rima Nakkash found that although teenagers are aware of the harms of smoking, they still take up the unhealthy habit. “The solution: to implement smoke-free policies in schools and universities,” said Nakkash, also an active member of the Tobacco Control Research Group.
In fact, AUB’s experience with implementing smoke-free policies has proved rather promising, said Monique Chaaya, associate professor of epidemiology and statistics at AUB and a member of the Tobacco Control Research Group. In the first year after the smoke-free policy was implemented on campus, almost half of staff members and 18 percent of students thought they had reduced their smoking frequency.

Indeed, educational institutions that ban or restrict smoking on their premises noticed a significant health benefit related to smoke-free policies. Currently, more than 60 percent of Lebanese teenagers 13 to 15 years old smoke some kind of tobacco.

Moreover, the 2005 Global Youth Tobacco Survey had shown that smoke-free policies in schools and universities help students and teachers quit smoking and also discourage teenagers from taking up the habit.

The AUB research group also found that private companies had no problem enforcing smoking bans, but researchers recommended that bans be accompanied by smoking cessation programs to help smokers quit.

Meanwhile, a study of nine food and drink establishments found that if a national law that bans smoking in all closed public places is passed, the hospitality sector would willingly comply. “In general, no problems were encountered when an employee at a café or pub would ask a patron to stop smoking in compliance with the establishment’s smoke free policy,” said Nakkash, citing study results.
Nakkash and others concluded, based on findings, that there is a pressing need for a law that bans smoking in public areas in addition to a body that would ensure the enforcement of the law.

Moreover, studies conducted in the United States, Canada, and Britain have shown food and drink establishments do not lose any business—often even attracting more clients—when they adopt smoke-free policies. Researchers do not find such results surprising, as they note that the majority of any country’s population are non-smokers.

According to Hussam Eid, Zaatar wu Zeit’s marketing director and a smoker himself, a London study showed “that the only businesses that were substantially affected by smoke-free policies were Laundromats: because people don’t need to wash off the stench of tobacco from their clothes the next day.”

© 2009 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)

Opening a retail outlet to sell a product that many people consider harmful might seem risky in the best of times, let alone in a down economy.

But at least four tobacco-related businesses have opened recently in Wichita or are close to doing so.

Jason Webster and Neil Edwards recently opened the Humidor Cigars & Lounge at 8558 W. 21st St.

It’s a spin-off from the smoke shop next door to ABC Discount Wine & Spirits, Webster said. “We kept expanding the humidor and finally we just ran out of space” and moved the cigar part of the business to a separate building. The front half is the retail area; the back half is a cigar lounge.

A Humidor also opened recently at 2221 N. Woodlawn. That one is owned by Rick Daugherty.

Mary and Maher Gerges just opened Shesha Tobacco Shop in Towne West Square.

It’s in a space where another tobacco shop was a few years back and offers a variety of tobacco, including cigars and tobacco for hookah water pipes.

Space at 2821 W. 13th St. is being remodeled for Steve’s Smoke Town, according to signs outside.

Webster said business at the smoke shop has been steady through the years.

But “I see fewer smoke shops than there used to be” around Wichita. “That’s probably helped us maintain some of our business.”

David Flax, who owns four Tee Pee’s Smoke Shops in Wichita and two in Newton, has seen others leave the business and said it would be tougher to open a new store now than it was 15 years ago, when he started.

“There’s so much stuff in the last 15 years that has changed,” he said, mentioning attitudes about smoking, the number of products available, state regulation and the price of cigarettes.

He has seen customers switch to roll-your-own tobacco and electric cigarettes that give the user a dose of nicotine without smoke. And to stay in business, he has to stock those as well as the cigarettes that they can buy anywhere else for the same price.

“You have to have everything the customer wants,” he said, and a customer who can find only two of the three things he wants will shop elsewhere.

Valeria Stanford manages Central Smoke Shop, which has been open about two years. She said the first three months or so were a struggle, “but we’re doing well.”

Customers complain about increasing prices but keep buying, she said.

The shop offers some convenience store products as well as tobacco, she said, but “what’s keeping our doors open is the cigarettes.”

Webster, of the Humidor, said he thinks people — especially younger ones — are looking for inexpensive ways to indulge themselves, and cigars and other tobacco products give them a way.

“I think it’s a younger generation that’s driving our business now,” he said.

With more space for cigars and a lounge in which to smoke them, he said, “we’ll increase our sales enough to hopefully make this thing work.”

BY KAREN SHIDELER
November 25, 2009, Kansas

When the federal government raised the tax on the loose tobacco people use to roll their own cigarettes a staggering 2,000 percent, companies stopped selling “loose tobacco.” Smokers stopped buying it. Very little of the projected tax revenue of $35 million per month appeared.

Yet smokers still roll their own cigarettes and still legally buy the ingredients.

Pipe tobacco is taxed at a rate of $2.83 per pound. Loose cigarette tobacco is now taxed at $24.78 per pound. Although pipe tobacco is, in general, cut rougher and sold moister than that used for cigarettes, there is no legal distinction between the products. They are taxed based on what their labels call them.

In just a few months, the production of tobacco labeled for pipes rocketed from 270,000 pounds per month to 1.7 million pounds per month. The production of tobacco labeled for cigarettes plummeted from 1.5 million pounds per month to 660,000.

It shows what happens when taxes unfairly target specific behaviors and assault narrow groups. Savvy producers and consumers have switched to unusually dry, unusually fine “pipe tobacco” for rolling their smokes.

There is no justification for hiking the tax rate of any legal product 2,000 percent. It places an undue burden on consumers of a legal product, and in this case, it placed an undue burden on the group of mostly small businesses that produce loose tobacco.

The tax increase, enacted alongside hikes in the federal levy on cigarettes and cigars, is pointlessly discriminatory. Why should people who place their tobacco in cigarettes be charged 10 times as much tax as people who place their tobacco in a pipe?

Again and again we see that taxes meant to change the behavior of the taxed backfire. They rarely raise the revenue their proponents promise, generally don’t cause people to act as predicted and often create unintended consequences.

The fairer a tax is, the harder it is to evade. An income tax, if the government stopped providing deductions targeted to manipulate behavior, would be fair and almost impossible to circumvent. A sales tax, if the government applied it to all items rather than excluding goods and services it wants you to buy, would be fair and almost impossible to evade. A property tax, if it simply reflected a set rate multiplied by the current value of property rather than varying based on behavior legislators want to encourage, would be fair and almost impossible to evade.

Seemingly incapable of learning, the federal government is now looking to set stricter legal distinctions between pipe and cigarette tobacco in an attempt to collect its money. Unmentioned is the issue of why the tax on one should be 10 times the tax on the other.

Perhaps government policymakers think pipes are cool and intellectual, and home-rolled cigarettes are just uncouth. If so, that’s a poor rationale for tax policy.

November 17, 2009 Goupstate

There is a long list of people who are barred from entering the shop of Edinburgh tobacconist Alan Myerthall. Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, the chancellor, and former first minister Jack McConnell are all at the top, due to their support for the smoking ban, which tobacco retailers claim has been a nail in the coffin of their industry.

Now, ministers in the new Scottish government will also be turned away from the Leith Walk establishment if the proposed point-of-sale ban on the display of cigarettes and tobacco goes ahead.

The smoking ban has seen the demise of a number of Myerthall’s peers, including the 100-year-old Glasgow institution Herbert Love, but the shelves in The Pipe Shop, Myerthall’s store, are a tobacco lover’s heaven. They are stacked with thousands of products, all related to cigarette, pipe and cigar smoking.

If the legislation goes ahead, retailers such as Myerthall, whose wife’s family founded the tobacconist store more than 50 years ago, will be forced to keep cigarettes, rolling tobacco and cigarette papers out of sight under the counter, or behind a screen.

“Everyone in the trade is against it,” said Myerthall, who sells around £1m of smokingrelated products a year. “I have already had to change my whole business due to the smoking ban.”

The bill, which aims to reduce young people’s exposure to tobacco products and cut the number of teenage smokers, has been granted first stage approval by Scottish ministers, while a similar scheme for England and Wales was given the go-ahead by Westminster earlier this week. It is now awaiting approval from the House of Lords.

But although the ban is welcomed by health charities and education groups, small businesses that rely heavily on cigarette sales are worried. Stores such as newsagents and corner shops generate about a third of their sales from tobacco, according to the Tobacco Retailers Alliance (TRA). They are concerned not because the cigarettes themselves generate a large amount of cash — high taxation gobbles up the majority of any profits — but because they rely heavily on cigarette sales to bring customers in. A survey carried out this year by the TRA claimed three-quarters of shopkeepers in Scotland believe their businesses could be under threat as a result of the ban.

Although most retailers accept that regular customers buying their usual brands are not likely to stray from their local vendor, they fear that passing trade may favour supermarkets where they think they are more likely to find their chosen product, resulting in a drop in ad hoc sales of milk, bread and other groceries.

Fiona Barrett, spokeswoman for the TRA and a newsagent on Glasgow’s Byres Road, said: “If we don’t sell their preferred brand, they will have to go through the process of deciding on an alternative without looking at the packets. If we don’t have their second choice, they will have to do the same thing all over again, whereas at the moment, they can see what we have on offer and can choose.

“Instead of going through all that, we are worried they will just go straight to a big supermarket where they are more likely to get their first choice straight off.”

She added: “The loss of trade may just push people over the edge who have already been struggling to keep going.”

Retailers have also raised concerns about the ban increasing the time spent on each transaction, as well as worries over security due to their having to turn their backs on customers to access the products from behind a screen or a shutter.

In a financial blow to cash-strapped businesses already hit by the recession, compliance alterations would have to be made to existing “gantries” — the cigarette display shelves used by retailers — and although some tobacco companies have indicated that they may meet the bill for these, what that would mean in practice is not clear.

While multiple retailers such as supermarkets would have to comply with the new rules by 2011, small shops have until 2013 to prepare for the ban, which the government claims will give them ample time to make the alterations in the process of “normal refurbishment” to their shops.

“We are working with businesses as much as we can,” said a spokeswoman for the Scottish government. “This is not about incurring extra costs for them but is about getting the tobacco products out of the sight of children. Otherwise, we are giving mixed messages to children, telling them that smoking is bad, but when they walk into a shop, the products are lit up in lights.”

In Ireland, where a similar scheme has been in place for four months, Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro, and the independent retailer Maurice Timony recently filed a joint lawsuit with the High Court in Dublin seeking to stop the ban, claiming it threatens business, fuels the smuggling of contraband cigarettes and restricts their ability to provide trade and services, violating Irish constitutional law and EU law.

An Irish study last week showed that 97% of stores were adhering to the new rules, which if broken could mean a €3,000 fine or six months in prison for the retailer.

While all sides claim to agree that reducing the number of teenage smokers is a good thing, retailers are sceptical that removing products from shelves will make a difference.

But Sheila Duffy, chief executive of ASH Scotland, disagrees. “We know from many years of research that advertising by the tobacco industry encourages young people to experiment with smoking, experimentation which frequently results in a lifelong addiction to a product that kills half of its long-term users,” she said.

“Since most forms of tobacco advertising and event sponsorship by the tobacco industry were banned in 2003, we have seen an explosion of brand variants from tobacco companies.

“This tactic enables big tobacco [companies] to take maximum advantage of one of their last remaining marketing opportunities — the increased brand presence on their brightly-lit and enticing retail gantries, familiar sights in shops across the country.”

In a unique dispensation, under the Scottish rules, specialist tobacconists such as The Pipe Shop would be allowed to leave smoking paraphernalia and cigars on show, but they would still have to remove from sight non-specialist cigarettes and rolling tobacco.

With just 20% of his turnover coming from the products he will have to hide, Myerthall, who has already shifted his focus to pick up more mailorder trade from overseas in the wake of the smoking ban, is confident that he will overcome the new legislation. He believes there will be loopholes in the law, having heard of shops in Ireland covering up the offending items with opaque plastic sheets, allowing the branding to be clearly seen underneath, or painting the brand names on top of a cover.

Whether such sneaky methods will slip through the net of any new law in Scotland remains to be seen. The details of the legislation will be finalised as the bill completes its passage through parliament over the next few months.

“We will find a way around it,” said Myerthall, optimistically. “We might not be as educated as these MSPs, but we’re more wily.”

By Jane Bradley, October 18, 2009 Timesonline

Wisconsin has become the next-to-last state to require so-called fire-safe cigarettes.

Gov. Jim Doyle signed the bill a year-and-a-half ago and the law took effect on Oct. 1.

Fire-safe cigarettes are designed to snuff themselves out if they’re not smoked for a certain length of time.

The idea is to prevent fires started by cigarettes that are left smoldering.

Sen. Judy Robson, D-Beloit, tried for five years to require fire-safe cigarettes, soon after New York became the first state to mandate it.

Now, every state but Wyoming has similar laws on the books although some won’t actually take effect until next year or 2011.

The National Fire Protection Association says 800 Americans die each year from fires caused by smoking materials.

But not all smokers are crazy about the new cigarettes.

Milwaukee tobacco retailer Jeff Steinbock says some of his customers complain that the new smokes don’t taste as good and they have to keep lighting them up because they go out too quickly.

Steinbock says it’s another case of blaming the product instead of people for their irresponsible behavior.

October 12 2009 Riverfallsjournal

A “fire-safe” product that you light up?
It’s the new state-mandated cigarette in Wisconsin.

In a nutshell, the new cigarettes don’t burn as well as the old ones – which is good, if you want to prevent accidental fires, bad if you have to keep flicking your Bic.

Since Oct. 1, when Wisconsin became the 49th state with a fire-safe law, distributors have been required to purvey only the new variety of smokes.

They’re not fire-proof, supporters of the law acknowledge, but they are less likely to continue burning when left unattended.

According to the state Department of Commerce, manufacturers typically wrap fire-safe cigarettes with two or three bands of less porous paper that act as “speed bumps.”

When the cigarette is left unattended, the burning tobacco reaches one of the speed bumps and extinguishes itself, the department says.

One of the chief backers of the Wisconsin bill, which Gov. Jim Doyle signed into law in April 2008, was state Sen. Judy Robson. The Beloit Democrat called it the most important fire safety step since smoke detectors.

Robson pursued the legislation after New York in 2004 became the first state to mandate fire-safe cigarettes. New York saw a decline in fires that caused death or major property damage, said Nadine Gratz, one of Robson’s aides.

“The chances are a whole lot better that it will go out before any fire starts,” Gratz said of the new cigarettes.

Dozens of states have adopted fire-safe cigarette mandates in the past several years, partly as a result of a push by the National Fire Protection Association, which says about 800 people a year in the U.S. die in fires caused by smoking materials.

Only Wyoming has no such law, according to the Coalition for Fire-Safe Cigarettes.

In about a dozen cases, the laws are scheduled to go into effect in 2010 or 2011.

Smokers have voiced two main complaints about the new cigarettes, which have been in stores since about August, said Jeff Steinbock, owner of Uhle Tobacco Co. in downtown Milwaukee.

If you don’t puff on them fast enough, they go out.

And they don’t taste right.

Steinbock, who doesn’t smoke cigarettes, complained about the law by phone while fishing for musky in Rhinelander on Friday.

“I guess my problem is you blame the product for irresponsible behavior. How far do we need to protect ourselves?” he said.

There is at least one side effect that’s good for business: a jump in the sales of disposable lighters.

“I think if you have dough to invest, I’d buy Bic lighters,” Steinbock said.

By Tom Kertscher of the Journal Sentinel

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – A year after the nation’s second-largest gambling resort scrapped a plan to go totally smoke-free in its 11 casinos, the issue remains as hazy as the cigarette smoke over the blackjack tables.

Atlantic City was set to ban all smoking last October, but backed off when the recession hit, promising to reconsider in a year.

But there’s still no consensus on whether to stick with the current arrangement, which permits smoking on 25 percent of the casino floor, or to try again for a total ban.

“Right now, I don’t see where many minds have changed on council,” said City Council President William “Speedy” Marsh, who plans to poll council members soon on the issue.

Marsh, who has battled health problems over the past year, said he personally favors trying again for a total ban on smoking.

“Every dollar you have in life doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t have good health,” he said. “This is a health issue.”

But the casinos continue to oppose a total ban. Already battered by the poor economy and fierce competition from Pennsylvania and New York slots parlors, the gambling halls fear even further revenue declines they say would happen when their smoking customers take their business elsewhere.

“A 100 percent smoking ban would be catastrophic,” said Mark Juliano, CEO of Trump Entertainment Resorts, whose three Atlantic City casinos are operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “Right now, we just can’t face another negative.”

So far this year, Atlantic City’s casino revenue is down 15.1 percent, and there are about 400 fewer casino jobs than there were at the start of the year. Since the first of eight slots parlors opened in Pennsylvania, touching off Atlantic City’s downward spiral, the city has lost nearly 8,900 casino jobs.

Atlantic City actually did ban smoking for two weeks last year , but by accident. It approved a ban months in advance, then acted too late to legally prevent it from taking effect.

During the two weeks that all smoking was banned in Atlantic City casinos, several of the gambling halls said their revenue losses doubled.

Councilman G. Bruce Ward said marketing Atlantic City as a smoke-free destination could bring in new customers who now shun the gambling halls.

But Councilman Dennis Mason said Atlantic City would be placing itself at an even greater disadvantage by banning smoking; the Pennsylvania slots parlors allow it on 50 percent of the gambling floor.

“We should go to a 100 percent smoking ban when all the other casinos in neighboring states do it,” he said. “It’s got to be a fair and equal footing in this recession. There’s no other way to go right now.”

WAYNE PARRY
The Associated Press

As of midnight, September 21st, all flavored cigarettes – except for menthol – will be banned from production and sale nation wide.

What is Included in the Cigarette Flavor Ban?

Any cigarettes with flavoring, other than menthol, are covered in the ban. This includes long-time favorites, like clove cigarettes. So far, it does not include flavored cigars or pipe tobacco, and some companies, like Djarum, a well-known clove cigarette producer, are turning instead to ‘tiny cigars’, clove cigars roughly the same size as the clove cigarettes.

More Tobacco Restrictions to Come

This is one of several steps taken by the FDA because of a law President Obama signed in late June, giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products. In the future, it is planned to also implement further restrictions on tobacco advertising, and require large health warnings on the top half of cigarette packages, similar to those already found on cigarettes in Canada. It will also prevent cigarette companies from marketing cigarettes as mild, light, or low tar.

Why was This Ban Passed?

There are a large number of factors as to why this ban passed. Around 45 years have passed since studies linked the use of tobacco to respiratory disease, like emphysema, and heart disease; some officials have been calling for stiffer regulation ever since. Although some restrictions have passed previously, such as certain advertising restrictions and raising tobacco taxes, the bill passed by President Obama is one of the largest steps taken to curb one of the leading contributors to many health conditions.

This particular part of the new restrictions, the cigarette flavoring ban, is specifically intended to help reduce under-age smoking, to stop the habit before it starts. Many studies have shown that the flavored cigarettes appeal most to younger people, not least of all because it masks the harshness of the inhaled smoke and thus makes it easier to start smoking.

British artist David Hockney is backing calls for a review of the smoking ban which he says is destroying “bohemia”.

The 72-year-old lifelong smoker is supporting moves by a cross-party group of MPs to amend the UK smoking laws.

They want people to be able to light up in designated smoking rooms to prevent pubs that are losing trade closing.

Mr Hockney told the BBC’s Politics Show he missed being able to smoke in his favourite cafe in East Yorkshire while admiring the view.

He accused former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his successor Gordon Brown of interfering in his life and said: “I loathe them for it.”

“I am not that interested in politics. I didn’t care about any until recently,” he added.

HAVE YOUR SAY

Smoking rooms with good ventilation systems would be an excellent idea

KA Owen, Bristol

East Yorkshire Conservative MP Greg Knight, who also supports the campaign, says that without a relaxation of smoking laws hundreds more pubs and clubs may be forced to close as they lose trade from smokers.

Smoking was banned in England in all public indoor spaces, including places of work, pubs, restaurants and nightclubs in 2007. The ban also applies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

SHREVEPORT, – Nearly two years have passed since 53-year old Patty Easom of Shreveport was killed in a ferocious fire, born from a cigarette she had left on her sofa. While the Easoms continue to mourn her loss, according to a new report, cigarette-ignited fires like the one that killed Patty are all too common.

The Coalition for Safe Cigarettes (CFS), recently characterized cigarette-ignited fires as a leading cause of home fire deaths in the United States and they conclude that between 700 to 900 people per year – smokers and non-smokers alike, are the victims of a preventable death.

Starting January 1st, 2010 all tobacco dealers will be required by law to sell a new fire-safe cigarette, which many fire-safety proponents say is a measure long over due. Shreveport’s Assistant Chief of Fire Prevention, Randy Stephens, agreed and added, “… that any reduction in these cigarette-ignited fires would help save lives and benefit our community.” Experts say the new fire-safe cigarettes will burn slower when they are left unattended through a technique that wraps the cigarettes with multiple bands of paper. These multiple bands of paper act as “speed bumps,” and purportedly cause the cigarette to self-extinguish.

We investigated these new fire-safe cigarettes to see if they would perform as promised and help reduce the number of cigarette-ignited fires. Along with the help of the Shreveport Fire Department, we recreated a similar scenario to the tragic fire that claimed the life of Patty Easom. On the grounds of the Shreveport Fire Department, a sofa was placed inside a specially designed room called a “Burn Building.”

First, the fire-safe cigarette was lit and placed it on the sofa. Then a regular cigarette was lit and placed it on the opposite end of the sofa.

Nine minutes later, the fire-safe cigarette had practically self-extinguished, while the regular cigarette still burned vigorously and had welded a hole into the couch.

The test was done a second time, but this time the fire-safe cigarette did not work. Almost 14 minutes had passed and the fire-safe cigarette was still burning, while the regular cigarette self-extinguished.

The team recreated the test for a third and final attempt and shortly after, the fire-safe cigarette had succeeded again and self-extinguished.

The results of the investigation revealed that the fire-safe cigarettes did not work every time. Shreveport’s Assistant Chief of Fire Prevention, Randy Stephens, clarified the outcome of the test. “All cigarettes have the potential to start a fire but this is a fire (safer) cigarette.”

According to Stephens, if the fire-safe cigarette does its job two out of three times, it is still an invaluable tool for saving lives. One that could have made a difference for Patty Easom and hundreds like her.

Copyright © Sep 14, 2009 Ksla

CIGARETTE sales should be banned from pubs and clubs, say anti-smoking campaigners, who point to the results of world-first research carried out in Sydney.

The combination of being in the company of smokers at a venue where tobacco is also for sale softens the resolve of would-be quitters and can turn a one-off cigarette into a full-blown relapse, a study has found.

Wendy Oakes, tobacco control manager for the Cancer Council NSW, which funded the research, said long-term smokers would not be disadvantaged if cigarettes were removed from sale in licensed premises.

”Smokers have very habitual buying patterns. Smokers don’t run out of cigarettes,” she said.

Such a move would instead ”support people to keep the resolve they’ve already made … not constantly harassing people and tempting them” as they tried to quit.

The new results revealed ”a very strong association amongst people who said they had quit between having a cigarette and buying a pack of cigarettes”, Ms Oakes said.

Outdoor smoking areas in otherwise smoke-free pubs meant people ”clustered there in social groups [allowing] people to continue to smoke in very socialised ways”, and borrowing a cigarette from a friend could quickly lead to a purchase.

Cigarette machines in pubs may be operated only by token and only by a staff member, but this might not be enough to break the nexus, Ms Oakes said.

”We would like to see vending machines removed from pubs and clubs because the work done shows that it is a trigger area,” she said.

In world-first research, Suzan Burton from the Macquarie Graduate School of Management asked smokers intending to quit to record their smoking and cigarette purchases in a diary over four days.

She found they were much more likely than non-quitting smokers to buy them at bottle shops and bars rather than supermarkets, suggesting impulse buying.

Their smoking was disproportionately influenced by the presence of other smokers. If family or friends smoked around them, they were three times as likely to light up.

”Allowing cigarettes to be sold in pubs is allowing people to be targeted at their most vulnerable,” said Associate Professor Burton, a consumer behaviour expert who conducted the study with colleague Lindie Clark.

Tobacco availability seemed to conspire with alcohol and relaxation to knock people off the wagon and stopping such sales ”might be a relatively efficient method of preventing relapse”.

The study is the first to track the behaviour of people as they try to give up smoking, letting the researchers see how consumption aligned with cigarette availability and social behaviour. Previous research has been based on quitters’ retrospective recollections, which are notoriously unreliable.

Most smokers say they would prefer not to smoke. About half make a quit attempt in any six-month period.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

EL CAJON — El Cajon’s tobacco licensing ordinance — one of the toughest in the state — is resulting in fewer stores illegally selling cigarettes to youngsters, backers say.

Five percent of 125 stores in El Cajon sold tobacco to youths who served as underage decoys in fiscal 2008, according to a report released last week. A similar survey in 2004, before El Cajon’s ordinance was enacted, showed that 40 percent of the city’s stores sold tobacco to minors.

El Cajon Councilman Gary Kendrick, who pushed for passage of the ordinance, said the numbers show that it’s working.

“It’s a tremendous success by any measure,” he said.

The El Cajon City Council approved a tobacco licensing ordinance in June 2004 to curb underage smoking. The city was the first in San Diego County to adopt such a law.

If El Cajon tobacco retailers violate the law by selling to minors, fail to ask for ID or do not display the proper signs, they risk a $1,000 fine or a 30-day license suspension. Retailers who violate the law four times in five years face the permanent loss of their licenses.

Many tobacco retailers were opposed to the law from the start, saying they were already taxed enough. Tobacco retailers were initially required to pay a $198 annual fee, which has since risen to $675 to cover the costs of enforcing and administering the program.

Samantha Dabish, vice president of the Neighborhood Market Association, said the cost of the permit is a financial burden for small stores. Educating business owners should be a higher priority than penalizing them, she said.

“We think (city officials) could work more as a team with the retailers rather than set them up,” said Dabish, whose association represents 2,000 retailers in California, Arizona and Nevada.

Since El Cajon’s passage of the measure, Vista and the city of San Diego have also approved ordinances requiring tobacco retailers to buy a license. Solana Beach approved an ordinance in July but it hasn’t gone in effect, while Del Mar is considering a similar ordinance.

The Center for Tobacco Policy Organizing, a unit of the American Lung Association, lists El Cajon among 63 communities in California with strong tobacco ordinances in effect for more than a year. More than 80 communities have passed ordinances, but some have provisions that make them ineffective, the group said.

Debbie Kelly of the American Lung Association said cities with strong tobacco licensing laws have seen dramatic decreases in tobacco sales to minors.

“These ordinances are very important,” she said. “If it’s harder for a kid to get their hands on tobacco, then maybe they just won’t do it.”

Communities Against Substance Abuse, an El Cajon nonprofit, has a $32,751 contract with El Cajon to recruit teenagers posing as cigarette buyers to ensure the law is being enforced.

One of the youths, 16-year-old Alma Alvarez, a senior at Steele Canyon High School in Jamul, said a clerk at one store urged her to buy a three-pack of cigarettes on sale when she asked for a pack of Camel Lights.

“It can be easy for a young person to obtain tobacco products if the laws regarding tobacco sales to minors are not consistently enforced,” Alvarez told the El Cajon City Council.


Union-Tribune

Anne Krueger: (619) 542-4575;

A lawsuit against two tobacco companies went to the Helsinki Court of Appeals on Monday. The plaintiffs are two women who have smoked for a long time, and who are seeking damages from the Amer Group and the Finnish subsidiary of British-American Tobacco.

While some American victims of smoking-related diseases have managed to Finns have successfully sued tobacco companies for their smoking-related illnesses, this has not happened in Finland.

In the first phase of the lawsuit, Helsinki District Court found for the defendants, saying that the plaintiffs were aware of the dangers of smoking.

Court cases against tobacco companies have become a specialty of Erkki Aurejärvi, Professor Emeritus of Civil Law. Appearing on YLE’s morning television programme on Monday, Aurejärvi was very critical of the Finnish justice system, which he said is not capable of making important decisions.

“Courts in Finland do not make decisions which they fear might lead to something important”, Aurejärvi said on YLE.

Tobacco Industry Documents as Evidence

Aurejärvi has acquired documents from the tobacco industry, which came up during court trials in the United States. The documents focus on the risks linked with smoking.

The plaintiffs argue that tobacco companies have deliberately marketed their products to children. Aurejärvi says that cigarettes have contained additives to make smoking easy even for young children. The tobacco industry has developed additives that expand the bronchial tubes, making it easier for children to inhale smoke.

Aurejärvi also alleges that tobacco companies have deliberately tried to maximize nicotine addiction.

“It is science that has been practiced in laboratories behind closed doors since the 1950s.”

Deceptive Advertising of Light Cigarettes Alleged

The plaintiffs in the ongoing appeal are two smokers, one of whom suffers from emphysema and the other has lung cancer. They smoked light cigarettes, and a major issue in the case is whether or not the tobacco companies have engaged in deceptive marketing.

“Light cigarettes were marketed as light products. ‘You can smoke these with a good conscience’.” Auerjärvi notes that light cigarettes were created as an alternative to quitting cigarettes.

A decision in the case is expected next spring.

Copyright © 2009 Yle

Miami, FL – A new study confirms what has already been likely known to most smokers – cigarettes lessen taste buds’ abilities over time.
Greek scientists studied 62 Greek soldiers’ tongues using electrical stimulation to test the taste threshold of the men and endoscopes to measure the number and shape of a certain taste bud.

Lead researcher Pavlidis Pavlos, of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, said there were statistical differences detected between the taste buds of smokers and non-smokers.

The researchers said they noticed that the tongues of the 28 smokers in the group had flatter taste buds with a reduced blood supply.

The study was published in the journal BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders.

Copyright © August 20, 2009 Allheadlinenews

Hundreds of Turks have taken to the streets of Ankara to protest against a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants which was brought in last month.

Many of the protesters are cafe owners who say the ban is hurting trade and want smoking to be allowed in special areas of their establishments.

The government banned smoking in most enclosed public spaces in May last year and extended the ban last month.

Turkey has 20 million smokers but polls suggest most people support the ban.

Turkey aspires to become a member of the EU, and the ban brings the country into line with most EU countries.

Anyone caught lighting up in a designated smoke-free area faces a fine of 69 lira ($45; £28).

Bar owners who fail to enforce the ban could be fined from 560 lira for a first offence up to 5,600 lira.

On Tuesday about 1,000 protesters gathered in a park outside the health ministry buildings with brightly coloured banners daubed with slogans and, inevitably, many cigarettes.

“Don’t add a coffeehouse crisis to the economic crisis,” one banner read.

Other banners threatened that the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a supporter of the ban, would suffer at the next election.

Copyright © 18 August 2009 BBC