BEIJING, – Only a quarter of Chinese people believe that smoking tobacco increases the risk of cancer. And anti-smoking campaigns are failing to influence them, according to a government survey.
Three quarters of people in China are regularly exposed to second-hand smoke, often in the workplace, in a country that puffs its way through around a third of the world’s cigarettes.
The survey, conducted by the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that barely one in four adults believes smoking increases the risks of lung cancer, strokes and heart attacks.
In a country where 301 million people smoke, only 16 percent are looking to quit in the coming year, perhaps due to a lack of understanding about the dangers.
Over half of Chinese men smoke, compared to just 2.4 percent of women, according to the China section of the “Global Adult Tobacco Survey.”
A million people die each year from smoking-related illnesses, yet China’s Ministry of Health banned smoking in hospitals only this May.
“Chronic conditions now constitute the lion’s share of the burden of disease in China, and tobacco use is the single largest preventable cause of death and disease,” said the World Health Organization’s China representative, Michael O’Leary.
Both anti-smoking campaigns and cigarettes ads had little impact on most people, the survey found. Only one in five remembered seeing marketing, and less than half noticed health warnings on television or radio.
Less smoking could reduce smoking-related health costs, but would also hurt government revenues, as the tobacco industry still provides a steady flow of government income.
Last year a county government in central China ordered government workers to smoke a combined minimum of 23,000 packs of cigarettes a year to boost tax income, with punishments for those who failed to light up enough. The order was revoked after it created an uproar in the media.
A hefty state tobacco tax hike appears to have led to a huge drop in demand for cigarettes.
But those who waged the war over the tobacco tax say it may be too early to draw conclusions about the long-term effects of the new tax.
There is no way to track actual cigarette sales, but orders for the tax stamps that have to be attached to every pack sold in the state fell dramatically in July.
Since July 1, when the state cigarette tax jumped from 69.5 cents per pack to $1.70, the Utah Tax Commission sold stamps for about 2.8 million packs of cigarettes.
That is about half as many as it sold on average for the first five months of 2010 and a huge drop from the more than 9 million stamps it sold in June, the month before the tax took effect.
“The magnitude of the drop surprises me,” said David Davis, president of the Utah Retail Merchants Association. “I think that folks were filling their cabinets or filling their pantries. They knew the tax increase was coming so they went out and bought ahead.”
Jim Gibbs, owner of The Tobacco Store in South Salt Lake, said his sales are down sharply since the tax took effect.
“Sales are down, I would guesstimate, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent,” Gibbs said. “I haven’t seen many people quitting. They’re just cutting back because they simply can’t afford it. They’ve taxed the lowest income people there is and that’s the smokers.”
The dip in demand is not too surprising, said Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, who along with Sen. Allen Christensen, R-North Ogden, led the fight for the tobacco tax hike. Ray said state budget analysts forecast a drop in sales for the first few months.
Indeed, analysts projected that retail tobacco sales would fall by more than $50 million in the first year the tax was in place, but because of the higher rate, the state would receive $43 million in additional tax revenue.
It will likely take several months for the market to find its new equilibrium, Ray said.
Michael Siler, director of government relations for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, said he hopes some of the reduction is due to people quitting the habit and suspects some is probably due to people who stocked up in June and some who have gone out of state, although he suspects that is a short-term phenomenon.
“I think it’s probably a fact that people are going to cross borders for a while, but after a brief period of time, they’re going to get tired of that and we’ll see revenue increase significantly,” he said.
The big drop in demand for cigarettes has been offset by the spike in the tax, and overall the revenue the state has collected rose to $4.8 million in July, up from an average of $4.2 million per month for the prior year.
Gibbs said when a 70-cent-per-pack federal tax kicked in last year he saw sales slip, but only by about 10 percent and some of them came back. This time he said he doesn’t anticipate a return to the same volume as before because the government has simply made it too expensive.
BARAGA — The veterans at the American Legion Post 444 see it as pretty straightforward.
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Smoking tobacco is legal. They own, run and risk failure at their post’s tavern in tiny Baraga at the base of the Keweenaw Bay in the Upper Peninsula.
So they get to decide whether patrons get to smoke.
That wasn’t an issue before May 1, when a statewide ban on smoking in places of employment took effect (with a few, minor exceptions and one major one: Detroit’s three casinos).
Now Foucault-Funke Post 444, where the ashtrays never came off the tables and smokers line the bar each afternoon and evening, is at the center of what could be a decisive showdown for the new state law and — as the vets see it — for the individual liberty and self-government they fought to defend.
Earlier this month, the post sued the Western Upper Peninsula Health Department to strike down as unconstitutional the department’s order to end indoor smoking.
“It’s not about the smoking,” said post spokesman Joseph O’Leary. “It’s about the right to choose to allow the use of a legal substance on our property.”
Smoke looks like freedom on a Baraga afternoon
At least for the time being, smoking is good for business at the Baraga American Legion post.
On a recent perfect August afternoon, nearly two dozen patrons took shelter from the sun at its U-shaped bar to toss back brew, banter and (for about half the group) brazenly blow smoke into the indoor air.
The way one of those smokers, Baraga resident and auxiliary post member Anita Shepard, sees it, that smoke is what freedom looks like.
“People walk in, stop and see the ashtrays and they’re blown away,” she said. “They say, ‘Awright,’ turn around and go back to their cars to get their cigs.”
The new state smoking ban, Shepard said, is just one more encroachment on personal freedom, a decision handed down by out-of-touch politicians 500 miles away. She likens it to restrictions on gun rights and creeping government intrusion generally.
“We’re not a communist country yet, but we’re only one step away from it,” she said.
The leaders of the Baraga post said they didn’t go looking for a confrontation with the state or local health authorities. But when the new law was signed, they decided it was time to take a stand.
“These are guys who put their lives on the line for their country,” said O’Leary, an honorary member of Post 444.
“They said, ‘Wait a minute. This is our property. This is not heroin. Nobody in the world who doesn’t like smoke has to walk through that door.’
“They just decided, enough is enough.”
When May 1 came, Post Commander Rick Geroux issued a notice to members and employees that, until ordered by a court, the new restrictions would not be observed on its premises.
During the next two months, several citizen complaints were filed about the post’s noncompliance, and local health department officials sent notices of violation. Geroux responded with a news release July 16 that described the new law as unconstitutional and un-American.
Further, the exemption for Detroit’s casinos (which was based on their need to compete with American Indian casinos not covered by the state law) is “wildly unfair” to the Baraga post, which lies within a mile, and competes for customers, with two alcohol-serving, smoking-acceptable tribal facilities, Geroux said.
After getting a cease-and-desist order from the health department July 20, the post decided to sue.
Guy St. Germain, director of the western Upper Peninsula health department, said the post’s take on the law is “strictly speaking, irrelevant to how we do our job.
“We’re obligated to enforce public health statutes the Legislature passes. This is a valid law until a court says otherwise.”
St. Germain said the Baraga post is alone among establishments in the five-county region that have chosen to ignore the law. He said a “small handful” of complaints about other violations were mostly technical in nature and easily resolved. A spokesman for the state Attorney General’s Office said she was unaware of any other lawsuits over the smoking ban.
Post spokesman O’Leary, also the Baraga County prosecuting attorney, believes noncompliance with the law, especially in the libertarian-leaning Upper Peninsula, is more widespread than health officials acknowledge. The legion post has been targeted, at least in part, because it is openly defiant, he said.
That high profile has helped in some ways, as well, generating donations to a legal defense fund and drawing support from all over the state.
St. Germain and the health department have asked Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox to defend the smoking ban in court. A response to the post’s lawsuit is due soon.
For now, however, Post 444 keeps serving and its patrons keep smoking.
The front door is decorated with a bumper sticker, notifying customers: “We believe in Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Those Who Threaten It!”
Inside, the barkeeper distributes another to visitors, “Say yah to da U.S. eh!,” a patriotic variation on the green stickers that became ubiquitous in northern Michigan in the 1980s — “Say yah to da U.P. eh!”
The vets at Post 444 said they don’t think of smoking as an act of patriotism (although several of the elder statesmen point out the government provided the smokes and hooked them on the habit when they were in the service).
But there isn’t any question they view a government order to stop as an affront to liberty.
“No foreign enemy has ever taken away any of our liberties or our property,” O’Leary said. “Now those guys in Lansing are doing it.”
NEW YORK – Riding shotgun with a smoker is just as bad as hanging out in a smoky bar when it comes to being exposed to second-hand smoke, Johns Hopkins researchers report.
In fact, they found, it’s probably worse-and for back-seat passengers, too.
“No matter how much you had your windows down or the air conditioner on or any other driving conditions, you could always measure tobacco smoke and in most cases you could measure very high concentrations,” Dr. Ana Navas-Acien of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, one of the researchers on the study, told Reuters Health.
While scientists have tested secondhand smoke exposure in automobiles before, Navas-Acien noted in an interview, they had only done so in the lab. “We wanted to evaluate what those levels could be under … normal, real-world driving conditions,” she said.
To do so, she and her colleagues recruited 17 smokers and five non-smokers, all of whom drove their own car to and from work every day. The researchers planted nicotine samplers in the front passenger seat headrest and in the back seat of each car for 24 hours. They measured nicotine because it is a highly accurate, easy-to-measure gauge of second-hand smoke levels, Navas-Acien said, although cigarette smoke contains many other harmful substances.
Nicotine levels were undetectable in the non-smokers’ cars. But for smokers’ cars, concentrations averaged 9.6 micrograms of nicotine per cubic meter, much higher than concentrations typically measured in places-public or private-where smoking is allowed. And for every cigarette a person smoked, the air nicotine concentration doubled.
“This is because the car is a very small place,” Navas-Acien noted. The results, she and her colleagues conclude in the journal Tobacco Control, “support the need for education measures and legislation that regulate smoking in motor vehicles when passengers, especially children, are present.”
Risks for kids can include worsening of asthma, ear infections, and more, the researcher said. In addition to legislation, she noted, education is important, because many parents who smoke may not be aware of the risk of second-hand smoke exposure to their young passengers.
Plus, other research has shown that smokers have a higher rate of accidents, and smokers get less for their cars when they sell them, the authors note.
Taylor Momsen has been slammed by anti-smoking campaigners for lighting up illegally on stage on Sunday – officials have branded it “a dumb thing to do.”
The “Gossip Girl” star was performing with her band The Pretty Reckless in California when she took time out from their set to smoke.
The 16 year old is two years below the legal age to buy and smoke cigarettes in the state of California – and her onstage antics have sparked outrage.
Momsen has been blasted by officials at Britain’s Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) organization for succumbing to the “filthy, deadly addiction” – and for setting a bad example to her young fans.
A spokesperson for ASH tells WENN, “Clearly Momsen’s act is designed to shock and smoking illegally on stage is part of that act.
“It is to be hoped that her fans have the maturity to see that her smoking is neither cool nor glamorous but a filthy, deadly addiction and a dumb thing to do.”
ALBANY – After a Friday of furious budget activity, the Legislature returns to the Capitol today to vote on Gov. David Paterson’s latest provocative one-week budget extender – including a chunky tax hike on cigarettes and tobacco products as well as stepped-up tax enforcement on sales of tobacco products on Indian reservations.
Under the plan, the current tax on a pack of cigarettes will rise from $2.75 to $4.35. The tax on other tobacco products – such as cigars, chewing tobacco and pipe tobacco – will increase from 46 percent to 75 percent. The increases are scheduled to take effect Sept. 1 and raise $290 million annually, according to the Paterson administration; stepped-up enforcement on Indian sales is expected to collect $150 million more.
Over the weekend, forces on either side of the debate over smoking weighed in. Altria, the parent company of cigarette giant Philip Morris, released a packet of information arguing that the hike would be an unfair burden that would hurt consumers and retailers, and could lead to increased illegal trafficking.
The American Heart Association was one of several groups that came out in support of the boost: “The higher the better,” said Julianne Hart, the state organization’s advocacy director.
The inclusion of the new taxes will make the extender harder to support for any of the three Republican senators who enabled last week’s emergency appropriation to pass over Democrat Ruben Diaz Sr.’s “no” vote. The extender’s defeat would lead to a broad government shutdown.
Sen. Hugh Farley, R-Schenectady, said last week that he wants to keep the state running, but would refuse to vote for anything that contains new taxes.
The Senate’s Democratic majority will also take up a series of budget bills dealing with government operation, transportation, environmental protection and other sectors. The bill were passed by the Assembly on Friday but lagged in the Senate due to the absences of several Democrats.
Paterson and legislators still have to tackle the thorniest portions of the budget: the state’s revenue plan and education funding.
The budget deadline for this fiscal year passed on April 1. Paterson said last week that if a final budget plan isn’t settled this week, he’ll put the remainder of his budget proposal into the extender to be passed on Monday, June 28.
Ask Sami Romman the health question and you get cheeseburgers.
‘If you eat cheeseburgers five times a week, that’s not good for you,’ said the co-owner of Austin’s Kasbah hookah lounge. ‘But you have a cheeseburger once a week, maybe that’s not so bad.’
He’s answering this question: Is smoking a hookah as bad for you as smoking cigarettes?
You don’t have to watch Dr. Oz to know that lighting and then breathing anything isn’t good for you. But the hookah smoke is so cool after it passes through the water, expansive and perfumed, sweet as a campfire marshmallow. And because it’s not acrid and hot, you might be tempted to inhale, passing it back through your mouth and nose like the condensed breath of fall’s first morning.
Back here in the less-prosaic world, I’ve cleaned enough hookahs to know this: The black, resinous particulate matter that builds up in those satin-girdled hookah hoses? Some of that’s getting into your mouth and in your lungs. When you’ve tried, let’s say, six places in six days for a story on hookah lounges, it makes for a fine flinty cough.
In those six days, I also learned that first, most people have no idea what a hookah is. That I can fix. (It’s what the caterpillar is smoking in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ the one who sounds like Professor Snape.)
And second, the hookah can bring together cultures that are half a world apart physically, a whole world apart philosophically. See there. Hookahs and cheeseburgers. With nothing more than tobacco and saturated fat, we’ve built a bridge between the Middle East and America.
Just set that coffee down next to my Nobel Prize.
The cloud (and how it got there)
Simply put, a hookah is a water pipe. A hollow metal stem fits into a thick glass vase filled halfway with water. Atop that stem sits a ceramic bowl with holes in the bottom. Into that bowl goes shisha , which is shredded tobacco mixed with molasses or honey and a corner-shop’s inventory of fruits, spices and flavorings. Over the bowl goes a shroud of foil poked with an artful array of holes for ventilation. On top of that foil go a few pieces of checker-sized charcoal as hot as Elin Nordegren’s vengeance.
A hose with a tapered mouthpiece fits into the shiny stem. As the smoker draws breath through the hose, air is pulled down over the coals, through the shisha, down the stem, through the water, into the vase and back through the hose as a pillowy cloud of smoke that’s more like aspirated Fruity Pebbles. The rush, when there is one, is no more sinister than a second cup of coffee.
There will be bubbling. The same rapid-fire thurping your parents heard from your older brother’s room before things at home got real different. Except this is about tobacco and not that other plant. It’s a Middle Eastern cafe-society thing that predates Jeff Spicoli by a millennium.
But the stigma remains. At Yahala Hookah Lounge on Airport Boulevard, a rough-looking guy rattles in, looking to bum a cigarette. ‘I don’t smoke,’ one of the hookah-smokers says in full exhale. The rough guy does a double-take. ‘Yeah, just that marijuana (stuff),’ he grumbles on the way out.
The hookah lounges in this story don’t feel like stoner places. They’re mostly like any other student-magnet, with coffee and free Wi-Fi. Except for the bubbling, and except for the place with the sea monster. Let me explain.
At Redline Hookah on South First Street, there are big saltwater aquariums, and in one of them swims a sea monster, a cheetah-spotted thing that stares at me with dead white eyes for 10 minutes while I smoke. Stick with your theory about it being a moray eel, but in Redline’s dim, soporific light, it looks like a phantom, helped not at all by the DJ flashing topographic grids against a wall, pulsing them in time to music that sounds like a chorus of car horns.
The ceiling is hung with bedsheet tapestries that look like Persian rugs. Shiny black and red couches flank low, scuffed tables for the pipes. Some of the shisha flavors defy logic. What is ‘Afro Pie’? ‘Dead Nazi’? And there are beer bongs. But service is good, and the resident tech performs CPR on a flatlining pipe to stoke it. It’s a jangly rotating model with a plain flexible hose, a step down from the hoses with grips as big and ornate as scimitar handles at some places.
But how is it that you can smoke a hookah indoors in a city with a no-smoking ordinance that won’t even let you light up in a bar? The Austin ordinance makes an exception for tobacco retailers. Set up as a tobacco retailer, a hookah lounge can allow smoking indoors, as long as other sales are ‘incidental,’ a term the city has come to interpret as five percent of sales, said Robert Wright of the Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Department.
The percentage creates some of the Kasbah’s stickiest moments, Romman said. Nobody wants to be the guy who enforces the tacit ‘thank you for smoking’ policy, but 95 percent of the money has to come from tobacco, so if you show up at the Kasbah, plan on paying for a pipe.
The incidentals at most lounges amount to coffee, tea, soda, energy drinks and a handful of light snacks. Full-menu restaurants with hookah service have the same ordinance option as everybody else: Take it outside.
Smoke for the soul, food for the rest
Outside’s not a bad place to be at Phara’s Mediterranean Cuisine, cross-legged in a cushioned lounge, guitars crashing from the punk-rock pizza Parlor across the street. The staff is never far away, whether they’re bringing a glass for the beer you carried in (for a $3 charge) or adding coals to your pipe. Your house-blended shisha might be Layer Cake or Jazz LeMonte or a smooth apple-mint.
Lamb shish kebab ($17) is charred nicely outside, overcooked inside, with a hint of garlic and sweetness. Lemony baba ghanoush is $5 with big folds of warm pita. With the hookah, dinner is a $40-plus experience, a baggage fee for a trip to a world apart.
On Oltorf Street, the front door of Tarbouch still says ‘just be nice,’ a holdover from the restaurant’s days as the late Danny Young’s Texicalli Grill. Young likely would have approved of the kind Lebanese woman who takes our order for a fresh gyro wrap with a savory Greek salad ($6.99), some tender lamb shish kebabs ($11.99) and a vegetarian plate ($7.99) highlighted by grape leaves stuffed with a rich blend of tomato and rice.
She charges up our hookah ($10.99) as she brings it out to the deck, drawing on the handle to fire the coals and prime the mapled smoke, then gives us each a plastic mouthpiece to insert in the hose as we pass it back and forth.
Perched next to the all-day crush of Oltorf Street, the deck is a slice of South Austin nirvana in spring. In summer, I suspect it’s more like the Sun’s Anvil from ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ Drawing from another South Austin well, we brought in beers from the Whip In: astringent Ranger and Ridgeway IPAs for the food, sweet Avery Imperial Stout for the hookah.
There’s not much to eat at Yahala Hookah Lounge on Airport Boulevard. It helps to have the Arpeggio Grill next door, where you can order a Mediterranean sampler plate and have it delivered right to one of Yahala’s couches, thrones with minarets of crushed pine-forest velvet. For $10.99, the Mesa Plate rounds up tangy baba ghanoush and hummus, crisp falafel plus beef, chicken, stuffed grape leaves and herbal green tabbouleh.
Yahala operator Walli Elshinawy’s Turkish coffee is a bonus attraction, a sweet and boiled blend of dark-roasted beans, cardamom and secrets he keeps to himself. Elshinawy was born in Cairo.
‘I used to go to hookah lounges in Egypt when I was a teenager,’ he said. I watch him load a bowl of custom-blended apple shisha for a pipe with a satiny hose criss-crossed with blue ribbon.
In conversation with Elshinawy, I hear the word ‘hospitality’ so often it sounds like a mantra, a belief system. It extends to a giant of a man who walks in with a six-ringer of Lone Star tallboys dangling from one beefy hand. Two of the rings are already empty. The giant is Craig Brown, visiting from Montana, and he’s taken to Lone Star beer with the zeal of a native. He smokes cigarettes, he said, but the hookah is something more congenial: ‘I couldn’t just sit and chain-smoke cigarettes for two hours, but I could do this for two hours.’
Nearby, Barrett Dietz smokes with two friends, including a young woman who would turn heads even if she weren’t in such a traditionally male environment. The fact is, I saw just as many women as men in the city’s lounges and restaurants with pipe service. ‘When I smoke hookah, I want to get out and socialize, but not go to a rave,’ Dietz said. ‘I like someplace mellow.’
On a flat-screen TV in the back, an Arab music channel plays serpentine, beat-driven pop videos. A blond GaGa-wannabe with a black eye feeds raw meat to her baby crocodile. Note to self: Check local listings.
Kasbah: The spark of destiny
Sami Romman owns the Kasbah at West 27th and Guadalupe streets with his brother, Ronnie. Sami is 33 but could pass for a University of Texas student, which he was when he and Ronnie started Hookah-Shishah.com in 1999. The two have built their Austin-based Web site into one of the better-stocked and more well-designed Internet hookah bazaars, with Romman-branded coals and shisha and dozens of pipes. Ones with skulls, ones with as many writhing coils as Medusa’s head, one as tall as a man for $595, a little bitty silver one that looks like camping gear.
The Rommans took over the fledgling Kasbah in 2009. In its previous lives, before the smoke that gives the place a permanent caramel aroma, the two-story Victorian had been somebody’s home and a succession of coffee shops, including Mojo’s Daily Grind. Sami Romman pointed to a sunny spot near the front window where he studied in the coffee-shop days, unaware that his future self would be running the joint.
His own pipe dreams began in his early 20s. He’s from Houston, but his family is Palestinian and Jordanian, and he’d come back from visits to the Middle East with hookah pipes as gifts. ‘Suddenly I found myself with more and more friends,’ he said. His apartment off Riverside Drive became a social hub, like the Kasbah is now.
The place attracts a 3-2 ratio of women to men, Sami Romman said, a stat he credits for bringing in at least some of the guys. ‘People think this is an old-school male tradition, but it’s more than that,’ he said.
The magic of ‘more’ materialized on one of those Austin-only South by Southwest nights, in a scene with the look and sound of an indie music doc from a former Soviet republic shot with a handheld camera.
Crammed into an upstairs room with old wooden floors, open windows and boilerplate neo-Moroccan décor, about 25 people laughed, drank coffee and smoked hookahs. In the center of this claustrophobic euphoria, a band of telegenic pop kids played violin, cello, electric bass, acoustic guitar and steel-brush snare drum. Part hand-clapping polyphonic jam, part public rehearsal, they were Boston’s Art Decade. On the balcony nearby, a Hollywood fringe player brayed into his phone, oblivious, rounding out the sonic landscape.
Culture shock and awe
How do we explain a market that supports even one hookah lounge? The hookah is an artifact of Middle Eastern culture, the pursuit of which isn’t exactly cultivated in the West these days.
Maybe it’s this simple: College students will try almost anything once, and there’s so many of them around here. They’re in control of their time, many for the first time in their lives, and they’re meeting humanity’s full rainbowed ark , many for the first time also. And it’s happening in the pressurized crucible of academia. From that perspective, a hookah seems pretty tame, an 18-and-up option for thrill-seekers who have History 315K the next morning.
At the Arab Cowboy on West 24th Street, the clientele is split evenly between the neophyte college kids and Middle Eastern men for whom the hookah is just another day at the cafe, says staffer Nathan Guy. Owner Anouar Bhiri is one of those men, a native of Tunisia who first smoked a hookah when he was 15, when only the men went to the cafes there. To play cards, to drink tea, to tell a few jokes.
Bhiri, who opened the lounge last summer with his wife, Kansas native Dawn Scheel , says he’s the ‘Arab’ part of the equation; she’s the ‘cowboy.’ And yet he’s the one wearing the boots. In a way, the lounge reflects their relationship. ‘It’s the combination of two cultures,’ Scheel said. ‘Our purpose here is to break down those barriers. We’re doing it in our own small way with this cafe.’
Before moving here to start the Arab Cowboy, the couple lived in Los Angeles for 10 years. ‘L.A. is packed full of hookah lounges,’ she said. ‘The reason we chose Austin is that perfect balance of big city and small town.’ They’ve turned the place into a warren of rooms with contemporary furniture, polished wood floors and walls striped like Le Mans pit-crew jackets from the 1970s.
The hookahs are beautiful here, as much art as function. A bell-shaped ice chamber rests just below the bowl of mine, making for an even cooler and thicker smoke. Taking Guy’s suggestion, I have it loaded up with an apricot-rose shisha blend ($16.99, $10 during happy hour). Blushing, full and floral, this is what Eden must have smelled like, though my version of Eden smells more like a deep, frothed cup of French-press coffee ($1.95). Either way, it’s a sensory table dance, a swirl of guilty pleasures.
Tobacco is a quicksand of guilt and pleasure. Bhiri said he’d smoked cigarettes since he was 14, a habit he’s managed to shake. Somehow, the hookah hasn’t jarred his dormant cigarette impulses awake.
The hookah places in this story
• Arab Cowboy (901 W. 24th St. 477-9456, www.arabcowboy.com ): Hookahs $16.99-$18.99, $10 from 3 to 7 p.m. daily. Coffee, tea, soft drinks and pastries. No BYOB allowed. Open 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily, until 3 a.m. Thursdays through Saturdays.
• The Kasbah (2714 Guadalupe St. 289-4752, www.kasbahhookahbar.com ): Hookahs $17. Coffee, tea and soft drinks. BYOB. Open 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily, until 3 a.m. Thursdays through Saturdays.
• Phara’s Mediterranean Cuisine (111 E. North Loop Blvd. 632-7067, www.pharas.com ): Hookahs $15-$20, half price from 6 to 7 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday. Full menu, with smoking in a covered lounge, gazebo, patio and courtyard outside. BYOB with $3 corkage fee. Open 6 p.m. to midnight Tuesdays through Sundays.
• Redline Hookah Lounge (2101 S. First St. 383-8567, www.redlinehookah.com ): Hookahs $14-$15. Soft drinks. BYOB. Open 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily, until 3 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
• Tarbouch (534 E. Oltorf St. 326-2001, www.tarbouchfood.com ): Hookahs $10.95. Full menu, with smoking on a patio and deck in front. BYOB. Open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, until 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
• Yahala Hookah Lounge (6617 Airport Blvd. 467-2233, www.austinhookahlounge.com ): Hookahs $9.99-$14.99. Coffee, tea, soft drinks. Arpeggio Grill next door delivers from a full Mediterranean menu. Open at 6 p.m. daily, until 1 a.m. Sundays through Wednesdays, 2 a.m. Thursdays and 3 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
More places to smoke hookahs
• Cedars Mediterranean Cafe (220 N. Edward Gary St., San Marcos. , www.cedarssanmarcos.com ): Lunch buffet and low hookah prices in San Marcos. Open 10 a.m. to midnight Sundays through Fridays.
• Jungle Juice (2423 S. Bell Blvd., Suite A, Cedar Park. 219-1963): Smoke and smoothies. Open 5 p.m. to midnight daily, until 2 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
• Pipes Plus (2418 Guadalupe St. 479-7473, www.pipespluslounge.com ): The living room of your apartment in college, with a head shop upstairs. Open 11 a.m. to midnight daily.
• Stratosphere Lounge (235 N. LBJ Drive, San Marcos. 512-393-5001, www.myspace.com/stratospherelounge ): A Texas State University hangout from Rayda Sounny-Slitine and Michael Kelton, who managed the late Hook-Up Lounge in Austin. The pipes are from the Middle East. The furniture’s from IKEA. Open 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily, until 3 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
• Zakia’s Greek Cuisine (8701 W. Parmer Lane. 670-1000, www.zakiasgreekcuisine.com ): Mediterranean food, Middle Eastern aromas. Open 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays.
Host Kid Rock definitely turned the CMT Awards show into a party last night in Nashville. He kicked off the night by rocking out in an opening number with Hank Williams Jr.
He told the crowd afterward, “Just to be forewarned,” he told the audience. “If there’re any, like, Kanye West-ism going on, I’m about to bring out two beautiful ladies. Anyone thinking about grabbing a mic, myself or Bochephus will personally punch you in the mouth. Maybe I can get Trace Adkins … and then your weekend is really messed up.”
Later, he came onstage smoking a cigar. “I know there’s no smoking,” he said to a fan. “I got the memo. Calm down.”
He was also seen backstage doing shots in his dressing room with Kellie Pickler and other stars. Toward the end of the show, he said, “I felt good at the beginning. Now I feel real good, you know what I mean?”
For the final award, he was joined onstage by Sheryl Crow. He grabbed her and said, “Will you just have my baby?” Sheryl replied, “I don’t know how to answer that. If it’s a girl, maybe.
The smoking rate among Beijingers is above the national average according to research released on Wednesday by the Beijing health bureau, and more than 80 percent of smokers don’t view tobacco addiction as a disease.
The survey, conducted from January through May, covered more than 2,000 residents aged from 18 to 89 and found that 34 percent of respondents smoke. The percentage of male and female smokers was 60.2 and 4.8 percent respectively. The national average is 57.4 and 2.6 percent.
“Although the non-smoking campaign in the medical departments is going well, with more than 40 percent of them reaching the target we set, the high smoking rates among residents is not so optimistic,” said Zeng Xiaopeng, general director of the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Zeng said the city’s anti-smoking project would be further promoted among communities, especially in residential clinics.
“We will consider training more doctors for medical guidance in the clinics. People will be able to get counseling services in the future and we hope doctors will spend five minutes giving a non-smoking lecture to each patient,” he said.
According to the report, about 40 percent of all smokers have a severe addiction. Nearly 50 percent tried to quit, but less than 40 percent were able to sustain their non-smoking beyond three months. While more than 60 percent of smokers are planning to quit, fewer than 10 percent are considering asking a doctor for help.
“Most smokers don’t choose medical treatment as the first choice to quit as some believe determination is the best way out,” he said. “But actually, medical support is often necessary,” said Zhi Xiuyi from Capital Medicine University.
As a doctor who has promoted the non-smoking campaign for more than 10 years, Zhi said medical professionals from big hospitals should be encouraged to provide free lessons in non-smoking control in residential areas.
Currently there are about 10 public hospitals in Beijing that offer both mental and medical treatment to smokers, and the cost for quitting is between 400 and 1,000 yuan.
In order to reach the goal of banning smoking in all medical sectors by the end of this year, officials from the city’s health committee announced early this week the penalty for smokers who light up in non-smoking areas may soon be increased.
The survey also showed that about 60 percent of residents were aware that smoking can cause apoplexy and impotence, an improvement on the national average.
THE World Health Organisation is trying to stop women smoking.
WHO says that while global rates of smoking among men have peaked, smoking rates among women are rising. Particularly troubling is the rising rate of smoking among teenage girls.
WHO suggests this could be a result of tobacco advertising increasingly targeting girls.
Smoking is still the single largest preventable cause of death in Australia. It kills 19,000 Australians a year and, in NSW, 17 people die each day from tobacco-related illnesses.
Cigarettes contain more than 4000 chemicals. As well as tar and nicotine, they contain carbon monoxide – the poisonous gas in car exhaust fumes – ammonia and arsenic (found in rat poison).
As a result, smokers are much more at risk of suffering a range of health problems, including cancer. More than 40 of the chemicals in tobacco smoke are known to cause cancers of the lung and mouth.
Smokers are more likely to suffer from other problems, including emphysema, heart disease and strokes and peripheral vascular disease (blocked blood vessels in arms or legs).
They are also at higher risk of contracting diseases that lead to blindness, hip fractures and painful stomach ulcers.
A good start for smokers wanting to quit is to phone the Quitline on 13 78 48, which is always open.
Callers will receive a Quit Kit, the latest information on quitting, access to counsellors and referrals to services and ongoing support.
Listen to the stories and experiences of recent quitters and how quitting smoking has benefited them and their families. And show the website to your daughters.
QUIT TIPS
>Make a date to quit.
>Identify strategies to cope with high-risk situations, such as going to a party where you know friends will be smoking.
>Ask family and friends to support you.
>Reduce caffeine and alcohol intake
>Consider phoning the Quitline – 13 78 48 – or nicotine replacement therapy (NRT).
A tobacco giant that exhausted its inventory of small cigarette packets in anticipation of a ban threatened Thursday to take legal action against the Malaysian government for reportedly deciding to delay the prohibition.
The Malaysian affiliate of Philip Morris International voiced disappointment with what it called a “precipitous” decision that would be “a devastating blow not only to our business but to foreign investor confidence in Malaysia.”
Tobacco companies in the Southeast Asian country have been phasing out parts of their inventory and manufacturing equipment in recent months ahead of a government ban on cigarette packets containing fewer than 20 cigarettes that was supposed to take effect June 1.
However, the financial newspaper The Edge reported Thursday that the government had decided to postpone the ban. The Malaysian Insider news website later quoted Health Minister Liow Tiong Lai as saying that authorities feared the ban would spark a surge in demand for illegally produced cigarettes.
Health Ministry officials said they could not immediately comment on the reports, and that Liow was traveling late Thursday and could not be contacted.
“In the absence of clarity surrounding this decision, (we) will have no choice but to evaluate all possible avenues, including legal recourse, to recover any losses the company may suffer,” Richard Morgan,the managing director of Philip Morris in Malaysia, said in a statement.
“How can any corporation plan for its future and maintain its viability in an environment of such legal uncertainty, where decisions that are supposedly set in concrete can be overturned so rapidly and without any consultation?” the statement added.
The government had been planning the ban for years as part of efforts to curb smoking among young Malaysians who consider smaller cigarette packs more affordable.
The Malaysian Insider quoted Liow as saying the government would make a final decision in “a few months” on when the ban might be enforced.
“Robin Hood,” one of the biggest movies in America right now, is all about how Robin got his start. He begins as an archer, and by the finish, he has just begun his life in the Sherwood Forest. He has assembled his men, but he has not yet stolen anything from the rich or given a scrap to the poor. Everything is ahead of him. And he’s played by Russell Crowe, who is 46 years old.
Now go back to 1976, to “Robin and Marian.” Robin Hood returns from the wars, his glory days behind him. He’s beginning to feel his advancing years, and Maid Marian lives in a convent. Everything, or just about everything, is behind him. And he was played by Sean Connery, who was 45 years old.
We’re seeing this more and more in movies, not actors playing younger than they are, but rather actors playing their age — middle age — as a time for beginnings. Look at the “Sex and the City” women, who are in their 40s and 50s playing women in their 40s and 50s, yet their whole atmosphere is young, and their whole story is one of constant renewal. There’s no sense of settling down or turning from the world.
Jennifer Aniston is in her 40s and doesn’t pretend otherwise, and yet she still appears in comedies of courtship that, a generation ago, would have been the province of women 10 years younger. And Matt Damon, who turns 40 this year, still has the aura of a young man going out for his first job interview.
Part of this is simply perception. Baby boomer and Generation X’ers are getting older, and so we look at people in their 40s as young. And because there are a lot of us, we get to set the cultural agenda. It seems unfair that people who, in their youth, made their middle-aged parents feel like Methuselah (and made everyone over 30 feel over-the-hill) should never get our comeuppance. But there’s no denying the strength of numbers.
Yet if it were merely a matter of perception, wouldn’t the stars of yesteryear also look young to us when we look back on their films? That would stand to reason, but we know this isn’t the case. Look at Clark Gable in “Command Decision” (1948). At 47, he looked like an old man. Look at Ava Gardner in her early 40s in “55 Days at Peking” (1963) or “The Night of the Iguana” (1964). The beauty lingers, but really only as a shadow. The glow is gone, and she could be 10 years older.
To be blunt, Gable and Gardner looked like they’d already spent decades smoking and drinking, and their lives were beginning to show up on their faces. The same could be said for Lana Turner “Peyton Place” (1957). She was still attractive, but while still relatively young (36), she had already made the turn into middle age.
So this phenomenon goes beyond perception. Today’s stars have a younger aura because they tend to take better care of themselves. Many are still smoking, but they have less of a predilection for pickling themselves in alcohol. They’re also working out. Crowe, who has struggled with his weight over the years, got into excellent shape for “Robin Hood.” A generation or two ago, no one, except for the occasional cult-of-the-body star, ever thought about lifting weights.
There’s yet a third reason screen actors are maintaining an aura of youth into middle age: Attitude. There’s a refusal to get old — to some degree it’s a refusal to become mature — that’s just part of our present culture. Katharine Hepburn wasn’t an alcoholic, but at 44 she was practically an old lady in “The African Queen” (1951). Meanwhile, look at Tom Cruise as a Senator in “Lions for Lambs” (2007). The first time you see him, you think, wait, he’s too young to be a Senator. But Cruise was 45 then, the same age as John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Actually, there’s something to be said for the very adult, been-to-hell-and-back quality that JFK exudes in “Crisis,” Robert Drew’s behind-the-scenes documentary of the Kennedy administration. You don’t see that quality today, not on screen or in our public life, which brings us to the downside of middle age today: Adulthood just isn’t what it used to be. In fact, when I see movies like “Sherlock Holmes” or “The Losers,” I wonder if we’re not lost in some “Peter Pan” hell, in which adult characters can behave like children, and yet no one seems to notice.
Let’s be fair to the past. Ava Gardner may have been practically an old woman at 41. But in “The Killers,” at 23, she was more of an adult than most of our current actresses will ever be. Gable may have been an old fat guy at 47, but at 31, in “Red Dust” (1932), he was a man. Not a young man. A man. He was a year younger than Ashton Kutcher is today.
Kirsten Dunst is 28 — the same age as Greta Garbo in “Queen Christina” (1933) — and yet she’s still an ingénue. At 32, Hilary Swank tried to act the femme fatale in “The Black Dahlia” (2006) but seemed like a girl playing dress up. Meanwhile, Jane Greer — perhaps the sexiest, slinkiest and scariest film noir heroine of them all — was only 22 when she filmed “Out of the Past” (1947). And Jean Harlow was only 26 when she died. She was a woman from her first appearance on screen.
Perhaps it takes a Depression or a World War II to put miles on people’s spirits and make them seem older. By comparison, later boomers and Generation X’ers have lived their lives in unchallenging times. I’m not complaining — that’s a good thing — who needs calamity? Who needs to feel or act old a minute before it’s necessary?
Yet I wonder: Maybe we’re seeing in our buoyant, middle-aged stars a representation of our own consciousness — the unclouded consciousness of a people who have evaded life’s deepest and most meaningful lessons. That would even be worse than aging, to go through life and miss the point.
Holidaymakers Tony and Judie Ellis watched as the crow alighted on the roof of a water villa next to theirs and calmly began extracting the cigarettes from the packet.
As Judie, 53, rushed to get her camera to record the scene on the Maldives two more crows arrived and picked up the cigarettes in their beaks.
Judie, of Crowborough, East Sussex, said: ‘The crow which flew past with the cigarettes seemed to be dishing them out to the others.
‘It was taking the cigarettes out of the packet and putting them on the roof of the water villa. Then the other crows were picking them up. It was amazing that they seemed to have them in their beaks the right way round.’
The couple, who work as toy inventors, were told after the incident that crows can sometimes be a bit of a nuisance on the islands. They were told that another holidaymaker had a sandwich stolen by a cheeky crow.
Mrs Ellis said: “We have been to the Maldives four times before but never seen any sort of crow behaviour like that. I was lucky to be able to record this on my camera.”
Is this common? To think a woman smoking might be sexy? In my old high school, if you wanted some idea of who the wicked girls were, you’d find out which ones snuck cigarettes in the bathrooms. These weren’t the goody-two-shoes, obey the rules, no-making-out-on-the-first-date girls, no sireee! I remember — well, never mind what I remember.
The point is that smoking and naughtiness have been linked since at least 1917 when silent film star Theda “The Vamp” Bara, billed as the wickedest woman in the world, lounged on a settee wearing a transparent gown and languidly raising a cigarette to her lips. This was five years before a woman in New York City was arrested for smoking in public. It was 11 years before Edward Bernays pulled off the most successful public relations stunt in history on behalf of the American Tobacco Company by arranging for women to stroll down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in the 1929 Easter Parade while smoking. The resulting rotogravure pictures in newspapers sent cigarette sales soaring.
Now, of course, we know that smoking kills people. But the smoking backlash can have the perverse effect of making it seem even more decadent, sort of like eating a bacon-stuffed meatloaf wrapped in bacon. Mmmm. So we get thousands of smoking fetish photos on Flickr, smoking fetish videos on You Tube, and, of course, smoking porn sites galore.
Why can smoking be a turn on? A 2005 paper by University of Southern California sociologist Julie Albright quotes Freud’s old saw about cigars and cigarettes being phallus substitutes: “‘To put it plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego….’ The fetish as symbol of the mother’s penis comes also to represent her desire, thereby affirming that her desire lies with him and not with the father.”
Maybe, but Freud was so wrong about so much.
Many sexually charged smoking images feature beautiful, unsmiling women often wearing miniskirts and heels, leather, severe business attire, or dominatrix gear. The women are sexually aggressive and a little unapproachable. Albright’s own analysis of smoking videos featuring young women or girls suggests that smoking signals “sexual precocity.” In other words, it’s kinda slutty, which some people apparently find sexy (see “Pretty Wild,” cast of). This might be especially true for you since you don’t seem to have a fetish, just a desire for a little variation.
We here at Sexploration strongly oppose tobacco products and the havoc they’ve wreaked in people’s lives. But smoking is legal and having your wife light up a few times a year — without inhaling — probably isn’t going to wreck all the good your low-carb, no-red-meat diet is doing.
In the first quarter of this year, Latvia’s most popular cigarettes were still the brands “Winston“, “Marlboro” and “Monte Carlo“, according to information on excised goods compiled by the State Revenue Service (SRS).
The fourth most popular brand in the first three months of this year was “Bond” cigarettes, followed by “L&M”, with “Red&White” in sixth place, writes LETA.
“Kent” cigarettes were the seventh biggest seller, “Wall Street” and “Partner” were eighth and ninth respectively, while “More” was the tenth most popular brand.
According to SRS figures, the largest producers and importers of tobacco products over the first quarter of 2010 were Philip Morris Latvia, British American Tobacco, JTI Marketing and sales, Rasta 1 and Tabakas nams grupa.
HONG KONG – A eulogy to lung pollution, “Love in a Puff” makes sharing a pack of cigarettes look sexier than sharing a bed as it chronicles how two chain smokers fall in love over a week in the wake of a government crackdown on tobacco in Hong Kong.
While smokers can relish the nicotine nirvana created by every smog-filled frame, even non-smokers will be riveted by director Pang Ho-Cheung’s wry dramatization of a bona fide smoking sub-culture among Hong Kong urbanites with an inventive use of colloquial obscene discourse.
Given a restrictive rating excluding the under-18 demographic, the film scored a so-so $515,000 within two weeks of domestic release, but generated critical hype for its fresh and adult way of handling romance.
It’s hard to recall any film that makes refuse bins a sizzling dramatic focal point. Yet in “Love,” one witnesses the curious phenomenon of “Chinese hotpot” — the activity of people from different backgrounds gathering around a public bin near their offices to smoke and swap tall tales and dirty jokes — an after-effect of a law banning indoor smoking in 2007.
At one such session, a spark is ignited between cosmetics lady Cherie (Miriam Yeung) and advertising executive Jimmy (Shawn Yue). They keep making excuses to see each other until Cherie’s live-in boyfriend notices something fishy. Whether the protagonists finally take the plunge to be together is of less interest than the painfully truthful way Pang depicts their suggestive body language, their guessing games and how their spontaneous rapport is offset by calculated moves to avoid being hurt.
Adeptly paced, there are no big dramas, just slyly droll vignettes like Jimmy wheedling Cherie’s mobile number out of her, or the hidden meaning found in an SMS, or their night out raiding convenience stores to buy up all their cigarettes a few hours before tobacco tax skyrockets. These are punctuated by mock-documentary interviews with their friends, which has the juvenile feel of student films. Technical credits are ordinary but outdoor scenes have a zingy, bustling feel.
By reveling in political incorrectness, sexual obscenity and defiantly homegrown verbal profanity, Pang blows a big raspberry at the local film industry, now fettered by considerations about the China market (and consequently its censorship system). However, some of his typical smart alecky gags backfire.
The salacious details in which Jimmy’s colleagues describe his girlfriend’s infidelity are smutty but not funny. The tone in a scenario where Cherie’s friend Brenda is stood up by her Facebook date is downright mean, yet Pang degrades her further in post-credit shots of her keening wails.
The film partly owes its offbeat humor and candor to emerging writer-director Heiward Mak, who co-wrote the screenplay. Her youthful perspective can be detected in the dialogue, which pins down the restless pulse of Hong Kong’s so-called ‘”instant cook” culture of speedy dating with uncanny accuracy.
The happy-go-lucky Cherie is played fetchingly by Yeung. She is the most sympathetic and least objectified heroine among Pang’s films. Yue is just right as the regular guy capable of both chivalry and commitment phobia.
Los Angeles, – Paris Hilton has been spotted smoking indoors of a Los Angeles club despite California’s ban on smoking. However, it seems that the hotel heiress has an excuse. The stick she was holding was actually exempted from the ban.
According to reports, the 29-year-old socialite was puffing a SmokeStik. After her father Richard Hilton allegedly said he was unhappy with his daughter’s casual smoking, she thought she needed to switch to an e-cigarette to satisfy her nicotine cravings without upsetting her father.
She joins other celebrities who have been spotted with the e-cig, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Britney Spears, and Simon Cowell.
Meanwhile, Hilton, who had launched an album in 2006, is said to be re-launching her pop career. Speculations arose when she said last week that she visited songwriter and music producer Linda Perry.
She wrote: “Went and visited Linda Perry at her studio. She is so cool and her studio is incredible! I respect her so much as a producer, what a talent!”
NEW YORK — The Wall Street Journal “Numbers Guy” blog said that while smokeless tobacco products remain far less popular than cigarettes in the United States, a collection of products that deliver nicotine without smoke—including dip, chew, snuff and newer items that look more like chewing gum—have sparked a heated debate about health risks.
Opponents of these products have presented numbers that suggest smokeless tobacco is an enormous public-health threat akin to cigarettes, while supporters, including some scientists, suggest smokeless items could offer a solution to smoking’s toll on public health. Both claims are based on misinterpretations of the data, said the report.
Critics of smokeless tobacco have spoken out recently about elevated risks of oral cancer and dangers these items pose to children who accidentally ingest them. All of these risks appear to be overblown, said the blog, particularly compared with smoking, which is far more likely to kill than smokeless alternatives.
But researchers who recommend these products as alternatives for smokers seeking to quit also are relying on hazy figures, the report added. Much of their evidence comes from Sweden, where use of smokeless products has risen in recent decades as smoking, and lung-cancer rates, have fallen. Many scientists who study tobacco use remain unpersuaded that the drop in cancer rates stemmed from the increase in use of smokeless products.
In pressing the case for more stringent regulation of smokeless tobacco, a National Cancer Institute physician last week testified before Congress that smokeless-tobacco products can multiply users’ risk of oral cancer by up to 50 times. The American Cancer Society followed up with a similar statement. But as Brad Rodu, professor of oncology at the University of Louisville whose research is funded by the tobacco industry, pointed out in a blog post this week, the risk figure is based on a survey of individuals who had used a form of tobacco called dry snuff, which is inhaled through the nose—a product that now is little used.
Peter Shields, deputy director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University, looked at several studies on smokeless tobacco risk and concluded that smokeless tobacco raises the risk of oral cancer by three to 10 times compared with nontobacco users, rather than 50 times, the Journal blog said.
Dr. Thomas Glynn, director of cancer science and trends for the American Cancer Society, said this week that his organization will no longer use the statistic citing a 50-fold increase in risk.
Several recent studies focused on other risks. This week, a study published online by the journal Pediatrics reported that chewable tobacco products were the second-most-common tobacco product accidentally ingested by children, as reported to poison-control centers nationwide. The study echoed fears among health advocates that newer smokeless items including strips and lozenges could be mistaken by children as candy.
But the study didn’t note that smokeless products—categorized as chewing tobacco—caused just three major incidents, which are defined as life-threatening, disabling or disfiguring, and no deaths from 2005 to 2008, said the Journal.
Add up all the risks of smokeless tobacco, say supporters of its role in smoking prevention, and using smokeless products raises the risk of premature death by only 2% of the amount that taking up smoking does, according to the report, citing Joel Nitzkin, chair of the tobacco control task force of the American Association of Public Health Physicians.
Some scientists agree, said the blog. “If nicotine could be provided in a form that is acceptable and effective as a cigarette substitute, millions of lives could be saved,” reported the U.K.’s Royal College of Physicians’ tobacco advisory group in 2007.
If researchers could be assured smokers really would quit, they would get behind it. “If we can get everybody to switch to smokeless, great,” Gregory Connolly, a professor at Harvard University’s school of public health, told the newspaper. “That would be wonderful.”
But he and others doubt that will happen. They point to surveys showing that smoking rates are higher among smokeless-tobacco users than among the rest of the population.
Much of the available data on smokeless tobacco comes from Sweden. There, men gradually have cut down on smoking and increased their use of snus, a form of moist snuff that doesn’t require spitting, in a shift that began in the 1970s. Lung-cancer deaths among Swedish men peaked in 1978; since then, the death rate has declined to the lowest in the European Union.
This is the major basis for claims that smokeless tobacco can have a massive public-health benefit. But even believers acknowledge they are making some assumptions beyond what can be proven. “I would be just as interested as you in any study that directly shows that snus use is a cause of decline in smoking rates,” Lars Ramstrom, director of the Institute for Tobacco Studies in Stockholm, told the paper. “But I do not have a real hope of ever finding such a study.”
The experience of another effort to induce American smokers to switch clouds the picture for Terry Pechacek, associate director for science in the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s office on smoking and health. He recalled that many smokers switched to low-tar cigarettes beginning in the 1960s, under the mistaken belief they were safer. “We need to be careful not to repeat this experience,” he told the Journal. Public-health officials, he added, are reluctant to advocate any form of tobacco use.
Where there’s smoking, there’s ire. Unfortunately, Kelly Clarkson’s just landed in the crosshairs.
The original American Idol winner created quite a stir when billboards and TV ads popped up in Jakarta promoting her concert—and its sponsor, Indonesian cigarette company L.A. Lights. As with Alicia Keys before her, antismoking activists immediately challenged Clarkson to cancel the show or risk sending a bad message to her young fans.
Alas, Miss Independent claims she knew nothing of the matter.
“My morning began with finding out that I am all over billboards, TV ads and other media formats alongside a tobacco company who, unbeknownst to me, is sponsoring my Jakarta date on my current tour,” she writes on her blog. “I was not made aware of this and am in no way an advocate or an ambassador for youth smoking. I’m not even a smoker, nor have I ever been.”
That said, she has no intention of canceling her April 29 performance.
“I can’t justify penalizing my fans for someone else’s oversight,” she explains. “This is a lose-lose situation for me and I am not happy about it but the damage has been done and I refuse to cancel on my fans.
“I think the hardest part of situations like this is getting personally attacked for something I was completely unaware of and being used as some kind of political pawn,” she concludes. (Guess she doesn’t pay attention to the fine print when she signs those big-bucks concert contracts.)
But the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids isn’t buying Clarkson’s “for the fans” spin.
She “has let down her fans and chosen to be a spokesperson for the tobacco industry” by going on with the show, says CTFK spokeswoman Marina Carter. “In doing so, Ms. Clarkson is allowing her name, image and talent to be used to promote cigarettes to Indonesian youth.
We again call on Ms. Clarkson to withdraw tobacco industry sponsorship of her concert and to demand the removal of any tobacco-branded advertising and promotions associated with it.”
It was in front of 200 Imperial Tobacco staff over dinner in the Spanish town of Marbella that it hit her. “I proposed a toast to him and suddenly it felt very real – the realisation that he really is going,” Alison Cooper says. “It’s weird thinking of Gareth not being there any more.”
Gareth Davis’s departure after 14 years as chief executive of Imperial Tobacco will mark the end of an era at the Bristol-based company. In May this year he hands the baton to Cooper, his chief operating officer since last March and an Imperial staffer for 11 years.
A larger-than-life character who has turned Imperial into the world’s fourth-largest cigarette manufacturer, Davis will be a hard act to follow. Cooper, 17 years his junior and a mother of two, suggests there might however be more continuity than meets the eye.
“We’re informal. I had canapés at Buckingham Palace the other night and still had my pasty at Paddington on the way home. That’s very much Gareth’s style as well,” Cooper says.
The love of a pasty, a pint and the occasional cigar apart, the City should not expect a Davis carbon copy. “I’m probably more collaborative. I wouldn’t say that’s not Gareth’s style but it’s certainly one of my hallmarks. I like dialogue.”
It was in that spirit that Cooper gathered her top managers together in Marbella this month to explain that life would be different under a new boss: “We need a change in mindset. Tobacco has been traditional in the way it has operated. We want to move from being a tobacco manufacturer to an FMCG [fast moving consumer goods] company.”
It might be jargon-heavy but in the world of Imperial that’s a radical statement. As the company prepares to update shareholders on its latest trading tomorrow, the City will be looking for news on the integration of Altadis, the Franco-Spanish cigarette group bought for £11bn in 2007. Such deals have been the trend in tobacco land in recent years as the principal players have competed to consolidate the industry. With the major plays now complete, the focus is shifting.
“In recent years at Imperial it’s been about deal, cost out, integration; deal, cost out, integration,” Cooper says. “This is the logical next move. We’ve acquired assets; the next stage is leveraging them. The focus now is out-and-out on driving sales.”
Cooper is upbeat about the reception from her managers, but the 43-year-old needs little backing. “If there’s a direction I want to go then that’s where we’re going and I expect people to line up behind me, get stuff done and done quickly,” she says. “Historically some people have described me as harsh but fair. I’m quite direct,” she adds with a smile.
That is typical of Cooper – a mixture of the informal and the corporate, the light-hearted and the driven, high heels and cigars.
“If I didn’t wear a skirt, I’d probably be one of the boys,” she says. A tomboy then? “That’s more like me. I do like my pint of Guinness.”
It is that make-up which has in all likelihood helped drive her to the top of a male-dominated industry. Cooper will become only the fifth female chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, but all the more striking for coming from the world of cigarettes.
“It’s not something I ever think about. It’s an ‘And?’ It’s a shrug of the shoulders,” Cooper says.
She’s not a Harriet Harman disciple then? The minister for women and equality has vowed to break up the old boy’s network in British business.
“Boards should make selections on the basis of merit,” Cooper says. “I’m appalled by the idea of forced distributions on boards. I find that rude to women. I don’t think it’s the old boys’ network that she’d depict.”
That dismissal rings true considering Imperial’s wider relationship with the Government. The tobacco industry is under political siege and while much of the regulation that has been introduced has proved sensible – whether bans on smoking in public places or sports advertising – at times Labour seems determined to all but wipe out the industry.
Andy Burnham, the health secretary, has set a pre-election pledge to bring the smoking population down from 21pc of British adults to 10pc by 2020.
It is a pledge to which Cooper gives short shrift. “It’s a headline-grabbing quote. We recognise we’re an industry with a controversial and risky product and we have always supported sensible regulation,” she says. But she points out that a core of smokers will carry on regardless. “They can have every risk in the book thrown at them, but actually they enjoy smoking and choose to smoke A key focus will be holding back the tide of ridiculous regulation.”
Cooper is savvy enough to know that tobacco will never be feted by the Government or the general public. Her first goal is merely to promote joined-up thinking. She says that excessive regulation will start a dangerous trend for both consumers and the Government – the spread of the illicit trade, with either non-duty paid or counterfeit cigarettes being shipped in from eastern Europe.
“The Government has got to think about whether it wants this product in the hands of a responsible industry or in the hands of crooks.”
In Ireland a combination of regulation and high excise duties has handed illicit products a 30pc share of the market. The same could easily happen in the UK, where the Government currently takes more than £10bn a year in excise duties.
A further frustration for Cooper is the lack of any dialogue between Imperial and the Department of Health. “There is a huge reluctance to talk to us,” she says.
It might well take a change of Government to alter the regulatory status quo and Cooper isn’t backward in nailing her colours to the Tory mast.
“It will make a difference if we end up with a different colour government,” she says.
She is more upbeat about her standing in the City. She joined Imperial from what is now Pricewaterhouse Coopers in 1999 to work in M&A support and strategy planning and is well known to analysts and institutional shareholders. Nevertheless she’s taking nothing for granted.
“I’ve talked to many of the investors since day one, but I would be naive to think that following a handover there isn’t a bit of a proof-of-the-pudding period,” she says.
One focus will be persuading many in the City that Imperial – with a 45pc share of the UK market with brands including Lambert & Butler and Davidoff – is as attractive an investment play as British American Tobacco, its more emerging markets-focused, London-listed rival.
She explains that while much of the developed world is seeing volume declines of 1pc to 2pc a year, the more aggressive excise regimes allow for price increases to maintain profits. She points out, though, that the group is investing in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and in Africa.
Potential acquisitions – which Cooper insists will be limited to bolt-on deals for at least a few years – could come in Algeria, Lebanon, Taiwan and Thailand.
In the meantime the focus will be on paying down the Altadis debt, driving sales and finding the odd politician to talk to.
Cooper will need plenty of pasties to keep her going.
Not even Snoop Dogg is immune to the city’s crackdown on smoking in nightclubs. The rapper, known for his affinity for funny-smelling tobacco, lit a cigarette inside M2 nightclub Saturday night. Owner Joey Morrissey rushed over to tell him to put it out. “But it’s just a ciga rette,” Dogg responded. He put out the smoke but remained rather subdued until he and his entourage left around 4:30 a.m. “Normally he would get on the mike and rap, but he seemed depressed all night because he couldn’t smoke,” said a witness.
Gossip Girl star Taylor Momsen doesn’t care if anyone thinks she’s got an attitude.
“I don’t read that crap that describes me as having an attitude, but I don’t know why that’s a bad thing,” she tells Parade’s Jeanne Wolf. “Attitude is in the eye of the beholder. I didn’t get into this to be a role model for 7-year-olds. I have no interest in doing that, you know? If parents don’t like some of the stuff I do then they shouldn’t let their kids watch me.”
Like her smoking. “I smoke, so what? Why do people give a s— what a 16-year-old girl who they’ve never met does? It’s not like I’m sitting there going, ‘Kids, you should go buy a pack of cigarettes.’ When I walk outside with a cigarette and someone takes a picture of it and puts it on the Internet, its not my problem. I’m just living my life and I’m not gonna live my life for other people.”
Medical researchers have examined the incidence of Parkinson’s disease among long term smokers and have found an inverse relationship between Parkinson’s disease and smoking. The Paging Dr. Gupta blog reports as follows.
“The study, released today in the journal Neurology looked at the lifetime smoking history of more than 300,000 people, and confirmed the inverse relationship between smoking and Parkinson’s disease, established in earlier scientific studies. But, researchers say they’ve found a critical new piece to the puzzle: It appears to be the length of time one has been a smoker – not the number of cigarettes smoked – that has the most effect on disease risk reduction.”
Medical experts hasten to assure the public that they are not advocating that people take up smoking. But they do want to know what chemicals in cigarettes reduce the risks of Parkinson’s disease.
Perhaps this story might wake up the public to the possible medical benefits of tobacco. Certainly, smoking a pack a day is a poor idea, but there are reputable doctors who advocate the therapeutic use of tobacco. The Access Excellence web site reports as follows on the possible medical uses of tobacco.
“Nicotine in tobacco form accounts for millions of deaths each year from cancer, emphysema and heart disease. Yet, in certain neurologic and psychiatric conditions, nicotine can have useful therapeutic effects, reported scientists at the inaugural conference of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.
“Nicotine has long been a useful tool for researchers interested in probing the nervous system. Although the health risks associated with its intake via tobacco products has tended to tarnish society’s view of nicotine, it is important to recognize that nicotine may have therapeutic potential with a number of disease states,” noted Ovid Pomerleau, Ph.D., Director of the Behavioral Medicine Program, University of Michigan and President of the SRNT.
Nicotine is one of the most studied of all drugs. At the beginning of the century, the earliest research into neurotransmitters involved the effects of nicotine, indeed the first neurotransmitter receptor identified was the nicotine receptor. Nicotine mimics the actions of acetylcholine and has been shown to modulates many neurotransmitters.”
The article lists Tourette’s Syndrome, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease as possible candidates for treatment with some form of tobacco derivative. Tobacco has been in use for centuries. It is well studied. If it can be established that it has medical and industrial uses, perhaps it could be grown for purposes other than smoking. It might even be possible to work nicotine into a beverage, much as caffeine is used now.
With all of the interest in herbal medicine, it is odd that tobacco has been excluded. Hopefully, the medical profession will take a second look at tobacco as a medicinal herb. We have put a lot of energy into demonising “big tobacco” and the tobacco lobby. It makes not only medical but economic sense to rebuild a tobacco industry that improves public health rather than endangers it. There is no doubt that this strategy could save and create jobs as well as improve life and longevity. It would be bitterly ironic if what we have learned about the dangers of smoking were to blind us to the possible life saving qualities of tobacco. Science should not be a slave to the fads of the age.
George Washington Carver discovered hundreds of uses for peanuts, as food and in industry. The time seems ripe for tobacco to have its own George Washington Carver. Tobacco clearly has many uses. For the good of humanity, it is about time that we discover them.
To get Roger Evans riled, ask him about the new state law that bans smoking in nearly every bar and restaurant.
In a monologue punctuated with expletives, he will tell you the law is the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. Property owners should be able to make their own rules when it comes to smoking. Simply talking about it makes him so angry that he lights up a cigarette.
First, though, Evans, 67, slides off his barstool at Marcom’s Tavern in North Raleigh and steps outside into the cold wind.
As much as smokers and some business owners have complained about the law, nearly all of them comply with it. There are more than 24,000 businesses in the state that are subject to the new regulations. During the first week of February, the state logged 71 complaints about potential violations. No businesses have been fined.
The relatively low number of complaints shows “the coordination we’ve put into this at the state and local level is working,” said Jim Martin, director of policy and programs for the Tobacco Prevention and Control Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health.
County health departments are responsible for enforcing the law. Health department officials check out complaints, which can be verified only with evidence, such as a customer smoking or the presence of ashtrays. Verified complaints trigger a warning. After two written warnings, businesses can face fines of up to $200 per day.
Since the law took effect, county health departments across the state have sent only 11 first-level warning letters. In all, there have been 608 complaints statewide, with the number generally decreasing week-to-week.
Enforcement has added another chore for health department staff, but the workload varies from county to county.
Johnston County has received only three complaints, one of which was described as “spurious” by Larry Sullivan, the county’s director of environmental health.
Wake has received 54, only one of which was reported in the most recent week of statistics. The extra work “has been taxing,” said health director Sue Lynn Ledford. When a complaint comes in, a department employee is dispatched to the bar or restaurant to reiterate the new rules. Schedules have been adjusted so someone is available when bars are open.
Health departments are more or less on their own in paying for the enforcement. Each county received a bit of money to help with education efforts, the amount varying depending on the county’s number of bars and restaurants. Wake County received $18,718. Much of that money, Ledford said, will be used to hire a temporary employee to help educate business owners.
Modeling its enforcement after other states, North Carolina uses a statewide database to collect complaints. Nearly all of the complaints, which are gathered over the phone and on the Web, are anonymous. But Lee Storrow, a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill, provided his name when he filed a complaint in January against Players, a Franklin Street bar.
He saw two people smoking on the same night but has been back several times since and has not witnessed any smoking.
“It’s good to see people complying with the law,” he said.
Kathy Marcom, owner of Marcom’s Tavern in Raleigh, said the new law has hurt business. She estimates that 75 percent of her more than 400 members are smokers, many of whom stayed home on Super Bowl Sunday.
“Last year we were packed in here,” she said. “This year we had maybe 10 people.”
The Wake County Health Department has received 14 complaints about Marcom’s, more than any other establishment.
Marcom originally thought her bar was exempt from the new rule because it does not receive a sanitation score from the health department. She serves no food and uses disposable cups. So for the first couple of weeks, people continued to smoke in her bar.
But after a visit from the health department, the smokers, surly or not, have been sent outside.
BY MATT EHLERS, Newsobserver
Feb 15, 2010
Culinary students standing outside and smoking cigarettes are such a common sight on Downtown’s Liberty Avenue that they’re practically a city landmark.
Dressed in their kitchen whites, the Le Cordon Bleu students stand out among the other smokers in business or casual garb who cluster outdoors on their breaks. They’re also a vivid and troubling symbol of an industry where smoking has long been accepted.
Forty percent of the people employed in the food and beverage industry smoke — nearly twice the national average, according to the 2000 U.S. census numbers.
“Hospitality workers have three times the [average] risk of lung cancer, which is 50 percent higher than any other industry,” said Stacy Kriedeman, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
These health disparities helped motivate Pennsylvania’s September 2008 ban on smoking in most restaurants and bars as well as other businesses and public places. Numerous cities and states have enacted similar bans, although they vary in scope and often contain exemptions.
According to the Pennsylvania Restaurant Association, 470,000 people are employed by restaurants and bars in the state. The ban eliminated a primary source of secondhand smoke in the lives of these workers and may already have saved the lives of approximately 75 Pennsylvania hospitality workers, state health officials estimate.
Still, the high rates of smoking persist within the industry.
Workers in hectic restaurant kitchens often attribute the prevalence of smoking to a fast-paced, stressful environment and a culture that long has tolerated cigarette breaks but not breathers for fresh air or mental health.
Also, smoking traditionally has accompanied a certain image of the chef lifestyle.
Even after he became a father and purportedly quit smoking, original bad-boy chef, author and television host Anthony Bourdain continued to preach a pro-smoking gospel.
“I’m amused by food nerds who say, ‘I’d never eat at a restaurant where the chef smokes.’ Almost all the chefs I know smoke. … I don’t want to encourage anyone to quit smoking. In my experience, it really does make you cool,” Mr. Bourdain told Time magazine during a 2007 interview.
Contestants on the Bravo reality show “Top Chef,” which includes some of the most successful young chefs in the industry, are frequently seen smoking on the air. Questions about them smoking often come up on fan discussion boards, and people most often are curious about whether it impairs the chefs’ crucial ability to taste and smell.
Kevin Sousa, who’s made a name for himself locally for his creative, often cutting-edge food, plans to open the new Salt of the Earth restaurant in Garfield this year. He has never smoked.
“I think that smoking affects your palate, absolutely,” he said. “It affects your taste for salt, especially some of the subtleties. The balance of a dish is affected if you smoked four cigarettes that day.”
Not everyone in the culinary world agrees. “If anything, [smoking] makes me more conscious of what I put on the plate,” said Rick Salensky, a line cook at Solstice Restaurant in Greensburg.
Mr. Salensky has worked in the culinary industry for more than 15 years, and he’s been a smoker for almost as long. He’s confident that it hasn’t harmed his palate. “I’ve never had anyone tell me I over season or under season,” he said.
Most research on smoking has dealt with its deadlier effects, and only a few studies have examined its relationship to taste and smell. But some recent studies have concluded that along with other health hazards, smoking does significantly increase chances of experiencing a serious problem with smell, while heavy smoking increases risks to both smell and taste.
Ryan Soose, assistant professor of otolaryngology at the University of Pittsburgh, cited the results of a 2008 study in Germany in which 1,312people were given standardized taste and smell tests. Comprehensive health surveys were used to determine the relationship between smoking and impairment of smell or taste.
The results concluded that smoking is bad for the sense of smell and taste, and “… the more you smoke, the worse your risk is,” Dr. Soose said. But the results also indicated that people can restore taste and smell nearly to their original state if they quit smoking, he said.
He also cautioned that just as every smoker does not get lung cancer, not every smoker will experience a problem with the sense of smell or taste.
This information is still relatively new, so it’s no surprise it hasn’t filtered down to the general population — or even to the future chefs who should find it most worrisome. Culinary schools may stress the damage smoking can do to palates, but students and cooks tend to believe what they’ve experienced.
“I tend to over spice things because [smoking] kills your taste buds,” said Dave Hrycik, a student at Le Cordon Bleu (formerly Pennsylvania Culinary Institute), Downtown. Yet Mr. Hrycik, 31, said that conviction hasn’t made it any easier for him to quit smoking.
Cordon Bleu student Joe Hammer, 21, of Bellevue, however, said he does not believe smoking has affected his palate, calling that fear “an old wives’ tale.”
The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., the nation’s largest and one of its best known culinary schools, participates in educational events such as the National Cancer Society’s Smoke Out November. Its students services department also provides smoking cessation information at health fairs.
But chef-instructor Mark Ainsworth emphasized informal classroom discussions of smoking’s effect on the palate as an essential tool for influencing students. School officials don’t track the number of students who smoke, so it’s not clear if their efforts to educate the students are a significant deterrent.
Smoking is still common enough that the school has built smoking gazebos on the campus to contain litter and keep students from congregating near doorways. And it’s a common joke at culinary schools that students who crave a cigarette volunteer to take out the trash, Mr. Ainsworth said.
In Pittsburgh, Le Cordon Bleu’s William Hunt, dean of culinary arts, emphasized that school officials look down on smoking and that few of its instructors smoke. But he acknowledged that the school offers no programs or support groups to discourage smoking.
Whole Foods Market has adopted a smoking-cessation program as part of its health insurance coverage for workers.
Participants in the six-month program receive educational materials online or through the mail and up to eight telephone coaching sessions with trained cessation specialists, as well as unlimited calls to the specialists when they have questions. Over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapy is included in prescription drug coverage.
Eat’n Park Hospitality Group also offers access to a similar program for employees who qualify for health care by working more than 32 hours each week.
Some small companies offer more informal incentives.
Jeff Cohen, outgoing president of the Western Pennsylvania chapter of the National Restaurant Association, has offered small quit-smoking bonuses to his employees at the Smallman Street Deli “just to give them the extra incentive.” While not all participants were able to quit successfully, Mr. Cohen said the program was worth it, primarily because of the long-term health impact on employees who did.
Such programs still seem to be relatively rare in the culinary industry, however, and especially so for workers in small restaurants and bars.
Mr. Salensky of Greensburg started smoking at age 15 when he got his first job as a dishwasher. When he took breaks, he said, everyone around him was smoking, and he wanted to fit in.
He’s tried to quit, he said, but “all it takes is that one Saturday rush where you want to pull your hair out, and you revert back to what you know.” He believes that more programs or support from employers might spur more workers to quit, saying that at a previous job where a high proportion of cooks smoked, they spent their entire break complaining about how they wished they didn’t.
Le Cordon Bleu student Dean Orner has noticed that at the Eat’n Park restaurant where he works, his employers are cracking down on smoking.
“They don’t want you standing outside smoking or anything like that,” he said.
Tobacco Free Allegheny, a nonprofit organization dedicated to decreasing tobacco use, has sent representatives to health fairs at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Downtown, and to the Bidwell Training Center on the North Side, both of which have culinary programs, hoping to educate the students about the risks of smoking.
Executive director Cindy Thomas said Tobacco Free Allegheny would like to offer more to culinary and other technical schools but budget cuts have made it difficult to staff programs. Still, she said, “we would try to work with anybody [who] called us [for help].”
Ms. Thomas encouraged hospitality workers and anyone else who wants to quit smoking to call the Pennsylvania free Quitline at 1-800-QUIT-NOW, calling it “a good option for people who have irregular schedules and work shifts.”
For a limited time, people who call and commit to a quit date will receive a free kit containing a four-week supply of nicotine patches as well as other information aimed at helping them succeed.
February 07, 2010
By China Millman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
It remains to be seen who will win the Super bowl, but it has suddenly become clear who will win the smoking ban debate in Indiana.
A bill to ban smoking in public places passed the house 73 to 26 earlier this week-but that bill is going nowhere in the senate.
Senate President Pro-tem David Long says that economic times are tough and a statewide ban could hurt business. Long says the senate isn’t ready to consider a ban at this time.
“Well the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House are the two bosses so to speak and they make the calls,” said Ind. Sen. Jim Arnold, (D) LaPorte. “That’s a power that’s awarded to the party in the majority and that’s his call and I respect that.”
Still, some insist that Indiana’s reluctance to approve a statewide smoking ban is earning it a new nickname. “The ash tray of the Midwest, unfortunately, but that is what we have been termed,” said Jill Sabo with Tobacco Free St. Joe County.
It’s an alleged reputation Indiana isn’t likely to lose anytime soon, despite Sabo’s willingness to do so. “Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin have all gone tobacco free, comprehensively, and I think that we’re ready.”
Senator Arnold agrees. “I would like to address it, let’s put it to rest one way or another, and then let’s move on to other issues and quit spending time every session on certain issues that seem to raise their ugly head every session.”
Senator Arnold discounts the contention that economic conditions should derail the debate. “I know that all surveys show Indiana is the second largest smoking state in the country, next to West Virginia. It can call it economy if they want, if they chose to do so, they probably have their facts and figures to support that, but sooner or later we’ve got to start looking at medical costs-what it’s costing for second hand smoke. How much money we’re spending, Indiana spends about $2 billion a year in smoke related medical issues in this state.”
Sen. Arnold does see one advantage to waiting until next year to address a possible ban. Next year’s session is a ‘long’ one, while this year’s session is short-slated to end in mid March.
Feb 4, 2010
Mark Peterson
The Russian parliament’s plans to sharply increase taxes on tobacco would create a boom in illegal trade in cigarettes and ultimately harm public health, according to the Finance Ministry.
The State Duma is considering a bill to raise excise duties on tobacco threefold in 2011 as part of government efforts to improve public health in Russia, which has one of the highest smoking rates in the world.
The ministry fears the bill would trigger a rise in illegal cigarettes sales, after similar laws have seen illegal tobacco markets thriving in the Baltics.
“High excise duties would prompt people to buy cheap and illicit tobacco products. This would hardly be to the benefit of public health,” the ministry said in a report.
Cigarettes in Russia are the cheapest in the developed world, with smokers paying around a dollar for pack a that costs $8 in the United States. Russian filterless cigarettes – including the notorious “papirosy” – cost less than 30 cents a pack.
The World Health Organization says more than 60% of Russian men are smokers, and about 400,000 Russians die from smoking-related diseases annually.
With smoking and alcoholism cited as two of Russia’s most widespread public health problems, Russian men have a life expectancy of only 60 years. President Dmitry Medvedev has begun to try to cut alcohol consumption, with a new law coming into effect on January 1 that set the minimum price of a standard half-liter bottle of vodka at 89 rubles (about $3).
John Burton Race is a Michelin starred chef, made famous by the Channel 4 series French Leave and its sequel Return of the Chef. In 1995 Burton Race joined an elite group of chefs as the winner of a coveted Catey Award – the Oscar of the UK hospitality industry. There is no man in the UK who doesn’t know this famous name.
A mentor on BBC cooking show Kitchen Criminals and a judge of ITV cooking show Britain’s Best Dish decided to attempt quitting smoking by means of participating in a TV show “Celebrities Quitters” broadcasting on Channel Five. In this show, which starts tonight, are participating five stars, inclusively the South Devon foodie. “Celebrities Quitters” will follow these volunteers during 10 days and will show strength of will of each participant not to try killing weed.
Together with valiant celebrities as former Birds of a Feather star Linda Robson, Chloe Madeley, daughter of Richard Madeley, Julie Finnigan, actor Paul Danan and TV psychic Derek Acorah, Mr. Burton Race determined to change his life and to kick this obsessive habit.
During an interview with Mr. Burton Race, we have found out that he wants to quit smoking and spend the money he saves towards his family holiday.
“I want to use the money I wasted killing myself on other things. At the moment, personally, I am not loaded, to put it mildly. It has been two years since we have had a family holiday and I want to go away for a week,” says he. He realized that smoking made a kind of distance between him and his family. Great sums of money he handed out in vain, only purchasing this smoking drug and didn’t pay attention at his beloved persons’ wishes and desires. The cookery specialist is convinced that with the assistance of this show he will change himself and will achieve his goal without fail.
The outstanding expert of culinary art also added that he had problems based on smoking not only in his family but at his job as well. “My partner Susie was absolutely adamant that I smell terrible and that she was completely repulsed by me smoking the amount I was smoking,” asserted Mr. Burton Race.
”Another motivating reason that has impelled me to take part in this grandiose show is my health. When you have children and dependents and when your chest hurts, when you walk up a very steep hill or ride a horse furiously across a field and you can’t breathe, it is already evident sign that it is something wrong and something has to be done,” sighed he.
Mr. Burton Race stressed that there are several things he wants to gain from quitting tobacco.
“I want to feel fitter, be fitter. I want to live longer,” said chef. And it is reasonable.
The first series will demonstrate the meeting of our risky smokers each other and the support team who reveals results of their medical tests. Then celebrities will have possibility to smoke their last cigarette before their first smoke-free evening.
The series will be live broadcasted every week night for the next 10 days on Channel Five at 7.30pm.
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and suddenly it felt very real – the realisation that he really is going,” Alison Cooper says. “It’s weird thinking of Gareth not being there any more.”
