Tobacco.org

The Food and Drug Administration, which is facing the most controversial regulatory challenge in its history -- the effort to regulate tobacco -- and has been without a commissioner since David A. Kessler departed the post in February. In the meantime, the agency is being run by a management troika with Michael A. Friedman designated as lead deputy commissioner.

A first-offense misdemeanor conviction for selling tobacco to a minor now carries a maximum sentence of 30 days of community service and a fine of up to $1,000. The first-offense infraction proposed by the House would carry a possible $25 fine. Arnold and other members of the House committee said they did not think store clerks should be penalized more than the underage youngsters who buy tobacco. Minors who buy cigarettes can be charged with an infraction.

Under the FDA contract, the state will send 15- and 16-year-olds into stores to try to buy tobacco products. About 250 of these visits will take place each month over the next eight months throughout Illinois, said Arabel Alva Rosales, director of the Liquor Control Commission.

In response to news reports that cigarette maker Philip Morris funded three of his overseas trips, Gov. Tommy Thompson on Thursday called for the National Governors' Association to conduct background checks to determine who is really paying for any future travel. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this week that Philip Morris helped pay for recent Thompson trips to London, southern Africa and Australia through payments to non-profit groups. Thompson has said he might have not made the trips had he known who paid for them.

Pro-tobacco interests used letter-writing and telephone campaigns to urge the average smoker to contact lawmakers about higher cigarette taxes as part of $750,000 they spent lobbying smoking issues, an Associated Press review found. In late May, Philip Morris Inc. set up a booth at an auto race at the state fairgrounds in Milwaukee, offering to mail letters to lawmakers criticizing a proposed tax hike if people walking by would sign them. "They said, `What do you want to do, send a mild one, a wimpy one or a harsh one?' " recalled Daniel O. Manz, a forklift driver from Milwaukee. Philip Morris Inc. and its subsidiary, Miller Brewing Co. in Milwaukee, spent a combined $598,023 and about 1,429 hours lobbying state lawmakers on smoking-related issues the first half of this year. . . . "We are always looking for opportunities to reach out and communicate" with customers and retailers, McCormick said.

You might breathe a little easier with Air Supply, a personal air purifier that helps to kill odors and germs. The purifier, which is battery operated and needs no filters, is small enough to wear around the neck or in a shirt pocket. The purifier projects a stream of ions, which eliminate odors, germs and pollutants such as cigarette smoke from the air that passes through it. When the wearer inhales, cool air wafts around the face. The purifier covers a range of about 400 square feet. The purifier ($110 plus shipping and handling) comes with a neck cord, cigarette lighter adapter and a standard power cord. Contact the IonAir Co. at (800) 884-1611 for more information or to order.

I've always loved all those old movies that glamorize smoking. But it never made me want to smoke. I've always loved those old movies that glamorize bank robbers. But I never wanted to rob a bank. . . The First Lady is straying into commissar territory. The purpose of movies is not moral uplift, and Mrs. Clinton does not know what is good for everybody. A holier-than-thou celluloid universe where people are portrayed as we want them to be, rather than how they are, is not art or entertainment. It's propaganda. It is their flaws that make characters interesting. . .

"You know the stupid thing about this. Jesse Helms is a big supporter of the tobacco industry. If it weren't for him, these people wouldn't need chemotherapy. He should be thankful." JAY LENO, on Senator Jesse Helms not supporting Weld's nomination as ambassador of Mexico because of his stance on marijuana

The Food and Drug Administration is offering stores posters designed to dull the anger of customers who are asked for ID cards before they buy tobacco. . . The FDA has printed posters with the pictures of two young women -- one who is 16 and the other 25 but who look similar. The caption reads, "Which one is 16?"

President Clinton says he strongly supports the decision of Senators John McCain (Republican-Arizona) and Russell Feingold (Democrat-Wisconsin) to seek a Senate floor vote on their campaign finance reform bill in September.

Turkey's pro-secular government plans to impose an extra 20% consumption tax on tobacco and alcohol to finance a controversial education reform curbing religious schools, State Minister Eyup Asik said Friday.

The Ministry of the Environment said the crackdown is designed to protect nonsmokers from the harmful effects of secondhand tobacco smoke. After the new regulations go into effect Aug. 15, smokers can light up legally only at home, in their cars, a handful of areas without air conditioning and in special smoking rooms. Even smoking outdoors is a no-no in public places where two or more people get in line, such as bus stops. Schools and junior colleges are to be totally smoke-free. At universities, the ban applies only to covered structures.

The law . . . requires licensing of tobacco retailers and annual undercover compliance investigations of retailers . . . Other provisions of the law ban display of single packages of cigarettes to discourage theft, although tobacco shops are exempted. . . Store owners, clerks and people under 18 are subject to a number of new civil penalties in addition to criminal prohibitions contained in current law banning sale of cigarettes to minors.

A tax-cut bill hammered out between the White House and Republican congressional leaders won almost unanimous support yesterday from Virginians in the House. Only Rep. Robert C. Scott, D-3rd District, voted against the bill. . . He said the cuts were weighted too heavily to favor the wealthy. Also yesterday, Sens. Charles S. Robb, a Democrat, and John W. Warner, a Republican, voted for the balanced-budget legislation. On the tax measure, Warner voted yes and Robb was one of eight Democrats voting no.

Mr. Graves and Ms. Glenn are advocates of industrial hemp, a form of Cannabis sativa, or marijuana, that has been outlawed in the United States since 1937. "I'm not interested in giving up the tobacco unless I have to," said Ms. Glenn. "What we are interested in is another cash crop. "And there's a great sense of urgency among the hemp people to provide another ca

Smoking will be prohibited in the common areas beginning Aug. 8. "It had nothing to do with outside pressures," said mall manager Patrick Day. From 300 to 500 of the mall's customers were surveyed on the matter before the decision was made a few weeks ago, Day said. "Since our customers are our bread and butter, we did what our customers said."

Philip Morris USA has set up a booth at the 1997 Ohio State Fair to promote its Marlboro tobacco products and promotional items. . . Just as early as March, the Liggett Group admitted that tobacco is addictive, causes major health problems and that the tobacco industry has intentionally marketed its products to children for years. . . In Ohio, 18,000 die annually due to tobacco related illnesses. . . "It's hypocritical for the state to sue the tobacco industry to recoup the millions of dollars Ohio has spent treating smoking related illnesses through Medicaid and other sources, while the Ohio Expositions Commission allows Philip Morris to promote its lethal product at a family event," Chippas said.

The Food and Drug Administration contracted with Illinois and Texas to enforce the agency's regulation that prohibits retailers from selling cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products to children under age 18. Under the contract, Illinois will conduct about 250 unnanounced compliance checks monthly over the next eight months, while Texas will conduct about 300 such checks. In each case, 15- and 16-year-olds in typical attire will attempt to buy cigarettes or tobacco in retail stores.

The government released a state-by-state list of poor health habits today, a gauge of risks for chronic disease and causes of death around the country. . . In Kentucky, 27.8 percent of those surveyed said they smoked cigarettes, the highest among all states. Greg Lawther of the Kentucky Department of Public Health sighed when he heard that Utah's 13.2 percent was the lowest.

Gender Bender: 7% of women say they have smoked a cigar this year... . Joe Camel syndrome: Those aged 18 to 34 have a less negative view of the Philip Morris tobacco company than any other age group.

Dr. Frank B. Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues there and elsewhere examined the prevalence of asthma and wheezing in a group of 705 fifth-graders attending public schools in Chicago, Illinois. . . The researchers noted that the "...overwhelming evidence that children's exposure to environmental cigarette smoking either before or after birth is associated with many health and development problems." Based on the results of this study and previous research, they recommend that "...family smoking of any kind...be strongly discouraged. Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol 1997;79:80-84.

Many parents of infants at high risk for allergy and asthma do not know about environmental control preventions measures they can take, and therefore do not practice them. This is the conclusion of Dr. David P. Joyce of the University of Toronto and co-investigators who report the results of a questionnaire in the July issue of the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

"The billboards are part of the urban design, they form a visual corridor along the Strip and we wanted to preserve and enhance that," said Sarah Lejeune, who was the project manager of the Sunset Specific Plan, launched by the city of West Hollywood last year to encourage creative urban design along the boulevard from Doheny to Crescent Heights and to assuage residents' concerns about their views getting blocked and the increasing use of neon. . . . Resident [Bettie] Wagner has lived behind the landmark Marlboro man billboard for the last 25 years, which due to its unusual size and shape was dealt with separately in the plan. "The Marlboro man is probably the nicest one on the Strip -- the people miss him" said Wagner last week of the temporarily vacant billboard structure. Wagner hasn't always felt so fondly about the tobacco icon. In the early 1980s she succeeded in getting the Marlboro man made three feet shorter, as he blocked her view along Sunset. (The infamous cowboy is undergoing a face lift. When he reappears, the cigarette will be gone, as will the horse, and the brand name will be less apparent.) "I am getting a much younger man and he's much better looking, so I can't complain," Wagner chuckled, as she contemplated the prospect of a more politically correct cowboy and one the Strip's most enduring landmarks.

SMOKING -- A measure to cut teen-age smoking rates was weakened from a proposal Pataki made last December. Senate Republicans rejected a ban on self-service cigarette displays. Retailers also will not have to pay a higher licensing fee to finance local efforts to keep children from buying cigarettes. The $2.5 million will come from the state's coffers, instead.
INDIAN TAX EXEMPTION -- Pataki's proposal to make official the tax-free sales of cigarettes and gasoline on Indian reservations appears dead. The matter presumably will be decided in court later this year as convenience stores push to get the state to stop the tax-free sales.

Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth has collected a sizable campaign fund for his 1998 re-election effort, giving him a head start on his Democratic opponents. . . Faircloth's recent contributors include such prominent executives as . . . A.C. Monk Jr., the Farmville tobacco distributor . . . He also raised about a quarter million dollars from PACs. Faircloth, who is a member of the Senate Banking Committee, received $37,231 from bank or financial institutions PACs. Some of his biggest PAC contributors included . . . Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. ($6,166),

Dr. Jed Rose of Duke University runs one of the country's leading laboratories designed to learn how nicotine grips most of the nation's 46 million smokers. . . The hows and whys of nicotine addiction intrigue Rose, 45, a psychiatrist, and impel the research at the Nicotine Research Center. "The basic question is why people want the things they want. Why do people really pursue them," Rose said. "I got hooked on nicotine research." Rose works at an office just a short drive from the headquarters of cigarette-maker Liggett Group and for a university founded on tobacco money.

With the planned demise of Joe Camel, collectors of tobacco advertising merchandise are watching to see whether the market for items bearing the cartoon figure will heat up.

Across the nation, the successful legal assault on the tobacco industry by 40 states, including Florida, is suddenly spawning imitators and sending chills through major U.S. industries fearful of becoming the next target. In Florida, the trend is causing Associated Industries of Florida President Jon Shebel to shake his head and say, "I told you so." "The tobacco lawsuits are just the first round, we've been saying that all along," said Shebel, a longtime critic of Florida's courtroom crusade against cigarette makers. . . "There is a direct link between the tobacco litigation and this lawsuit," said Blair Thompson, [a dairy] industry spokesman. "The precedent has been set to shake down an industry without accounting for personal responsibility. Where does it end?"

The nation's major cigarette companies are waging a ferocious rear-guard action in courts around the country to keep another wave of potentially damaging internal documents from coming to light while Congress and the White House are considering the proposed $368.5 billion tobacco settlement. Judges in three states have called for the release of industry documents that they say show evidence of crime or fraud by tobacco companies in a 40-year effort to suppress information about the hazards of smoking. . . THE CASES ALL involve allegations that the industry in 1954 conspired to deceive the public about the hazards of smoking, and as a key element of this effort created a nonprofit research arm -- the Council for Tobacco Research -- that would serve as a "front" group.

Former Beatle George Harrison is awaiting results of cancer tests after discovering lumps on his neck, according to his record company. Harrison, 54, had a series of enlarged lymph nodes removed at a private hospital near London late last month. The rock legend gave up smoking in the early 1970s, reported Britain's Sun newspaper over the weekend.

A slew of studies show that an effective way to influence teen smoking is to combine anti-tobacco messages with intensive school-based education. Under the proposed tobacco settlement, however, $2.50 would be spent in advertising for every dollar that went toward education and prevention. If adults are serious about reducing the number of young smokers, they might reconfigure this plan while rethinking what approaches will work best in schools. No matter how many campaigns are launched, to smoke or not to smoke always comes down to a teen's personal choice. It is a scary concept to many adults, that teens are free thinkers, but maybe we should start from that basic premise.

"Whether you're smoking to be cool or you're chain smoking, 15 cents is not going to make a difference," says the Washington teen-ager, reflecting skepticism not only among her peers but among lawmakers who wanted a higher tax but were forced to compromise.

Steve Cohen, a former executive with Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co., loved his industry and loved to smoke. And he did for decades. Three months after his death in January from cancer, the Liggett Group publicly admitted that smoking cigarettes is addictive and can cause lung cancer and heart disease. . . This story is by Cohen's sister, Cheryl.

This article reviews the adverse health consequences of smoking, basic techniques for initiating dialogue with patients about smoking, and measures clinicians can employ to help patients to stop smoking.

The quest to regulate cigarettes marks the most ambitious public health initiative in the history of the FDA, founded 91 years ago amid outrage over The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's shocking chronicle of unsanitary conditions in meatpacking plants. But it comes at a time of great uncertainty about the agency's ability to handle its current tasks, let alone take on a new one. As Bill Schultz, the FDA's deputy commissioner for policy, acknowledges, the agency is "at a critical juncture." To begin with, the FDA lacks a chief. . .

Overall, male smokers had five times the risk of heart disease and more than twice the risk of dying than nonsmokers if they were unable to achieve an adequate heart rate while exercising, according to the report in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation. Compared with other smokers they had twice the risk of heart disease and a slightly greater risk of dying during an eight-year period.

Taxpayers with no children, smokers, airline passengers will lose out in tax deal By Tom Curry MSNBC Publicist Ned Ward, 24, with his girlfriend, Jamie Zenner, 21. Ward, a smoker with no children, will not get a tax cut under the new tax law . In fact, his taxes will be slightly highe

President Clinton is preparing to sign a long-awaited executive order banning smoking in federal executive branch buildings, say anti-tobacco groups told to be on standby for the ceremony. About 80 percent of U.S. employers have some workplace smoking policy, ranging from bans to designated smoking areas, and smoking already is banned in many federal office buildings. . . anti-smoking activists have pressured Clinton to sign an executive order - originally written in 1991 but collecting dust ever since - that would start the ban now in government buildings. A signing ceremony originally was set for Tuesday morning, but officials were told Monday that a scheduling conflict had temporarily postponed the event.

The companies benefit from a form of "shadow marketing," as well. Smuggling, principally of U.S. brands, is prevalent throughout Europe and Asia, in countries that impose high import tariffs or sales taxes on tobacco. Smuggling helps the multinational companies because it creates a kind of illegal introductory price for their brands -- far below what the legal products are selling for. This helps "soften" the market up for a bigger sales assault. . . Tobacco promotion often targets the young and the poor -- a strategy so common that it can be found practically anywhere big tobacco goes. In Kenya, for example, the ad medium of choice is FM radio, whose majority audience is primary and secondary schoolchildren.

Business groups were jubilant at the High Court's decision to outlaw $5 billion in State taxes, believing the decision gave extra impetus to the push for major tax reform, including a goods and services tax. Other groups saw the decision as a window of opportunity for greater Federal control over the spending of the receipts from the suite of "sin" taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. . . The chairman of Action on Smoking and Health, Professor Simon Chapman, welcomed the decision, saying opportunistic State Governments could no longer reduce tobacco taxes. "It makes pricing policy more easy to manage, especially with a supportive Federal Health Minister," he said.

ndonesian stocks declined yesterday as HM Sampoerna plunged 3.1 per cent to a two-year low amid concern the tobacco company's first-half earnings would fall short of analysts' forecasts. "It's possible some of the bad news has leaked out," an analyst said.

What grabbed attention in the industry, though, is not such public relations high jinks but Cigarettes Cheaper's decision to go for rapid expansion based on exclusive marketing agreements with Philip Morris. That move defrayed some initial development costs and now assures the chain unbeatable prices on Marlboro, by far the nation's best-selling cigarette, and other Philip Morris brands.

He smokes at least one cigar a week, drinks plenty of water and doesn't eat much meat.

"He used to drink beer occasionally--never any hard liquor. He smoked cigars occasionally. He never smoked cigarettes."

Mrs. Calment died of natural causes at the Arles retirement home where she had lived for 12 years. . . For Mrs. Calment, the keys to long life were olive oil and port wine. She gave up cigarettes in 1995, and her doctor said her abstinence was due to pride rather than health -- she was too blind to light up herself, and hated asking others to do it for her.

She gave up a two-cigarette-a-day habit a few years ago -- not for health reasons, a doctor said, but because she could no longer light up without asking for help.

Robert Klesges of the Universities Prevention Center in Memphis, Tennessee and colleagues . . . surveyed 6,900 Memphis public school students with a mean age of 13 . . . "Of the regular smokers, 12 percent indicated they have smoked to control their weight, with white girls endorsing this belief significantly more than other respondents," they added. "Among boys, the opposite is true: black boys are more likely to express concern about diet and to endorse the belief that smoking has weight-suppressing effects.' . Smokers do often put on weight when they quit but their is no evidence smoking is useful for weight control,

For a member of the Mississippi legislature, Charlie Williams gets around. In the past two years, Mr. Williams has gone to Spain, Belgium, Australia and Costa Rica, all courtesy of the New York Society for International Affairs. . . The 53-year-old Tate County Republican, who has served in the Mississippi legislature since 1975, hopes to win the GOP gubernatorial nomination in his state in 1999. . . If he loses, it might be to Mike Moore, the state's brash Democratic attorney general who filed the landmark lawsuit against the big tobacco companies. . . The nonprofit New York Society, it turns out, receives almost all of its funding from Philip Morris Cos. . . With some states toughening their ethics laws and corporate junkets attracting unflattering press attention, the trips sponsored by the New York Society provide a vehicle for lawmakers to travel without any special-interest strings showing

Drs. Kenneth J. Meier and Michael J. Licari conducted a time-series analysis of data compiled between 1955 and 1994 on the effect of excise taxes on cigarette use. They found that, while both state and federal taxes are effective at reducing consumption, federal taxation appears to be more effective, because of the "bootlegging" of cigarettes that can occur across state lines. The investigators write that '...[b]ecause of inflation, increased health concerns and the declining percentage of smokers, large reductions in consumption require large tax increases." Drs. Meier and Licari also discovered that tobacco consumption declined when health warning labels were placed on cigarette packaging. Am J Public Health 1997;87:1126-1130.

Cigarette companies are scrambling to Africa's emerging markets from South Africa to Ivory Coast. "The market is growing hugely. Tobacco companies have nowhere to go with legislation in their own backyard," said one expatriate advertising man arriving in West Africa . . Brands are fighting for a share of markets like Nigeria, black Africa's most populous country with 100 million people. New kiosks and umbrella stalls selling cigarettes and sweets seem to appear each day by the roadside in Ivory Coast's commercial capital Abidjan.

So do CARLOS SLIM and ALFONSO ROMO, together worth $8.6 billion according to Forbes magazine, know something that the buyers, tobacco giants Philip Morris Cos Inc (MO) and B.A.T Industries Plc (BATS.L), do not? Not necessarily, say analysts. . . In early July, Slim's Cigatam SA, part of his conglomerate Grupo Carso (CARA1.MX), got $400 million in exchange for allowing U.S.-based Phillip Morris to raise its stake in the firm from 29 to 50 percent. Three weeks later, Philip Morris' rival B.A.T said it would dole out $1.7 billion to buy Romo's Cigarera La Moderna (CLM), part of his conglomerate Empresas La Moderna (MDAA.MX) (ELM).

The [Health Education Authority] says magazines, particularly those read by young people, are over-using influential images of cigarettes and smoking which promote it among the young. Interviews with young people found they associated images of smoking with power, individuality and self-assertiveness and said glossy photographs of models with cigarettes enhanced the glamorous image smoking once had.

A ban on smoking at state prisons went into effect Friday, but Sen. Dave Kleis, who proposed the law, says he is considering an exception for prison staff.

"I think that there may be some multilateral actions that we would want to be part of," Clinton said . . . "If they're dangerous to children here, they're dangerous to children there," he said.

House Speaker Jody Richards [D-Bowling Green] recently spent five days in Costa Rica as the guest of a non-profit group that's funded in part by tobacco giant Philip Morris. .. His trip raises questions about whether Kentucky's legislative ethics code, which bars lawmakers from accepting gifts from lobbyists, has a loophole for non-profit organizations that are funded by those lobbyists. Richards said no one from the tobacco company lobbied him on the trip, which he considered "one of the most honest things I've done in my life. I've gained so much from it." He said he did not even know that Philip Morris was involved in the trip until he saw the company listed as one of about 500 sponsors of the non-profit New York Society for International Affairs.

Winchester Tobacco Warehouse, the last tobacco warehouse in the city, will not hold sales this year. In recent years, more and more of the warehouse has been used for storage, and there is no room for this year's tobacco crop, warehouse President Arthur M. Walson said.

Bernie Reeves, founder, editor and consumer of 30 butts a day, has decided to ban smoking from the weekly Spectator's offices in Raleigh. And he says it has nothing to do with his new partners from Creative Loafing, the Atlanta-based alternative newspaper. Nor does it mean he's turned against the tobacco leaf. But Reeves says many of his workers have complained of colds and allergies -- which he thinks may be connected to poor air circulation and smoke in the building. Reeves has himself been slowed by vertigo this summer. "There are doctors who will say that tobacco is a contributory factor to vertigo," he says. Reeves has heard the complaints from within -- half of his employees smoke -- but he's standing firm.

International tobacco results were well above those of last year with particularly strong improvement in Latin America, Africa, and Europe as well in the company's oriental tobacco business. International sales continued to be strong, and margins improved due to higher volumes and the continuing benefits of the company's cost reduction programs. Domestic earnings were down in the year, reflecting in large part the absence of sales of old crop inventory. In addition, because of the effects of weather and blue mold, the U.S. flue-cured and burley crops were not large enough to accommodate all customer requirements. Consequently, the mix of business suffered.

COMPANIES advertising on American television are hanging "virtual" banners from football goal posts and painting "virtual' slogans across tennis courts. . . British television viewers may see the system used first on broadcasts of Formula One races. Since the ban on tobacco advertising, the sport's governing body has been concerned that tobacco companies will pull out of sponsoring the teams. Tests are currently being conducted to determine if it could be used to place non-tobacco adverts on cars in European television coverage of the races and reinstate adverts for cigarettes in broadcasts sent to South America and the Far East. The system uses video technology called L-Vis - pronounced like the late rock `n' roll singer - similar to that which places the BBC's Michael Fish in front of a weather map but American broadcasters have suddenly realised its money-making potential. The inserted image behaves as if it were real. Players passing in front of the image obscure it and not the other way round. The colour, lighting and motion are matched so that, if the camera angle changes, the advert appears fixed relative to its background, unlike existing systems. . . "Getting the image into the picture in real-time was the easy part," said Sam McCleery, vice-president of Princeton Video Image, manufacturer of the system.

"Butt Out Here," demand the signs on ashtrays near the doors of some government buildings. But even that will be forbidden under a crackdown on smoking near federal entrances.

AMERICAN government staff face an outdoor smoking ban, putting a stop to cigarettes even on pavements outside offices. The move is the latest in President Clinton's war on the tobacco industry. Officials, citing a "significant health risk" caused even by smoking outdoors, say Mr Clinton will sign an executive order this week ending smoking on virtually any federal government property. Although cigarettes are legal in the United States, Mr Clinton wants them to be treated increasingly as drugs, similar to cannabis or cocaine. Some observers believe that there could be a new age of Prohibition early next century, comparable with the ban on alcohol earlier this century.

As President Clinton prepares to sign an executive order this week severely restricting smoking in federal office buildings, and anti-smoking laws continue to toughen nationwide, one place remains a virtual haven for smokers: Congress. The House and Senate, which dictate their own smoking policies, would remain exempt from the executive order. "The Capitol is one of the last bastions of people being allowed to smoke in public buildings," said Jeff Whelan, a spokesman for Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who is urging the Senate Rules Committee to restrict smoking in the Senate. "Smokers hang out in the hallways of the Senate Hart Office Building. . . . I can literally smell the smoke wafting in to my office."

From Aug. 24-28, China will host the 10th World Conference on Tobacco & Health in Beijing - a gathering of top researchers and anti-smoking advocates. The World Health Organization is calling for support for a global convention that would set standards on marketing issues such as labeling. Wyden and other senators want the tobacco settlement negotiated with state attorneys general to keep U.S. trade representatives from trying to open up international markets for tobacco as they do for other consumer goods. "It's not a Ritz cracker; it's not Nyquil," Wyden says. "It kills people."

Nearly 1,500 of the world's experts on smoking and tobacco control will meet in Beijing from August 24-28 for the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health. . . "Tobacco: the growing epidemic" is the major theme, but with nearly one hundred presentations in the plenary and symposium sessions alone, the conference will cover tobacco issues from every continent and viewpoint. Topics include: litigation, legislation, tobacco promotion, world trade and smuggling, addiction and cessation, youth, school and families, passive smoking, occupational health, tobacco and religion, and the effect of tobacco on the environment and on economies. The role of health professionals, the UN and governments in tobacco control will also come under scrutiny.

Growing numbers of City institutions, hospitals and factories are banning smoking outside their premises, and some employees have been sacked for smoking on the doorstep. Tolerance is wearing particularly thin in the City of London, where merchant banks, insurance houses and trade exchanges say that it presents the wrong image to clients.

By most accounts, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian leader accused of war crimes, has moved from a ruthless career in Balkan war politics to a profitable life of smuggling. . . Goods including tobacco, fuel, and alcohol are trucked into Republika Srpska from Croatia and Yugoslavia without paying customs. There, they are sold for profit, with no tax revenue going to the state. Karadzic's profits fuel his policies of ethnic cleansing, according to an analyst with the International Crisis Group. "Karadzic uses almost a third of his profits to pay off the Bosnian Serb police to stay loyal to him," the analyst said. Those police intimidate non-Serbs from returning to their homes by blowing up houses.

The barrage of billboards gives no quarter. Camel, Marlboro, Lucky Strike and other full-color tributes to the good life explode across this gray capital. Cornel Radu-Loghin jabs a finger at each one with the zeal of a kid at Cooperstown. But he hardly is a fan. "You see? Cigarette ads are everywhere," says Radu-Loghin, 29, founder of Fresh Air Romania. "We are in the same situation the U.S. was in 20 years ago."

In his quest for new markets, North Carolina tobacco baron James B. Duke once ordered an aide to fetch him an atlas. On opening it, he ignored the expanse of distant continents and the blue of the great oceans. He fixed his gaze instead on a table that listed the population of each country. One country stood out. "That is where we're going to go sell cigarettes," he said, pointing to China. "The possibilities can hardly be overestimated."

So yesterday four of the six statewide candidates took time off from their busy schedules to pay homage to tobacco at the opening of the Danville tobacco market. "This is a litmus test for politicians," . . . Republican gubernatorial candidate James S. Gilmore III drove five hours through the night from Northern Virginia and arrived at Danville at 1 in the morning, spoke briefly, but long enough to criticize his Democratic opponent, then flew back to Northern Virginia. . . "We have to remember working men and women in all parts of the state." Gilmore's rival, Lt. Gov. Donald S. Beyer Jr., who has taken a harder stance against tobacco, was not there. . .. Neither was the Republican candidate for attorney general, State Sen. Mark L. Earley of Chesapeake . . . Earley's Democratic opponent, Arlington lawyer William D. Dolan, was not asked to share the speaker's platform with the other candidates. He shrugged off the slight, staying around to watch in fascination as the auctioneer moved among the sheets of tobacco . . .

As usual, the market opened with farmers for the most part selling tobacco left over from last year's crop. The market will run until shortly before Thanksgiving. Several farmers said the opening day price appeared to be about $1.80 per pound, about where it was in 1995.

The U.S. Farm Service Agency has launched a preliminary inquiry of Virginia tobacco dealers and warehouse operators suspected of violating federal price-support rules for flue-cured tobacco. . . Nelson Link, the agency's state tobacco specialist, said the inquiry involves the apparent purchase of tobacco from farmers at some warehouses at levels above government quotas without the required marketing penalties being collected. The three marketing years the agency is looking at are 1990-1992.

Chuck Jordan, a 54-year-old auctioneer, sold pile after pile of flue-cured tobacco on the first day of the annual Winston-Salem tobacco market, now in its 129th year. To the untrained ear, Jordan's jabber was like the stammering Porky Pig does before spitting out, "That's all folks." To growers gathered at the Old Belt Farmers Cooperative tobacco warehouse, it was the sound of money after another year of hard work and uncooperative weather.

Throughout the day, the scene will be played out in six other warehouses representing the Winston-Salem market. Sales will continue throughout the coming weeks until all the tobacco is sold. The Winston-Salem market is part of the larger, Old Belt market stretching through the Piedmont to southern Virginia. "This is big," said T. Nathaniel Walker, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. "The farmer's been out there working with his crop all year, and this is payday."

[Democrat Ed] Garvey, whose business endeavors have included a video production company, may already be taping a 30-second ad about the role of tobacco -foods giant Philip Morris in underwriting overseas trips for Thompson and other governors. . . At last week's meetingof the NGA in Las Vegas, Thompson asked the rest of the executive committee to make sure the governors weren't blindsided again. Can Garvey or others make it stick to Thompson? They'll have to show cause and effect. The same governor who accepted campaign donations from Philip Morris firms also proposed raising state cigarette taxes and joined in suing the nation's tobacco companies.

Henry H. Harrell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Universal Corporation (NYSE:UVV), Richmond, Va., and Harold S. Wertheimer, President of Socotab Leaf Tobacco Company, Inc., New York, N.Y., today announced the signing of a letter of intent to combine both companies' Oriental leaf tobacco businesses into a partnership. The resulting comp any, Socotab Leaf Tobacco Company, L.L.C, will be the leading Oriental leaf tobacco merchant in the world with global revenues in excess of $300 million. Oriental tobacco is an integral component of American blend cigarettes. The new company will have enhanced capabilities to serve the growing world demand for Oriental leaf.

Smoke job? Happy to report an item that Morton Downey Jr. may be smoking again after a bout with lung cancer isn't true. At least Downey, who has much at stake as a rep for cancer prevention causes, swears to us tobacco hasn't touched his lips since last year's surgery. He added: "I'd rather have sex with a raccoon." Oh.

ichael J. Tully Jr., a New York state senator from Long Island who was instrumental in passing the state's ban on smoking in public buildings, died early Tuesday at his home in Flower Hill, N.Y. He was 64. Nassau County police said he suffered a heart attack after returning home from an all-night legislative session in Albany. In his 15 years in the Senate, Tully focused on health, environmental and veterans' issues. "He broke the logjam on how to restrict smoking," said Blair Horner, the legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group. "Prior to his time as health chairman, the Senate never did anything on smoking. He made it happen."

The retired chairman and CEO of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco International Inc., died suddenly on July 30th, in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. Under his direction R.J. Reynolds marketed more than 60 cigarette brands in 160 countries and territories around the world with annual sales of $2.5 billion and earnings in excess of $200 million. . . He had a passion for Formula One racing and was instrumental in developing the International Camel Lotus Program. Perhaps his most notable business achievement was the opening of the emerging China market to R.J.R. In 1979 he began negotiations which led to an agreement to manufacture Camel filters in Xiamen. As a result of this agreement, Camels became the first American cigarette brand produced in China.

A worker for the county Natural History Museum stopped at a gas station to buy cigarettes, telling the attendant that the brand didn't matter because no one was going to smoke them. The attendant asked her what she was going to do with them. "Would you believe an offering to the gods?" she replied. She wasn't joking. In return for the loan of some sacred Indonesian heirlooms, museum officials had agreed to make a show of respect for the objects twice a week, in keeping with that nation's traditions. Approved offerings included the petals of five kinds of flowers mixed with tobacco.

In the case of the possible smoking benefits, even as fierce a protector of veterans' interests as former Veterans Affairs secretary Jesse Brown urged Congress to narrow the law and limit the government's exposure. The smoking claims could otherwise undermine "the integrity" of the department's compensation programs, he said. We would hope the congressional veterans' committees and the service organizations to whose views those committees are so closely attuned would take a similar position.

Of course, cigarette-wielding characters are necessary for any kind of verisimilitude -- and many real-life smokers happen to be glamorous and gorgeous. Furthermore, the curling of a stream of smoke above a lady's lighted cigarette evokes some of the finer moments of cinematic history: Lauren Bacall in "The Big Sleep," say, or Elizabeth Taylor in "Butterfield 8." But the First Lady is not motivated by artistic sensibilities, but by politics. She wants to enlist privately produced art to advance her and her husband's political, puritanical crusade against tobacco.

Julia Roberts does not smoke throughout the movie, nor does she have a cigarette for every mood. She smokes in exactly four very brief scenes and for very specific, negative reasons. . . Actually, not. Roberts' character smokes only when she is intensely anxious, full of self-loathing or both. Her smoking style is spastic, unattractive and is a metaphor for the full-blown sociopathic behavior in which she will engage: "I am a dangerous, criminal person," she says, puffing her fourth and last cigarette while slumped in romantic defeat in a hotel hallway. "I do bad things to good people."

When Peter Vallone, speaker of the New York City Council, pushed the smoking ban through for Yankee and Shea stadiums, and Aqueduct Race Track, I told him he was guilty of sacrilege, Vallone being a religious man. "Sacrilege?" he said. "Peter, you're saying that God can't ventilate Yankee Stadium!"

Maternal smoking is "one of the most important preventable risk factors" for SIDS, conclude scientists based at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta; the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland; McGill University in Montreal; The National Board of Health and Welfare in Stockholm, Sweden; and University Hospital in Uppsala, Sweden. The researchers studied the SIDS rates for babies born between 1990-1991 in the U.S. and from 1983-1992 in Sweden. They also divided the U.S. data into different race and ethnic groups, to see if women from different backgrounds smoked more or less, which could influence the SIDS rate. . . "We studied the effect of smoking on SIDS in many populations, and in all the different groups we determined that smoking is not a good idea because it increases the risk of SIDS," said one of the researchers, Dr. Marian F. MacDorman from the National Center for Health Statistics. . . . MacDorman explained that some health problems and diseases can be tied to people's cultural or ethnic heritage, but that this study showed similar results for all the women. "When you find a problem in more than one environment, it is more of a biological, or physical, effect."

The pipe and tobacco pouch of Sitting Bull is going back to the Sioux tribe, more than a century after the death of the medicine man and chief who defeated Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Rick Mount was skeptical when a customer whose motorhome he helped build gave him the pipe and pouch. He spent five years consulting experts and examining photographs to make sure the items were real. Mount estimated the artifacts were worth in the low six figures. But instead of cashing in, he is sending them to the Indian Museum at the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota. "The Sioux people are the people who need to have the piece," Mount, who is three-quarters Cherokee, said Friday.

`The Almanac of American Politics" used to be considered almost a bible for the nation's election junkies, Washington reporters and anybody needing a reference source on the nation's capital. As principal author Michael Barone grows more conservative, however, the "Almanac" has taken to the kind of characterization and name-calling heard on right-wing talk radio. . . However, major stories get tailored. In 1994, the House Energy and Commerce Committee conducted a famous hearing at which tobacco executives, under oath, swore that they had no knowledge that nicotine was addictive. The tobacco probes were stopped under the new GOP chairman, Rep. Tom Bliley, whose Virginia district has a major Philip Morris plant. "But other issues proved more important," argue Barone and co-author Grant Ujifusa, "and Bliley, keeping a tight rein on the power of subcommittee chairmen, compiled an impressive record of legislative achievement."

Roberto Morales, who started coming to Gorin's pharmacy 45 years ago at age 7, gave the druggist a bear hug. He recalled how he threatened to stop filling his asthma medication unless he stopped smoking. He credits the druggist with saving his life. "Papa is the best," he said.

Canadian provincial premiers debated on Thursday whether they should follow the lead of 40 U.S. states and seek damages from the tobacco industry in court. The leaders of the four Atlantic provinces agreed to push the issue during the premiers' annual meeting, but at least one provincial leader said it would be hypocritical to sue an industry that Canada depends on for tax revenue.

Canada's provincial leaders opted Friday for a wait-and-see approach on whether to sue the tobacco industry, as 40 states in the United States have done. At a two-day meeting in this Atlantic seaside resort, the provincial leaders agreed in the meanwhile to monitor British Columbia's effort to take on the industy. . . The leaders aparently backed away from a proposal by British Columbia and four Atlantic provinces for the premiers to consider a unified legal attack on the cigarette makers -- similar to the approach adopted in the United States. "I not sure there's a lot served by having 10 court actions, or 11 court actions or five court actions. We have one."

His henchmen called him "The Merciful One," but Le Duy Bao's rule of Berlin's underground apparently was less than kind. For years, police say, his Vietnamese mob used murder, blackmail and kidnapping to control the city's multimillion-dollar trade in smuggled cigarettes, often waging bloody turf wars with rival Vietnamese gangs.

Philip Morris Cos. learned the rules the hard way. Back in 1992, the American tobacco giant hit on a strategy for expanding in the huge Russian market: It would set up kiosks in St. Petersburg to sell packs of Marlboros directly to the public. Then, one blustery winter night, a kiosk exploded. And one by one, night after night, all the others blew up, leaving nothing but charred fiberglass and smoldering tobacco on the pavement. The message was clear: Russian cigarette and alcohol distributors don't want outsiders treading on their turf. "Going into the cigarette- and alcohol-distribution business can be detrimental to your health," says Peter Charow, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia. . . Rule No. 1: Pick a safe business -- and stay out of some altogether. Russian cigarette distributors, for instance, don't tolerate interlopers on their turf, be they Russian or foreign. And they don't limit their strong-arm tactics to destroying unmanned kiosks.

Alcohol and tobacco-makers, shaken and confused by a government decision to hit them with an extra tax bill of about A$600 million (about HK$3.39 billion) met yesterday with government officials to try to resolve the impasse. Beer prices have started rising, reflecting the new tax levels, and cigarette supplies in some areas are running low after two of Australia's biggest tobacco firms, Wills Holdings and Philip Morris, suspended deliveries until they could sort out who pays what. Treasurer Peter Costello, who sparked the confusion with his uniform approach, has declined to comment on the situation.

Cigarette-makers have suspended tobacco sales and beer-makers have warned that prices will surge after a court ruling prompted the Australian government to rush a new tax system into place. A High Court ruling last Tuesday which banned state governments from charging taxes on alcohol or tobacco products led to the federal government increasing

Philip Morris Cos Inc's Australian unit said on Friday it had suspended sales of its cigarettes to wholesalers and retailers because of uncertainty over the replacement of state taxes with federal taxes. A Phillip Morris Australia spokeswoman told Reuters there was no immediate end to the suspension in sight and it was costing the company A$1 million a day in lost gross margins.

The figure compares with 203 cases pending in July 1996 and 68 in July 1995, RJR Nabisco said in a 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. . . Of the number filed in the second quarter of 1997, 57 suits were dismissed or resolved in favor of the unit or affiliates without trial, it said. . . Of the cases pending as of August 7, it said 443 are in the U.S., one in Canada, three in Puerto Rico and one in Guam. The U.S. cases are filed in 44 states, of which 179, the biggest number, are in Florida, it said.

The Department of Taxation's indoor park will be smoke-free soon. The department is spending $7,000 for an indoor smoking room, complete with a separate air filtration system to suck the smoke out of the building. Currently, the tax department's smoking employees take their puffs outside in the front or rear of the building; in the indoor lounge, called "the park"; or in designated sections in the snack bar.

[Bobby] Rencher had been adamant about making Phantasmagoria [in Wheaton] a nonsmoking venue when he opened it a little more than a year ago, but he's become a kinder and gentler club owner: "We realized people were starting to resent having to go outside and smoke, and that included band members," says Rencher. "I didn't want to tell my acts that they had to step outside." He also didn't want to offend any patrons who were grateful for the club's nonsmoking policy, so Rencher took a large room at the back of the club that was being used for a band dressing room and turned it into a smoking lounge, with a custom exhaust system to remove the smoke. . . "It all turned out better for the bands and better for the customers," says Rencher. "It was definitely the way to go."

Despite dire predictions when it was enacted, a ban on smoking in restaurants in Madison and other communities has had little effect on sales, an advocacy group said today. In fact, sales in Dane County restaurants -- most of which are now smoke-free -- are actually ahead of those in the rest of the state, according to a report released today by the Tobacco Free Wisconsin Coalition. The anti-tobacco group did not use an independent consultant to conduct its study, but it did base its report on sales figures provided by the state Department of Revenue.

Merchants that sell tobacco products post virtually the same number of signs now as they did two years ago -- an average of 27 per store, according to a study of 3,766 stores released yesterday by Operation Storefront, a coalition of consumer and government organizations. Anti-tobacco advocates had hoped that Operation Storefront's first study, published in 1995, would shame retailers into reducing the number of tobacco signs in their stores. That survey found that shops located near schools displayed more tobacco signs than other stores. Those retailers also posted more ads near candy racks and within three feet of the ground, the 1995 study concluded.

Tobacco advertisements next to candy racks in local stores have risen dramatically during the past two years, the Operation Storefront anti-tobacco coalition announced Thursday. Of 199 stores surveyed in five Orange County cities, 53% placed tobacco advertisements next to candy racks, compared to 20% in 1995.

Tobacco companies spent $62 million more to advertise and promote cigarettes in 1995 than they did the previous year, but U.S. sales of the product fell. In its annual report to Congress, the Federal Trade Commission said tobacco companies spent $4.9 billion in 1995, up 1.2% from 1994. The bulk of that money was for promotional expenditures, which totaled $1.87 billion. Companies sold 482.2 billion cigarettes to U.S. wholesalers and retailers in 1995, down 1.6% from 1994--the only year since 1985 when sales showed an increase.

Loews' tobacco subsidiary, Lorillard Inc., was the biggest contributor to the bottom line, posting net income of $123.5 million, up 8% from $114 million a year ago.

In its first report to stockholders since going public in June, 800-JR Cigar, Inc. (Nasdaq: JRJR) reported a record second quarter for the world's largest distributor and retailer of brand name premium cigars. For the three month period ended June 30, 1997, 800-JR Cigar, Inc., reported sales of $60.4 million, an increase of $13.9 million, or, a 29.9% increase over the same period last year. The Company experienced a 51.9% increase in gross profits over the same quarter last year, jumping from $8.2 million to $12.4 million.

08/08/97 OPINION: USA DEBATE:

Our cultural problems run much deeper than glamorous stars taking a drag on screen. Popular art is, after all, a reflection and a criticism of who we are. . . Indeed, much of the police-blotter news has moved to the sports pages. . . . . Right and wrong have been reduced to winning and losing, getting sick or staying healthy. A call for nicey-nice "role models" may make the first lady and some of the rest of us feel good about ourselves, but that's a cheap thrill.

A ban on tobacco products in most East Tennessee State University buildings goes into effect Aug. 18.

Youths under than 18 caught smoking or chewing tobacco could be charged with a misdemeanor and fined $50 beginning Monday.

Carnival Cruise Lines says it will launch the world's first smoke-free cruise ship next year, the 70,000-ton, 2,040-passenger MS Paradise. The smoking ban will apply to all cabins, restaurants, public areas and even open decks.

The British family found the shelves full of options, but the book that became their bible was "Hello! USA" -- brainchild of Washington resident Judy Priven. Priven, who taught English as a second language in the 1980s, had realized that newcomers to the United States needed more than just language skills and vocabulary; they also needed to learn about the culture, customs and lifestyle of the country. So she approached businesses to see if there was a market for an instruction manual for workers being transferred to the United States on how to live here. . . "Many Americans do not like smoking in their homes; ask. Guests often go outside to smoke."

THE NUMBER OF SMOKERS IN BRITAIN HAS INCREASED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 20 YEARS. A study has found there are now more than 13m tobacco users, a rise of more than 340,000 in two years. High earners and those in their late thirties and early forties have been identified as the social groups adopting a "born again" attitude to smoking. The findings, by Mintel International, the market research group, were based on a survey of 25,000 people. They suggest that expensive campaigns to encourage people to kick the habit over the past two decades have been largely ineffective. . . The Health Education Authority (HEA) said the rise could be explained by the growing portrayal of smoking as chic, particularly cigars. . . "There is a new group of style leaders, who are also smokers, coming through. Smoking is increasingly seen as a way of showing assertiveness."

KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR . . . A SMOKING SHOWDOWN. Tobacco companies square off against U.S. Justice Department lawyers tomorrow in court arguments over Food and Drug Administration restrictions on cigarettes and smokeless tobacco. The government and the tobacco companies are appealing different aspects of U.S. District Court Judge William Osteen's April 25 ruling, which struck down FDA advertising restrictions but didn't block the agency from regulating tobacco. Although the $368.5-billion tobacco settlement with state attorneys general would supersede the FDA rules, analysts will keep a close eye on the court battle for two reasons. One, if Congress and President Bill Clinton don't sign off on the agreement, the FDA rules could take effect. Two, the appeals court ruling could give leverage to either side in congressional deliberations over the settlement.

SUPPOSE AMERICA JUST SAID NO TO TOBACCO--What Then? Here's a Hypothetical Look at the Probable Impact on Everyone and Everything From Smokers and Farmers to Tax Coffers and the Tobacco Companies Themselves.

HOSPITALS ONCE ENCOURAGED SMOKING BY PSYCHIATRIC PATIENTS. Cigarettes were the basis of behavioral plans and alliances; when there was nothing else to offer a patient, you could offer a light, and both sides felt better for it. . . Almost everyone smoked - patients who were too ill to speak, did not appear to know their own names, and shook so hard that they could not hold forks still learned to hold and inhale cigarettes. . . Yet, through the smoke clouds, these same patients also found a mechanism of relation. They held out their packs to one another, raked together through garbage cans for extinguished ends, and silently requested and shared lights with the universal butt-end-upheld gesture. In the social action of smoking, there was camaraderie, casual alliance, serenity, and a semblance of sanity. . . The problem with prohibiting smoking is not the nicotine addiction. Patches and gum can competently handle withdrawal. The problem is that the cigarette is filled with social and emotional meaning, in a world where meaning is often otherwise hard to come to find.

Washington: President Clinton has abandoned his derided plan to forbid outdoor cigarette smoking around the entrances to government buildings (Ian Brodie writes). The idea was discarded as too draconian, the White House said. . . Widely seen as an extreme case of political correctness, the proposed ban was attacked by civil servants who smoke and by the Tobacco Institute, the lobbying arm of cigarette manufacturers, which said there was no evidence that outdoor tobacco smoke was harmful to passers-by.

Gore cited a surgeon general¹s report that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer and other diseases in nonsmokers, increases children¹s risk of respiratory infections and aggravates symptoms of asthma. "Secondhand smoke isn¹t just unpleasant. It is a risk to the public health," Gore said.

Republican Erie County legislators Friday began a petition drive against the proposed sin tax on beer, alcohol and cigarettes, saying the county can finance its share of the proposed Buffalo Bills lease without adding to the county's tax burden. Two legislators and one candidate kicked off the petition drive at a news conference outside Rich Stadium before the Bills pre-season game. "We're going to be the first to sign the petition today," said Minority Leader Frederick J. Marshall, R-East Aurora. "We hope thousands more join us in the next few weeks." Marshall said the public's response has been "incredible" . . However, the Republicans, citing other commitments, passed up the opportunity to ask fans tailgating at Rich Stadium to sign the petitions. . . Marshall said a total of eight legislators -- the six Republicans and Buffalo Democrats Albert DeBenedetti and Gregory B. Olma -- have announced their opposition to the sin tax.

A BROOKLYN judge has ruled that the plaintiffs in 10 civil suits against the tobacco industry must specify the brand of cigarettes they smoked in order to pursue their claims for damages. But rather than dismiss the suits outright, as six cigarette manufacturers had requested, Supreme Court Justice Herbert Kramer allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaints because he found potential merit to two of their causes of action. While dismissing the product liability and breach-of-warranty claims brought by smokers and their families against the tobacco companies, Justice Kramer refused to dismiss claims seeking damages based on fraud and deceit. The judge said a jury should decide whether the tobacco companies acted in concert to deceive the plaintiffs about the harmful nature of cigarettes. "Given the fact that the case law in this area is developing rapidly ... the better option is to permit plaintiffs to present the proof underlying the concerted action claims at trial where the trier of facts will be in a better position to consider them," said Justice Kramer in Cresser v. The American Tobacco Company. The 10 separate suits have been joined before Justice Kramer. The judge also found that the plaintiffs can sue over the companies' failure to warn consumers about the harmful effects of cigarettes before Congress mandated in 1969 that warning labels be placed on tobacco products.

Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. has dropped its court fight to gain information about whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand from CBS' "60 Minutes," lawyers said. The tobacco company had sought tapes from a "60 Minutes" interview for a lawsuit in Kentucky against Wigand, a biochemist and former Brown & Wiliamson vice president.

Across the nation, the successful legal assault on the tobacco industry by 40 states, including Florida, is suddenly spawning imitators and sending chills through major U.S. industries fearful of becoming the next target.

Members of a Houston City Council committee studying new anti-smoking proposals said Friday that they will take the process very slowly and could try to forge a compromise. "The thing that bothers me right now is that both sides are saying there is no room for compromise," said Councilman Chris Bell, a member of the City Council Public Health Committee. "That usually makes matters a little more difficult to work out." A coalition of health organizations is calling for a series of amendments to Houston's smoking ordinance that would ban all smoking in restaurants. The group, Tobacco Free Greater Houston, also is calling for banning designated smoking areas inside most workplaces, and pushing outdoor smoking areas at least 20 feet from a public entrance. . . But the forces of opposition to the measures are strong and as well-funded as the anti-smoking faction . . Dave Pickrell, local director of Smokers Fighting Discrimination Inc., called the proposals "social engineering." "The effects of secondhand smoke have been overblown particularly by the media, and we feel it's gone too far," Pickrell said. "There's too much hype, and we need to seriously debate what really constitutes a danger to the public." Also on the opposition is the Greater Houston Restaurant Association, whose members have condemned the proposals for taking choice away from customers.

The national press junket sponsored by Brian Davis and Christian Laettner -- partners in Blue Devil Ventures -- will cast a national spotlight on their $31 million plan to turn vacant tobacco warehouses into an upscale complex of loft apartments and retail shops. . . The developers plan to renovate the Toms, Hicks, Flowers and Cooper warehouses, as well as an old power house, which were bought from the Liggett Group in March for $2.2 million. When completed -- possibly by next summer -- the warehouses will contain 238 loft apartments, courtyards and shops.

This restriction on tobacco advertising [AB752] is the first piece of legislation written by Assemblywoman Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, to be signed into law. . . The measure starting Jan. 1 will ban tobacco billboards within 1,000 feet of the sites frequented by children and allows localities to impose sterner standards. . . It's too bad there are so many other influences on kids leading them to try cigarettes as a mark of their coming of age.

Likewise, I am secretly gladdened whenever the efforts of the anti-smokers are set at naught. A recent paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine demonstrates how easily this is done by determined smokers. A group of 555 patients admitted for surgery in San Francisco were asked to participate in a trial designed to get them to stop smoking. . . . This is the first experimental evidence known to me that intensive medical treatment can increase lying among patients. Bravo, smokers!

SIR JIMMY SAVILE vowed to carry on smoking cigars as he recovered from major heart surgery yesterday. The 71-year-old celebrity also said he would continue running for charity after the three-hour quadruple heart bypass operation . . . As he was moved from intensive care to a general ward, Janet Cope, his secretary, said: "Smoking cigars has nothing to do with his heart problem. He has a huge cigar burning almost all the time, but he does not inhale. He's got stacks of cigars in his flat and he won't be giving those up.

Culbro Corp and General Cigar Holdings Inc on Tuesday said the merger of the two companies would take place at the close of trading on August 29. On September 2, all trading in Culbro shares will cease, the companies said.

Lost in the noise of Tobacco Row's problems with Uncle Sam may be how Eclipse, R.J. Reynolds' latest attempt at a near-smokeless cigarette, is making the grade. Widely heralded was the announcement 15 months ago that R.J. Reynolds Tobacco was bringing Eclipse to market. To say the least, Eclipse is only dragging along in its Chattanooga test market, as the company seeks to succeed where it previously failed with a Premiere brand. Right now, Eclipse has attracted what an RJR spokesperson described as a "small but dedicated" group of smo

More than 58,000 NEW cases of oral cancer were diagnosed in 1996, and 9,000 deaths were recorded. Since 1987, more women have died each year from lung cancer than from breast cancer. This is why health-care providers -- including members of the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons -- continue to encourage people to avoid tobacco in all forms. . . I hope Claudia Schiffer, Danny DeVito and other celebrities who appear in photos promoting cigar smoking will ask themselves, "Is it worth leading young fans down that hazardous path?" For those who are determined to continue smoking cigars or can't seem to quit, here are some guidelines

Even so, troubling civil-liberties questions are buzzing around a bill in the City Council that would ban outdoor cigarette advertising within 1,000 feet of schools, day-care centers, playgrounds, amusement arcades and other places where youngsters gather. The bill, proposed by the council speaker, Peter Vallone, seems headed for certain passage, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani supports it. . . If you do this with cigarettes, why not also with high-cholesterol foods?" Siegel said. Other critics of a broad advertising ban question whether it would achieve the desired results. According to some experts, the best hope to reduce teen-age smoking is a combination of anti-smoking advertising and strong school programs on tobacco's perils. Lawmakers could always price cigarettes out of most children's range by imposing new taxes. But don't bank on seeing a politically bold step of that sort. And the mayor, some note, could do his part by using his law-enforcement muscle against the many store owners who openly sell tobacco to youngsters. You don't need an advertising ban to keep cigarettes from being sold to those under 18. It is already against the law.

Dr. Marian F. MacDorman of the CDC in Hyattsville, Maryland, and others from the NIH in the US, and from Sweden and Canada, report in the August 1 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology that "[s]moking is one of the most important preventable risk factors for SIDS." The multicenter group discovered that the relationship between smoking and SIDS is consistent between racial and ethnic groups, and is dose-dependent.

Nicotine replacement therapy improves the likelihood of smoking cessation, regardless of how the nicotine is delivered, according to a report in the August 11 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. Dr. Agneta Hjalmarson of Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Goteborg and colleagues at the same and other sites evaluated the efficacy of a new nicotine inhaler that looks like a cigarette holder. They randomized about half of 250 smokers to the nicotine inhaler and the other half to an identical placebo inhaler for 6 months.

The story of how the child health insurance bill not only survived but grew from the $16 billion that Clinton and Republican leaders had agreed to initially to $24 billion in the final bill is a complex tale of political alliances, backroom political skills and fortuitous timing. Kennedy was the major political driving force behind the effort, along with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, whom he enlisted in early January. Away from Capitol Hill but in lockstep with the political efforts of Kennedy and Hatch, the Children's Defense Fund organized one of the most feverish grass-roots lobbying campaigns ever on an issue.

In the 1970s, he refurbished cigarette-rolling machines in America and sold them in China's tobacco-rich Yunnan province. Since then, his largess has helped the province build bridges, roads, hospitals and schools. Today, he has a government franchise to manufacture Red Pagoda Mountain, or Hongtashan, cigarettes, China's most popular brand, and sell them in the U.S. and elsewhere. "Since he did a lot for [Yunnan], he got the cigarette franchise, and that's where he got the big money from." . . Mr. Huang also solicited Sioeng associates. The family of Mr. Sioeng's son-in-law, Subandi Tanuwidjaja, gave $100,000. . . Mr. Yap says Mr. Tanuwidjaja now is involved in Mr. Sioeng's businesses. A Tanuwidjaja-family business recently purchased a major stake in [Sioeng's] Worldwide Golden Leaf, the global distributor of Hongtashan cigarettes. Mr. Huang solicited another $50,000 from Mr. Sioeng's Hongtashan distributor, Loh Sun International Inc. in Los Angeles.

Alcohol, tobacco and fuel prices will jump by the end of the week unless a national summit today can end the confusion over new tax arrangements and persuade wholesalers and retailers that their profits will be protected. Treasury officials from all States and Territories will meet in Sydney to try to thrash out a solution to the chaos caused by last week's High Court decision which knocked down $5 billion in State taxes on alcohol, tobacco and fuel.

Liggett Group's gambit to eliminate all present and future lawsuits brought against it by smokers has been thrown out by a federal judge in West Virginia. The decision is the first by a lower court to rely on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that makes it harder for massive personal-injury litigation to be resolved through class-action settlement agreements. . . Relying on the Supreme Court's recent decision in a case known as Georgine, Judge Hadden said the Liggett settlement covered too numerous and diverse a group of people. "This is a huge victory against class-action abuse," [an attorney with] Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

• 08/08/97 BROOKE to Resolve Issues against Settlement Reuters
  
  A statement from Brooke said the West Virginia court revoked its preliminary approval on largely technical grounds. It said a limited-fund class settlement was "the only practical way" to fairly resolve class members' claims and said it would seek to resolve the issues raised. "We believe that we will be able to address and resolve the technical issues the court has raised and that Liggett's limited-fund settlement will ultimately be upheld by the courts," the company statement said.
• 08/08/97 WEST VIRGINIA: Judge Throws Out Settlement Against LIGGETT Reuters
  
  A clerk in U.S. District Judge Charles Haden's office told Reuters that Haden this week withdrew his decision to expand a lawsuit by Putnam County resident Earl Walker Jr., who is suing Liggett Group, based in Durham, North Carolina. . . Haden said in his ruling that a class-action case would have exposed Liggett Group to an excessive number of claims. Haden had granted preliminary approval to the class-action settlement last May. The settlement would have prevented smokers, victims of secondhand smoke, states that pay Medicaid bills for smoking diseases and others nationwide from suing Liggett Group for 25 years.

There is only one reasonable response to these shocking, cold realities. Quit smoking now. Consult your family physician or CLSC for advice. Where there is a will, there is surely a way.

As for Matinee's sponsorship of the Fashion in Motion fund-raiser, having a cigarette company backing the project presents no ethical dilemma for her or, apparently, the Canadian fashion community, she says. "It has nothing to do with tobacco, it has to do with helping women. It's not as if they are standing around here handing out free cigarettes. In my view, as corporate citizens helping the community, they are tops." Certainly, as backers of the Canadian Ready-To-Wear, Matinee has delivered financially to what was formerly a struggling industry.

The profits that can be reaped on the border can be clearly seen in Izacic, a dusty, raucous town on the frontier between Croatia and northwestern Bosnia. A local military hero -- in collusion, diplomats say, with the Muslim political party -- has actually bought the port of entry and controls much of what passes through it to Bosnia. Hamdija Abdic says that he is just an honest businessman . . . Diplomats who have investigated Abdic say his control over customs agents lets him decide who pays tariffs and who does not, enabling him and his friends to keep money that should go to the government. . . Diplomats say Bosnian government records show that in the last several months Abdic and his partners imported an average of 6,000 cartons of cigarettes a day without paying customs duties. The fees would have been about $80,000 each day.

However, the key factor in the rise in smoking has been the scale of the involvement by tobacco companies. More than $3 billion (£1.9 billion) has been spent by Western tobacco companies in the region over the past six years.

Tobacco companies were the biggest advertisers, spending $2.6 million, according to a report from the International Management and Investment Consultants Ltd (IMIC).

The FBI is probing the disappearance of about $100,000 from the anti-smoking group Alliance for a Smoke Free South Carolina, a loss that is forcing the publicly-funded group to close. The alliance got federal funding last fall and planned to use the money for anti-smoking campaigns in schools and for media ads about the dangers of smoking.

Use of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana among Indiana youth has leveled off and in some cases declined this year after four years of increases, according to a survey released Tuesday. "Especially encouraging is the drop in use rates in the critical 7th through 9th grades," said William Bailey, director of the Indiana Prevention Resource Center at Indiana University, which conducts the annual survey.

Alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use among Indiana youth leveled off and in some cases declined in '96, following four years of steady increases, a federal survey shows. Possible reasons: drug awareness efforts and government battles with tobacco companies.

Effective July 1, Chicago-based Sara Lee cut $150,000 in advertising for Drum in Eugene and Portland, Ore., the only places where the tobacco was advertised, said spokeswoman M. Theresa Herlevsen. "This is a very small business for us in the U.S.," Ms. Herlevsen said. "We're aware of growing sensitivity to tobacco products in the United States, and we've tried to be responsive to those concerns."

Van Nelle Tobacco Co., a subsidiary of Sara Lee/Douwe Egberts N.V., the Dutch operating unit of Sara Lee, is no longer advertising its Drum handrolling tobacco in regional newspapers and magazines, Theresa Herlevsen said. The company has also stopped marketing Drum through other promotions such as sponsoring cultural events or concerts, she added - though it will continue advertising Drum to retailers in trade publications and maintain its point-of-purchase marketing, including signs, in stores. Herlevsen said the decision is "consistent with the direction we've been taking" in cutting back tobacco advertising in the U.S.

Hard core smokers may be using nicotine to help manage psychiatric problems such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and bulimia or binge-eating, says a researcher at the University of Michigan. Her conclusion, based on a review of studies involving smokers, may help explain why it is so hard for some smokers to quit. The proposed solution: treat the psychiatric disorders first or along with smoking-cessation efforts. "Many of those who have given up smoking in the past appear to have been the 'easy quits' or casual adult smokers," says Dr. Cynthia S. Pomerleau, a senior researcher with the Nicotine Research Laboratory at the University of Michigan's department of psychiatry, and Substance Abuse Research Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Pomerleau says health professionals concerned with helping smokers with psychiatric "co-factors" quit nicotine "need to develop new kinds of smoking interventions tailored to the special needs of these difficult-to-treat, at-risk populations."

THE cliche of the tortured soul who chain smokes is rapidly becoming the norm, a nicotine researcher said yesterday. Publicity about the health effects of smoking has caused many to drop the habit or quit for social reasons, leaving a hard core that increasingly includes those who use nicotine as a drug to help control psychiatric disorders. They tend to marry other smokers, so magnifying inherited tendencies to nicotine addiction in the next generation, said Dr Cynthia Pomerleau, of the University of Michigan nicotine research laboratory, who has reviewed relevant research for the journal Addiction. She said research suggested that smoking was becoming concentrated in those at risk from bulimia or binge-eating, depression, hyperactivity and anxiety disorders. "People with these conditions or co-factors often use nicotine to help manage their symptoms," Dr Pomerleau said.

A clearly skeptical panel of judges from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals took repeated verbal potshots Monday at the federal government's argument that it should be allowed to regulate nicotine and tobacco products. Appellate Court Judge Donald Russell, in particular, peppered acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger with sharp questions about what spurred the FDA to regulatory action in 1995 after years of arguing the agency had no authority over tobacco. The dangers of nicotine and the harmful effects of smoking were known as early as 1938 when the FDA was created, Russell said. "The FDA hasn't exercised its authority for a long time," the judge said. "You still have the same nicotine going in as before. What's changed? Is the product more addictive now? Russell, appointed by President Richard Nixon in 1971, often didn't allow Dellinger to complete an answer. "What worries us is that since 1938 till a year or so ago your arguments had gone the other way," Russell added. "Now you say we're not supposed to pay any attention to that?"

Whether restrictions on the tobacco industry sought by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will lead to a complete ban of cigarettes and chewing tobacco was key for both sides. "That's certainly within the agency's authority," acting U.S. Solicitor General Walter C. Dellinger told a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But "it would have some bad side effects." The FDA recognizes the social and economic "dysfunction" a ban would cause and has no such intention, Dellinger argued. The agency wants only to impose its 1996 restrictions aimed at reducing smoking by minors, he said. Richard Cooper, lawyer for the tobacco makers that sued the FDA, argued that validation of those restrictions by the court would leave nothing to stop the FDA from an outright ban on tobacco. In fact, Cooper argued at one point, a ban is the only action the FDA can properly take, assuming -- as the tobacco industry does not -- that nicotine is a dangerous drug that the FDA can regulate.

"It seems they didn't allow the agency's position to be developed," she said after the 3 1/2-hour hearing. Unless the judges simply sought debate with their questions, "the FDA has lost this one," said Aronson. . . "It's that constant refrain (from the FDA): 'This isn't in our jurisdiction; this isn't in our jursidiction; this isn't in our jurisdiction,"' said Russell, a U.S. senator from 1965 to 1966 and former governor of South Carolina. One thing, Dellinger responded, is that recent evidence has revealed that cigarettes are "highly engineered to administer adequate doses of nicotine that sustain addiction."

A top government lawyer pressing the Clinton administration's claim to regulate cigarettes was peppered with hostile questions on Monday by appeals courts judges who could undo a key legal victory for anti-tobacco forces. . . The judges' rulings could be a boon for backers of the June deal -- or of critics, such as public health organizations. The judges were not expected to rule until September or later.

"Decisions of this magnitude are to be made by legislation and not by unelected administrative bodies," Richard Cooper, an attorney representing the tobacco industry, told a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Once a drug has been found to be unsafe, there is no freedom of choice to use it," Richard Cooper, an attorney for cigarette makers told a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Today's oral arguments are not about the need to prevent youth smoking. To the contrary: tobacco companies (and other plaintiffs) are, like FDA, opposed to youth smoking and support rational measures to attack the problem. Nevertheless, the companies argued that Congress has not granted FDA authority to regulate the tobacco industry. Moreover, the FDA's sweeping and unprecedented claims of regulatory jurisdiction over the tobacco industry could lead to a total ban of cigarettes

RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp. said it received subpoenas from a federal grand jury investigating "possible smuggling activities." In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, RJR said the subpoenas, dated July 24, were sent to two of its units -- R.J. Reynolds Tobacco International and Northern Brands International, a distributor of Canadian cigarettes. A Reynolds spokeswoman declined to elaborate. Cigarette smuggling across the Canadian border has been one focus of the Justice Department's criminal probe into the tobacco industry's activities

The tobacco-and-food company said in a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the three subsidiaries, including international units, received the subpoenas July 24 from a federal grand jury in the Northern District of New York. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco International, a hub for international tobacco operations in Geneva, "understands that the grand jury is investigating possible smuggling activities," the SEC filing said. . . "People can make a lot of money by buying them in one state and selling them in another," said Roy Burry, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. . . The investigation also could involve international smuggling activities, the analysts said.

More Britons now smoke cigarettes than in 1994, according to one of the more surprising surveys that see daylight at this time of year. After quizzing 25,000 people, Mintel, a prominent market research group, projects that there are now 13 million users, up 2 1/2 per cent.

It's odd that some of the crew members smoke cigarettes -- will future astronauts be allowed to light up?

Attorneys for the state and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota are asking Ramsey County District Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick to circumvent a British court ruling denying the examination of the executives. They include the former chairman of BAT and former senior employees with key knowledge of research and development programs. Loss of their pretrial testimony could be crucial - but not necessarily critical - to the state's suit against the industry.

A state appeals court has upheld an unprecedented $2 million damage award to a smoker who blamed his lung cancer on the asbestos filters in his Kent cigarettes. Lawyers on both sides of the case said the 1995 verdict for Milton Horowitz was the first in the nation for a plaintiff in an asbestos-filter case. The 70-year-old Horowitz died of lung cancer last year. The ruling by the 1st District Court of Appeal was made public Wednesday. William Ohlemeyer, a lawyer for defendant Lorillard Inc., said the company would consider appealing to the state Supreme Court.

The California Court of Appeal (First Appellate District) issued a unanimous 27 page opinion late yesterday upholding a September 1995 jury verdict against Lorillard, Inc, manufacturer of Kent cigarettes, and co-defendant Hollingsworth and Vose Co., a supplier of an asbestos-laden cigarette filter.

A separate analysis of statistical data by the commission found that 12- to 17-year-olds who drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes at least once in the past month and who had no other behavior problems, such as fighting or carrying a weapon, were 30 times more likely to smoke marijuana. The likelihood was greater for girls (36 times) than boys (27 times). And these children were 17 times likelier to use a harder drug, such as cocaine, heroin or acid. The likelihood was greater for boys (29 times) than girls (11 times). The commission found that recent brain studies support these correlations by suggesting that these substances produce the same kinds of changes in brain chemistry, affecting dopamine levels through common pathways to the brain. . . The Commission on Substance Abuse Among America's Adolescents . . . called for $1 billion more in research, a $2 tax increase on cigarette packs, and a "substantial" increase in the tax on beer. The cigarette tax increase, it said, would probably reduce teen smoking by 70 percent.

CASA also reported . . . that the peak time for starting tobacco smoking was in the sixth and seventh grades, at about ages 11 and 12. . . Califano, the former U.S. health secretary, said that early use of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana put adolescents at increase risk for abuse of LSD, cocaine and heroin. He stressed the need for parents to be involved with their teen-agers to help keep them from substance abuse, but also said the media, including advertisers, bore responsibility for the glamorization of drug use, drinking and smoking. The report recommended raising funds for research on addiction to $1 billion and for a $2-per-pack tax on cigarettes, increased taxes on beer, tougher laws on adolescents who drive while drinking or using drugs, curbs on televised alcohol advertising, stiffer penalties for the sale of cigarettes to minors and a strengthening of the proposed multi-billion-dollar settlement between tobacco companies and those suing them.

"More young people are smoking than ever before, and half of these are female," Dr Desmond Carney told Reuters in an interview at the eighth world conference on lung cancer in Dublin. . . The disease is already the biggest cause of cancer deaths in the United States, with 170,000 new cases a year, and in most of Europe. Ten years ago it overtook breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer deaths among American women. Carney said when he worked as an oncologist at the U.S. National Cancer Institute in Bethesda in 1976 it was rare to see women or younger people with the condition. "Now in the U.S. it is the most common killer of women and it is not uncommon to see people in their 30s and 40s with this disease." The five-day world conference, which ends on Thursday, has brought together more than 2,500 scientists, physicians and radiologists from 63 countries to look at ways of tackling the "silent disease," one of the hardest cancers to diagnose and treat.

Instead of junkets abroad or jetting to resorts while Congress is on its August break, lawmakers and aides are getting invitations to tour the tobacco fields of Southside Virginia. . . "We want to get the people who don't understand us, or know us" to come next week to the heart of Virginia's tobaccoland, explained J.T. Davis Jr. of Halifax County, a board member of the Concerned Friends for Tobacco group. Invitations were going to such prominent tobacco critics as former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A. Kessler and former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, as well as Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., and Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill.

"I don't expect quick action" in Congress, Bliley told about 50 people at a forum at Providence Middle School in Chesterfield County. . . "Unless or until the president endorses the proposal, with whatever changes he makes . . . then we'll see legislation in Congress," said Bliley . . . But he would not predict when Congress might try to hammer out an agreement that could create stiff new regulations for Big Tobacco.

The rates of illegal sales for this year ranged from 41 percent in January to 17 percent in March. It was 19 percent in June, the last month for which the ABC had figures. . . State officials attributed the decline mainly to federal rules that went into effect in February requiring clerks to demand identification from potential tobacco purchasers who look under the age of 27. . . Johnstone said the decline also probably stems from state enforcement efforts and media attention on teen-smoking laws. Anti-smoking groups expressed cautious agreement with Johnstone's conclusion that some progress was being made. Dr. Jim Roach, a Midway physician and head of Kentucky Action . . said the figures "may be good news." But Roach noted that in some states, there has been a drop in the retail-sales rate without a drop in the teen-smoking rate.

Gov. Arne Carlson's Australia visit last year may have violated state law because tobacco giant Philip Morris Cos. indirectly financed the trip, according to a complaint filed with a watchdog board. Antitobacco activists Brian Bates and Michael Ravnitsky submitted the complaint last week to the state Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board. The two contend Carlson illegally accepted a gift from Philip Morris by going on the eight-day trip valued at $7,000. . .Four Philip Morris representatives, including the firm's chief Midwest lobbyist, joined Carlson on the trip, but Renner said no one lobbied on tobacco issues. "It is incumbent on the governor to make appropriate inquiries" about the trip's funding, Bates and Ravnitsky wrote to the board.

An 82-year-old San Francisco man who lived in an apartment house for the elderly and disabled died yesterday and 14 other persons were injured when a cigarette dropped in an overstuffed chair apparently set off the second serious fire South of Market in four days.

A 78-year-old San Pedro woman confined to a wheelchair died early Tuesday morning in an apartment fire caused by her smoking in bed, Los Angeles fire officials said.

A cigarette left smoldering in an armchair ignited a raging residential hotel fire that left hundreds homeless and as many as 12 injured today, arson investigators said. The man who allegedly left the cigarette unattended in his room at the five-story Delta Hotel could face criminal charges, said Sgt. James Bosch, a police arson investigator. "In this case, we believe the man opened the door to his room, providing oxygen to the fire at which time it really took off," Bosch said.

Standard Commercial Corporation (NYSE:STW) today announced the finalization of an agreement between Trans- Continental Leaf Tobacco Corporation ("TCLTC"), a wholly-owned subsidiary, and Guizhou Nanming Leaf Tobacco Co Ltd ("Nanming") for the construction of a tobacco processing factory. Nanming is a joint venture comprising several national, provincial and county government agencies. The project has received all necessary government approvals, and will be located in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province in China.

How is it that beer has such a feel-good image for many Americans, while other "sin products" like tobacco and liquor are more widely condemned? One explanation begins with the dromedary and the dog. In 1987, RJR Nabisco Inc. rolled out Joe Camel in billboard and magazine ads nationwide. The character became a lightning rod for antitobacco critics, who complained frequently and loudly that the company used him to target kids. But RJR stubbornly clung to Joe Camel for nearly a decade, deciding to phase him out only last month. Compare that with the modus operandi at Anheuser-Busch Cos

Old-fashioned tobacco harvest at Claude Moore Colonial Farm offers a chance to cut, string and hang tobacco just like in the old days. On Sunday, become a farm hand: Bring a knife and cut tobacco; hand-pull and bundle flax; pick and string corn; and then celebrate the harvest with light refreshments. From 1 to 4 p.m., weather permitting. 6310 Georgetown Pike, McLean. Fee: $3, discounts. 703-442-7557

Sheen, who made headlines for spending a fortune on Heidi Fleiss" hookers, shocked journalists at a promotional appearance Sunday for his upcoming picture, "Money Talks." According to Buzz Weekly, Sheen arrived late at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills claiming jet lag and immediately began chain-smoking. When one reporter asked him to stop, pleading allergies, Sheen ate the cigaret and then stuffed the whole pack in his mouth, the mag reports. . . "Yeah, he said all that stuff, but he wasn't late for the junket, he was early, and he only pretended to eat the cigaret," Sheen's rep, Jeff Ballard, told PAGE SIX's Jared Paul Stern.

The AHA also supports a strong McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. Ultimately, reform will limit the influence of tobacco money, but campaign finance reform is proving to be a long and drawn-out struggle. Here and now, we need to end the political influence of tobacco companies in our state. Public health policy should be determined by scientific evidence, not political influence. The AHA's Putting Health First: No Tobacco Money In Politics Pledge may not be the only solution to controlling the influence of the tobacco industry on Minnesota health policy, but we believe our efforts are making an impact. It is a first step on the road to campaign finance reform. We welcome other concerned organizations, candidates and citizens to join us in this effort.

DFLers Mark Dayton, Ted Mondale, Mike Freeman and Hubert Humphrey III, and Republicans Allen Quist, Tim Pawlenty and Dean Johnson announced that they would not accept money from eight tobacco companies, their employees and their 18 registered lobbyists in Minnesota. That should be a blanket big enough to snuff out all smoke money from their campaigns. But it isn't. Some of the state's biggest law firms -- and most regular donors to candidates -- count tobacco companies among their major clients. Their money can still flow freely to candidates. More significantly, the pledge doesn't extend to the political parties, though the Heart Association says it will try to enlist them next year. . . Individual candidates are not to blame for the excessive influence big money has in American government. It's the political financing system that is out of control. . . Those who refused to take the Heart Association pledge, Republicans Joanne Benson and Roy Terwilliger, did themselves no credit.

While on any day each of us may identify with the restrictive nature of a given campaign, there is a much larger issue here. Where do we draw the line on dictating to each other? How many of these battles can we stand? Whose values should prevail? Life in America has remained relatively peaceful compared with that in other societies. But we are becoming less tolerant and more mean-spirited in everyday social interactions. We have become less forgiving. . . When is the thrill too risky? How many drinks are too many? When is secondhand smoke too thick? All of these questions need to be considered with some measure of tolerance for the choices of others. We are witnessing a new age in this country: the fragmentation of society along lines that do not break on typical demographics like race, age or income. These new divisions are based on paternalism -- what we believe is best for each other. The beauty of choice is that it allows some people to drive a high-powered car to dinner, allows others to have a drink with dinner and allows a cigarette to be smoked after dinner. In all cases, we require individuals to make certain their behavior does not have an impact on others. To the degree that it does, they will be held responsible for their choices. But when we no longer allow those choices, both civility and common sense will have been diminished.

As a film critic and a mother, I couldn't agree more with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the prevalence of smoking in many films. After over a decade of seeing little or no smoking in films, we are suddenly witnessing an epidemic of characters lighting up at the drop of a hat. Characters of both sexes and all ages are puffing away in comedies, dramas, action films and even musicals. I heard the talking heads on network news programs making fun of Clinton's column. Maybe I'm not as jaded as the Washington press corps, but I am thrilled that Hillary Clinton has jumped on the "no smoking" bandwagon. . . It takes someone with Clinton's clout to focus the public's attention on the problem. Carole Simon Mills San Anselmo

Many of the nonprofit advocacy groups subpoenaed by the Senate committee investigating campaign finance, among them some of Washington's most influential lobbies on both the left and the right, are angry at the scope of the demand for documents, contending that their privacy is being invaded and suggesting that they may not fully comply. The documents sought by the Senate committee include confidential strategy memorandums, correspondence with candidates and all material related to publicly debated issues. Among the 26 organizations subpoenaed are, on the right, the Christian Coalition, the National Right to Life Committee, the Heritage Foundation and the Better America Foundation, created in 1993 by Bob Dole, last year's Republican presidential nominee, and disbanded in 1995. Groups on the left include the National Education Association, the Sierra Club, the American Trial Lawyers Association and Emily's List, which advocates for abortion rights.

New figures show the tobacco lobby has pumped more than $1.9 million in soft-money contributions into the political parties' coffers in the first six months of this year, with the Republicans getting more than $1.5 million of those funds.

Meanwhile, a Common Cause analysis of figures reported to the Federal Election Commission found seven tobacco companies and two tobacco groups gave nearly $1.6 million to Republican committees and $324,461 to Democrats in the first half of this year. That compares with $413,865 in soft money to both parties for the same period four years ago. Such donations can be used only for party activities, not for specific candidates.

The nation's beleaguered tobacco companies gave $2 million to political parties in the first half of this year‹nearly five times what they gave in the same, normally slack period of 1993 after the previous presidential election. The lion's share went to the GOP. "The increase is astounding," said Ann McBride, president of the private group Common Cause

Consider this. In the last week of July, Lott publicly chided the White House for taking longer than anticipated to complete its own examination of the $368.5 billion pact, helped the industry get a tax break to defray the cost of the proposed settlement and ripped those who said they'll seek to make cigarettemakers pay far more. "He recused himself, but he's obviously still a player," said Gary Black

Postman has proposed a Jan 20 starting date, while the Rosenblatts have suggested a December start and lawyers defending tobacco companies asked for a Feb 2 trial beginning.

State prisoners do not have a constitutional right to smoke inside prisons and a state ban on smoking in most prisons cannot be considered cruel and unusual punishment, a Suffolk Superior Court judge ruled yesterday. The ruling extinguishes, for now, a series of lawsuits dating back to 1994 filed by prisoners who fear the effects of second-hand smoke. It also ends another round of lawsuits filed in 1996 by prisoners contending they have a constitutional right to smoke. A class-action suit against the DOC by nonsmoking inmates was settled in 1996 when the state agreed to make prisons smoke-free and designate outside smoking areas. The DOC also declared cigarettes contraband and offered smoking cessation programs.

Most state legislators believe smokers are addicted to nicotine and that secondhand smoke can cause lung cancer in nonsmokers, according to a new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study. Also, a majority would support increases in state tobacco excise taxes under certain conditions

The store, which annually attracts hundreds of thousands of customers seeking deals on cigars, cigarettes and perfume, plans to expand by about 44 percent. . . "We most definitely need it," Wilson said. "It will give us the opportunity to have more merchandise and different kinds of merchandise." . . [JR's] largest retail outlet is the company's flagship store here in Selma, where company President Lew Rothman delights in selling offbeat products along with clothing, cigars and perfume. For example, the store currently is featuring Halloween and Christmas gifts.

The Burbank Unified School District has eceived an $80,262 grant for tobacco use prevention programs and a $10,000 grant for new teachers. The Tobacco Use Prevention Education Grant will fund resources, including textbooks and videos, to train 26 high school teachers about the effects of tobacco use on health. Also, high schools will offer programs for student users who want to quit smoking.

vibrant mural painted by local children onto the side of a Ventura Avenue liquor store in 1994 was partly painted over Friday morning, despite pleas from the directing artist and community members. The artwork, which was funded by the Ventura County Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, features anti-gang and anti-drug messages aimed at discouraging criminals from frequenting the area. The 12-by-72-foot mural gained national acclaim last year when it became one of 50 pieces of community art selected for depiction in an exhibit in Washington, D.C. "It's really sad that they would do this," . . . Store co-owner Kamil Yousef said he has no plans to cover the remaining portion of the mural, but that he does not regret covering what he did. "My customers didn't like that part of the mural. They said it was ugly". . . The objectionable portion of the mural depicted a billboard marketing tobacco and alcohol to children. Scrawled across the billboard were the words: "It's not cool to target kids."

The new controls ban smoking in offices and indoor and outdoor dining areas at restaurants in Castro Valley, San Lorenzo and Sunol. Smokers also must stand 15 feet from doorways and windows of smoke-free buildings . . . Vending machines also are banned.

Liggett Group continued its long sales meltdown in its latest quarter. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said its second-quarter U.S. tobacco sales declined 31 percent to $78 million from the same quarter a year ago.

Brooke Group Ltd. () said its second-quarter loss widened on its Liggett cigarette unit's declining U.S. sales to $13.6 million, or 75 cents a share, from $10.7 million, or 58 cents, in the year-earlier period

The exercise is part of an unusual international experiment in integrating ethics into education, a plan conceived of by an Israeli, conducted in six countries, and endorsed by some of the world's leading lights in education, including Harvard University's Howard Gardner and Nobel science laureate Leon Lederman. Last month, the program brought to Jerusalem gifted students and teachers from schools in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, the United States, Jordan, and Israel and assigned them to help build a global curriculum on ethics to be offered to schools everywhere. . . As Lederman, retired director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, wrote in his endorsement of the project: "There are, unfortunately, no difficulties in finding examples of how education fails, of itself, to produce ethical people: Nazi medical experiments, the steady procession of public officials to disgrace and prison, the astounding public position of tobacco company executives, and on and on. The idea of ethical standards in science is of growing importance."

Recently, I received e-mail asking me to be more detailed about whether restaurants have separately ventilated nonsmoking areas. Well, that's a tough one. . . What I do know is that most places offer smoking and nonsmoking sections. I consider that the norm. So I make particular note in a review or an information box only when there's a deviation from the norm . .

I propose that tobacco, when produced as biomass rather than for smoking, is an unexamined but viable source of cost-competitive renewable energy and fuel, food-grade protein, plastics and organic chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other resources with significant worldwide economic development potential. . . Biomass tobacco simply means tobacco planted densely, rather than in neat little rows. An insecticide company in New Mexico produced 300 tons/acre alongside the Rio Grande in the 1920s, and a company experimenting with tobacco protein conducted 200 MT/acre trials in the 1970s and 1980s, while scientists at North Carolina State University regularly produced 200-250 tons/acre throughout the 1980s. However none of these research efforts was directed at producing biomass tobacco as part of an integrated energy/protein/by-products plan

Think Marlboro Country without the Marlboro Man. You're left with a stretch of cactus-dotted, horse-trodden land somewhere out West. You'll also have an advertisement that's perfectly legal under the tobacco industry's suggested ad regulations.

Ramsey District Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick determined in May that the tobacco industry "intentionally denied or minimized known health risks" at the same time it conducted internal discussions about the link between smoking and illness, according to documents unsealed late Friday. Fitzpatrick said the public relied on the industry's public statements "at least to some extent" as the debate over smoking and health continued for more than 40 years. . . Fitzpatrick's ruling, as revealed Friday, contains some of his strongest language and most detailed findings to date in the three-year-old lawsuit brought against the industry by the state of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

But this year Shepherd, like many of the state's 8,000 tobacco farmers, is in no rush to enter the 23 auction warehouses that buy and sell flue-cured tobacco throughout Southside Virginia. The prices have been too depressing.

But he had a very strong opinion on that and on proposals being floated to get Kentucky farmers a share of the landmark $368.5 billion tobacco settlement Congress will begin considering next month. "It ain't going to do nothing for me," he said. "It will end up going for golf carts. Lawyers' golf carts." . . You still can smoke at the fair by entering the pipe-smoking contest. Sponsor Gayle Sallee of Kremer's Smoke Shoppe said entries are up 20 percent this year, mirroring the increased interest in cigars and pipes everywhere.

He has been smoking for 57 years and suffers from emphysema and lung cancer. It's too late to quit, he says. As Congress considers a mega-settlement to end tobacco lawsuits, West is a dying example of the reality beyond the dollar signs. West, 69, won't see a dime of the proposed $368.5 billion settlement with cigarette makers. Doctors believe he will die of cancer in a few months, long before the fate of the deal is known. . . He remembers reading the newspaper reports during the early 1950s about scientific tests on mice. The tests produced tumors when their skin was painted with tobacco tar, triggering a nationwide cancer scare about smoking. But West believed the tobacco industry's comforting explanation: There was no proof that cigarettes caused cancer. "I thought, `Well, that is a crock,' " he said. " `If it is dangerous to your health, why don't they prove it? If it is dangerous, why do they just say it may be (harmful)?' "

Now it can be told: Mrs. O'Leary and her cow have gotten a bum rap. Someone else may've started the Great Chicago Fire. So, at least, says a title insurance company lawyer, who has spent every other Saturday for the past two years burrowing into the underbelly of Chicago's most grievous disaster . . . Richard Bales, a 45-year-old employee of the Chicago Title Insurance Co., contends that . . . there is another likely culprit: a relatively unknown fellow named Daniel (Peg Leg) Sullivan, a one-legged horsecart-driver who was a neighbor of Mrs. O'Leary and who may, in fact, have been in her barn, lighting a lantern or smoking a pipe on Oct. 8, 1871 . .

Smugglers: Seizures by inspectors rose to a record in fiscal 1996. Legal visitors can bring back $100 worth for personal use.

CARNIVAL Cruise Lines recently announced it will introduce the world's first smoke-free cruise ship, Paradise, in fall 1998. Guests and crew will enjoy a smoke-free environment anywhere on the 2,040-passenger vessel, according to Carnival. Smoking will be banned in all the ship's cabins, bars, restaurants and lounges, even out on open decks.

His testimony during one key committee meeting in August of that year helped set the tone for the panel's finding that nicotine is addictive. Schneider concluded that science had yet to prove whether nicotine is nonaddictive at any daily dosage. "It is the best thing I've ever done in my life. One good public health decision can save more lives than a hundred doctors seeing 50 patients a day for their entire career," says Schneider

I've also been thinking about the Marlboro Man. By that I do not mean the mythic cowboy character of Philip Morris fame. I mean a specific cowboy named Daryl Winfield. For a long time, he was one of the most prolific models employed in the Marlboro campaign

The Bogart children approve about 75% of requests . . . They nix advertisements promoting alcohol (unless they include a disclaimer about drinking and driving) or his trademark cigarettes, because Bogart died of lung disease. Even ads for other products using the star's image must have any cigarettes cropped out.

Diane Keaton thinks "Northern Lights," a television movie she stars in and executive-produced, is an odd choice for the family-friendly Disney Channel. "I'm smoking up a storm," the 51-year-old actress says with a laugh. "I also think it's a little sophisticated. I'm surprised we got away with it, actually, because it's just ... out there." In the film, which airs Aug. 23, she plays Roberta Blumstein, a fulminating, chain-smoking New Yorker who wears a brassy wig and gets stuck with a 9-year-old nephew she never knew she had.

Marketing industry insiders call them "training wheels," products sold to teenagers and children to entice them and, ultimately, to get them hooked. Apple computers, donated to schools, are considered training wheels. Less benign are intoxicating new products called "alcopops," the liquor industry's equivalent of Joe Camel. . . Lesson 2: Coalitions make it happen. . . Alcohol marketers argue that they only are selling what the public wants to buy, and that these products are aimed at drinking-age adults. They often fall back on a libertarian argument repeated frequently by tobacco companies: This is a free country, adults have a right to choose

The Republican-controlled Congress is set to review the tobacco industry's mega-settlement with several states, and the companies are eager to have the deal approved so they'll be spared the risk of even worse hits at the hands of outraged juries. They're handing over the moolah to help secure favorable treatment, plain and simple. . . Contributions typically don't purchase votes so much as they improve access and encourage behind-the-scenes efforts to advance one cause or derail another. Frequent, detailed disclosure of who is giving how much to whom is critical to keeping that influence market to a minimum. Even that's not good enough, though, when the wealthy can use unlimited amounts of soft money to try to buy their politicians by the barrel.

Japan is also a society that values group harmony, making it hard for a nonsmoker to challenge office smokers. In the United States, that social reserve hardly exists. What America has clearly done more of than other nations is fight over smoking, particularly in court. Other nations legislate rather than litigate, said Eric LeGresley, legal counsel for the Non-Smokers' Rights Association in Canada. The United States also leads most nations in restricting smoking in restaurants and public places, which LeGresley attributed to the strength of local grass-roots movements. But in many countries, individuals wouldn't consider suing a cigarette manufacturer for what they regard as their own choice to smoke -- or wouldn't need to sue, because national insurance covers their hospital bills. Outside the United States, anti-smoking groups are often small, particularly in Asia, where citizen groups in general are weak and there is a traditional respect for central authority.

POPE John Paul II's genius for marketing Catholicism will be severely tested this week in Paris when he flies in for a massive gathering of the faithful billed as "the Papal Woodstock". Only 48 hours before the official opening of the Catholic Church's 12th World Youth Festival, the organisers are in despair at the low turn-out and the indifference of the great majority of France's young Catholics to their leader's call. . . Monsignor Michel Dubost, admitted: "There is a crisis in the relationship between young people in certain Western countries like France and the Catholic Church." . . . The modernisers won out with a vast publicity campaign, corporate sponsorship and special papal merc handising [icluding] the sale of papal cigarette lighters . . traditionalists have hit back with warnings of overcommercialisation: the papal altar at the 1995 World Youth Festival in Denver, they observe, was overshadowed by a vast advertising poster for Marlboro cigarettes which showed a John Paul II lookalike and the slogan: "He loves Marlboro too."

A Trade Ministry official said the embargo would initially apply to cigarettes, soft drinks, chocolate, cookies and other items that could be replaced by Palestinian products.

After three hours and 10 minutes, the arguments were over and grim-faced government attorneys headed for the doors. In a telling aside to a colleague, one government lawyer sighed, "Why weren't we arguing this in the 9th Circuit?" The fate of the FDA regulations now sits with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers several states in the heart of tobacco country and is home to a number of judges who are, philosophically, as far as one can get from the liberal 9th Circuit in the West.

Santander Investment analyst Luis Fernando Oliveira has started coverage of Brazilian tobacco company Cia Souza Cruz Industria e Comercio SA with a rating of buy.

PRESIDENT CLINTON'S executive order banning smoking in government buildings is important symbolically as well as practically.

The memo appears to provide a missing link in one of the central accusations against the tobacco industry: that to shield documents from becoming public in court proceedings, companies funneled sensitive research documents through their lawyers, according to Stanton Glantz, an anti-tobacco activist at the University of California who provided the memo to The Washington Post. . . An attorney for Brown & Williamson said the procedure described in the memo was a temporary system, neither illegal nor unethical, that merely provided the company's attorneys a way to review research documents. . . The two-page memorandum describes a system for ensuring that all but the most noncontroversial documents passing between Brown & Williamson and its corporate parent, British-American Tobacco, be forwarded through law firms. In the memo, dated Jan. 30, 1985, M.J. Hardwick of BAT's Group Research and Development Center described a set of procedures "for sending information and written material to the U.S.A." Once documents had passed through a BAT research facility called Millbank, three copies were to be sent to Robert L. Maddox Jr. at the law firm of Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs in Louisville, Ky. "The recipient list must not contain the name of any B&W person or that of Maddox or of his company," says the memo, in which the word "not" is underlined. "The covering letter should simply say that BTCo Millbank has asked that he, Maddox, receive the documents. (No other statement is necessary,)" the memo states.

In his May 9 ruling, Judge Fitzpatrick found evidence of crime and fraud in the documents but sealed those portions that he relied upon, prompting several news organizations, including Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal, to file a joint request to lift the seal. In granting the request Friday, the judge released his unedited ruling, which juxtaposed the industry's public statements undercutting the health risks of smoking with internal memos acknowledging them.

Evidence exists showing that the tobacco industry has intentionally denied or minimized the health risks smoking poses to the public, a Ramsey County district judge has said in a recently unsealed ruling in Minnesota's tobacco litigation. The once-confidential ruling by Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick, issued in May, was made public Friday after the judge unsealed it. Only the judge's order was made public. The sensitive tobacco industry documents that he refers to in his order remain under seal. A court-appointed special master is determining whether any of those documents can be made part of the public file. The judge stated in a separate order, however, that he believed it was important to release his May order, which quotes from the tobacco documents in question, because "such findings are the basis for the court's decision. The court's decision is subject to public scrutiny."

The two University of California, San Francisco, researchers created a model to assess the short-term direct medical cost savings associated with the state's Proposition 99 antitobacco education program. "This analysis reveals that a one-time, 1% reduction in absolute prevalence of smoking produces substantial short-run savings, both in terms of events avoided and dollars saved," Drs. Lightwood and Glantz report in the August 19 issue of Circulation. In just the first year, they estimate there would be 924 fewer hospitalization for acute MI and 538 fewer for stroke, yielding an immediate savings of $44 million. A 7-year program that produced a 1% reduction in smoking per year could save more than $3 billion, according to the UCSF researchers.

"If you go out to the general public and ask them what kills smokers, most of them will tell you lung cancer," Glantz said. "Lung cancer does kill a lot of smokers but the disease that kills most smokers is cardiovascular disease and stroke." "The point of this paper is that, in fact, if you look at the primary endpoint of tobacco use which is heart disease, you see immediate benefit both in terms of public health and in terms of dollars and cents," he said. The risk of heart disease drops immediately after quitting smoking and is about half way back to a nonsmoker's risk after a year. However, it can take 15 years of not smoking before lung cancer risk falls to a level even close to that of a nonsmoker. "What is impressive about these estimates is that they are so conservative," wrote Dr. William Kannel in an editorial accompanying the study. "They take into account neither the fact that continued smoking also increases the risk of recurrent myocardial infarction and strokes, nor the costs of rehabilitation, long-term treatment, or lost wages and productivity." "They make a good, conservative case for investment in adult smoking abatement by health insurers and government health officials," wrote Kannel, of the Boston University School of Medicine in Massachusetts.

"The only clear effect that D.A.R.E. had six years after the program was that male high school seniors who participated in the program used harder drugs like amphetamines/barbiturates, cocaine, and LSD significantly less than those males who weren't in the program," the researchers concluded. "The program failed in lessening both male and female students' use of alcohol, cigarettes, or marijuana."

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. could end up paying a hefty fine if an employee is found to have been involved in a smuggling ring, law professors said yesterday. "You can't put a corporation in jail, but you can go after individual members of a corporation," said David Logan, a law professor at Wake Forest University who follows tobacco issues. "You can fine a corporation a million dollars." At issue is a federal grand-jury investigation into accusations that the company knew about an operation that smuggled $687 million worth of cigarettes and liquor into Canada between 1992 and 1996, according to authorities.

As the leaders of a massive cigarette-smuggling ring discussed their booming business at a Canadian fishing lodge two years ago, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. had a representative in the meeting, according to federal court records unsealed last week in Syracuse. A marketing official with the cigarette-maker sat in on the meeting and indicated he knew that his company's products would end up on the black market in Canada, according to an affidavit from U.S. Customs agent Gil Schmelzinger. The documents reveal for the first time possible complicity by a tobacco company in the smuggling ring, which is accused of moving $687 million worth of contraband cigarettes and hard liquor into Canada from 1992 to 1996.

Insurance and tobacco interests together gave more than $3 million to Republican national party committees in the first six months of 1997, an independent watchdog group [Common Cause] reported on Monday . . .Tobacco companies gave almost $1.6 million to the Republicans, led by Philip Morris Cos. Inc. with $653,000 and RJR Nabisco Inc. and its RJ Reynolds subsidiary with $340,000. Contributions from tobacco interests ran five times greater than in the corresponding period four years ago.

"My dad says Tommy Thompson's the best governor ever." . . Guide: "Yes, and people want to raise the tax on cigarettes to discourage smoking. It's now 44 cents a pack, and even though the governor has traveled far and wide with Philip Morris executives, he wants to raise the tax, too. During a trip to Australia, he probably told them, `I'm raising the tax a nickel, whether you like it or not!' Then they all went scuba diving."

In a costly defeat for thousands of victims of asbestos and smoking- related diseases, the California Supreme Court yesterday limited the amount of damages a victim can collect for slow-developing illnesses. The decision comes as a financial relief to manufacturers who stood to lose millions of dollars as a result of the case that challenged the scope of Proposition 51, the 1986 statewide measure that limited the liability of manufacturers and other wealthy defendants. By a 6-to-1 vote, the high court ruled that the so-called deep-pockets law applies to any injury diagnosed after the measure was approved on June 4, 1986 -- even if the medical problem was caused before the law went into effect. . . The justices ruled in the case of James Buttram of Alameda County, who had sued Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp. of Ohio after he learned in 1991 that he had asbestos-related mesothelioma. He died shortly after a jury awarded him $1.5 million in damages in 1993.

Yesterday's 37-page decision by a D.C. Superior Court judge denying class certification in the Reed case is the correct and proper result under the facts and the law, and Philip Morris U.S.A. (NYSE:MO) expects that the now firmly established precedent rejecting smokers' class actions will continue to be followed across the country where similar cases are pending. The decision is important because it shows, once again, that courts recognize that a class action by smokers claiming damages for "addiction and injury" cannot be certified consistent with the law. The ruling relies upon a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Amchem case, last year's landmark ruling by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Castano case, and two federal court decisions, Arch and Smith, all rejecting class certification. The Reed Court said, "This Court agrees with the court in Smith, and also with the court in Arch, and finds that it is 'evident that the individual issues raised not only predominate over the common issues but overwhelm the common issues."' The Court added, "This Court is not persuaded at this time that a class action would promote either efficiency or fairness."

You choose the non-smoking section of a restaurant because you believe it protects you from the hazards of second-hand smoke. Wrong. Preliminary results from a new air quality study suggest designated sections don't give customers the protection they're after. . . Results also indicated levels of airborne nicotine in non-smoking sections of restaurants here were similar to levels in the smoking sections of Toronto restaurants last year, before it adopted a new no-smoking bylaw. Taylor, co-ordinator of the tobacco and substance abuse prevention program, said the Hamilton-Wentworth department joined with others in Brant, Waterloo, Niagara, and Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph to undertake the $15,000 indoor air-quality study. They were assisted by researchers from the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit . . .

Canada's largest cigarettemaker is preparing to introduce its first U.S. cigarette before anti-smoking restrictions make new brands more difficult to market. Imperial Tobacco hopes to launch Mercer, a "natural" cigarette without additives, before marketing and sales curbs are implemented as part of the tentative $368.5 billion settlement between U.S. tobacco companies and state attorneys general. Mercer reaches stores in Portland, Ore., its test market, Sept. 15.

For five years, Matinee Fashion Foundation (a division of Imperial Tobacco), has smoked out competing sponsors by distributing $3 million to local fashion talent. The effect has been an increased awareness of Canadian designers as well as new cachet for the Made-in-Canada fashion label, both here and abroad, as a recent show in Calgary demonstrated. But as legislation concerning the tobacco industry's sponsorship of cultural events awaits final amendments, fashionistas are in a haze over economics and ethics. Louise Lee, of a Calgary boutique, feels torn. "I appreciate what (Matinee) is doing because without them some of our designers would not be on their feet; they would not be independent. "However, I don't feel that there isn't someone else who would step forward and also sponsor the industry. Maybe it's an assumption I have.... I'm hoping there are others."

The Thailand Tobacco Monopoly, which virtually controls the country's cigarette market, will soon raise its prices in the wake of the baht's float and increase in value added tax. The monopoly's director, Ms Pakkinee Pattamasukhon said the company's production costs had soared by 10% this year and would rise between 16% and 20% next year. As a result, the prices of king-sized cigarettes would raise by two baht for a 20-cigarette pack, one baht for a pack of regular sized cigarettes, two baht per pack for those with filte

Two Chinese cities plan to introduce a tax on tobacco sales in what would be a landmark move to raise millions of dollars a year for the cash-strapped anti-smoking campaign, officials said on Tuesday. Authorities in the eastern industrial city of Shanghai and the northern port city of Tianjin were thinking in terms of a "health education" tax on cigarette sales, city officials said. The plan emerged as China's capital, Beijing, prepared to hold the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health on August 24-28.

Tobacco advertisements have been banned from television since 1971, but the visual image of people lighting up has proven to be a hard habit to break for television networks. Tobacco usage - including cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco - on prime-time comedies is at its highest level since 1963. And on TV dramas, there hasn't been so much tobacco use on screen since 1970, according to a study done at the University of California, San Francisco, medical school. From a punch line on a sitcom to a prop on a drama, cigarettes are a big part of the television-viewing experience.

The ban-it brigade is led by two groups - some three-dozen freshmen from both parties organized by Democrat Tom Allen of Maine and Republican Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas; and more-senior members organized by Democrat Marty Meehan of Massachusetts and Christopher Shays of Connecticut. . . .Giving $500,000 to a politician is not an expression of free speech. It is expensive speech, giving one person's thoughts more power than another's. It also supports the petition by President Clinton and many members of Congress to the FEC for a ban via the regulation route. The good news is that McCain and Feingold now want to compromise. The bad news is that many influential reformers still have pet ideas they insist be attached . . .The better course is to insist that Congress divide simply on a soft money ban.

Eleven years ago, Michigan economist Kenneth Warner was the first American to visit a rural hospital in a remote and impoverished area of China. He met with the hospital director, a Chinese physician who greeted him politely by offering cigarettes from a large bowl in his office. "Aren't you worried about the growing rates of lung cancer in China?" Warner asked. "No, we don't have much air pollution," the physician said, taking a deep drag from his cigarette. Warner returns to China this week as one of several hundred American delegates to the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health

World Conference on Lung Cancer The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer, comprising 2,300 of the world's leading medical experts on lung cancer, met last week in Dublin. It seems only the Irish Times saw fit to notice.

• 08/11/97 Lung Cancer Killed 20M People in 20th Century
  
  Two decades ago it was predominantly a disease of men. The number of women who develop lung cancer secondary to smoking now almost equals that of men. Deaths per year among Irish women is now exceeding that from breast cancer. Moreover, small cell lung cancer, accounting for 88,000 new global cases a year, continues to be a cancer characterised by "rapid spread, recurrence and resistance to drugs".
• 08/11/97 Action Sought to Avoid Cancer Epidemic
  
  Despite evidence that more young and middle-aged women are smoking, there is still time to avoid a major lung cancer epidemic among European women, a leading specialist said yesterday. Indications that lung cancer is still relatively rare in European women does not mean, however, that effective interventions to reduce smoking among women should be delayed, according to Prof Peter Boyle of the European Institute of Oncology in Milan.. . Prof Boyle warned that current lung cancer rates reflected smoking habits over past decades, but do not necessarily reflect current patterns.
• 08/12/97 Conference Told Cigarettes Designed to be Addictive
  
  The vast majority of cigarettes are designed by manufacturers to cause and enhance addiction, according to . . . Mr Clifford Douglas, of Tobacco Control Law and Policy Consulting, Illinois . . . Evidence also shows consumers use these products almost exclusively for pharmacological - drug dependence - purposes. "Tobacco manufacturers claim publicly that taste provides an independent reason for tobacco use, but they have been unsuccessful in their attempts to sell non-addictive, low-nicotine products that provide 'taste'," he said. In the industry's own research over three decades . . . it is clear that it knew for many years that consumers would not smoke cigarettes that fail to produce the necessary "physiological response" and satisfy the "nicotine need". Mr Douglas outlined to lung cancer specialists how the tobacco industry employed "a variety of methods to control nicotine delivery with space age precision".
• 08/13/97 Smoking Still Kills
  
  As has been known and promulgated for a generation, smoking causes lung cancer. The real wonder must be about just how this message has either failed to get through, or has been rationalised or ignored by those already addicted to nicotine. . . The size and extent of the problems resulting from tobacco are formidable, and growing daily.
• 08/13/97 Attempting to Cope with Smokers' Guilt
  
  "We deal concertedly with guilt. We tell the health-care community: `You are not justified in blaming these patients'. They are the victims of tobacco companies," explained Ms Peggy McCarthy, of Alliance for Lung Cancer Advocacy, Support and Education. The most obvious guilt comes when a smoker is diagnosed with lung cancer. That anger is not justified, she said . . Anger is found in those who gave up smoking but did not realise that everyone who ever smoked is at risk, "contrary to what the tobacco companies would have us believe". "We get calls from people saying: `I listened to my doctor. I gave up cigarettes 20 years ago. I was told my lungs would return to normal. Now I have lung cancer'."
• 08/13/97 New Drugs to Aid Lung Cancer Fight, Says Doctor
  
  New drugs delivered to patients in aerosol form are set to "greatly improve the prospects of controlling early lung cancer". The medication is administered in the same way that inhalers are used by for the treatment of asthma, according to Dr James Mulshine of the US National Cancer Institute. Delayed detection of lung cancer contributes to a mortality rate of 87 per cent within five years for patients with the disease, which this year will account for an estimated 160,000 deaths in the US, greater than the sum of all deaths from colon, breast and genital cancer. . . But early detection techniques and the use of drugs known as retinoids - synthetic derivatives of Vitamin A - represents a promising new direction, Dr Mulshine told the eighth World Conference on Lung Cancer in University College Dublin yesterday.
• 08/14/97 Drug Expected to Play Important Role
  
  Patients who have one of the most virulent forms of lung cancer are set to benefit from a new drug which has been described as "the most important to have emerged in the past 10 years" for that form of the disease. The drug topotecan has been shown to be effective in the treatment of small cell lung cancer (SCLC), the most aggressive of all lung cancers, which accounts for about 25 per cent of cases. Lung-cancer specialists meeting in UCD are to be briefed today on the latest field trials for the drug, which is derived from an oriental deciduous tree.
• 08/14/97 Women More Susceptible than Male Smokers
  
  Women are more susceptible to lung cancer than men, even if they smoke less. The findings [were] based on analysis of genetic material in both sexes . . . The study was carried out by Dr Aage Haugen at the National Institute of Occupational Health in Norway. . . However, only between 10 and 20 per cent of lifetime smokers develop lung cancer. This suggested a genetic link with the disease, but it was only recently that "genetic susceptibility factors" could be adopted to evaluating lung cancer risk. Lung cancer, therefore, resulted from a combination of environmental factors - usually smoke - and genetic susceptibility.
• 08/15/97 CESSATION: Most Former Smokers Quit Without Help--Specialist
  
  The existence of about 300 methods for giving-up smoking reflects the extent of the difficulty in trying to overcome nicotine addiction, lung-cancer specialists meeting in Dublin have been told. Despite the various techniques outlined in medical research literature, 90 per cent of smokers who successfully quit do so without outside help, according to Dr Daniel Ihde of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis in the US. Prevention of lung cancer is theoretically simple. No one should ever begin to smoke cigarettes, he said yesterday, but reality was different. . . The specialist in lung cancer prevention said the most effective smoking-cessation clinics helped clients to prepare for quitting and continued contact through what was known as "maintenance".

• 08/16/97 Strategy of Making Tobacco Firms Accountable Noted

Yesterday, the tobacco companies lost again, this time in the US Court of Appeals for the First District. In the ruling, a panel of three judges upheld a decision stating that the Massachusetts Ingredient Disclosure Law was not preempted by existing federal laws that set forth rules governing tobacco product disclosure. The ruling, touted as the first to give an individual state the right to set higher standards on tobacco regulations, brings Massachusetts one step closer to implementing the first-in-the-nation law.

The U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston rebuffed this week the appeal by Philip Morris Cos., RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp. () (), Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. () and Lorillard Tobacco Co., finding that Massachusetts' right to protect its citizens' health isn't subservient to federal regulations governing the tobacco industry.

The state Public Health Council yesterday approved a first-in-the-nation requirement that cigarette manufacturers reveal the additives and total nicotine content in any products sold in Massachusetts. The regulations take effect at the end of the year, setting the stage for the disclosures of cigarette ingredients early in 1998. Gregory Connolly, head of the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program of the state Department of Public Health, predicted that the regulations would survive court attacks being pressed by the tobacco industry, including one he expects to be filed almost immediately in an effort to block the new rules. By Dec. 15 the industry must provide the DPH with a list of ingredients - that is, additives in the tobacco, paper, or filters of cigarettes - of the 50 brands that have more than a 5 percent market share in Massachusetts. A follow-up report on 150 additional brands is due Dec. 1, 1998. DPH then will determine which of the ingredient names should be made public. Under the disclosure law passed last year, ingredients will be revealed only if they are harmful and if publishing them could reduce risks to public health.

"The decision does not resolve all the issues in the case," said Henry C. Dinger, an attorney representing one of the cigarette manufacturers. "The only issue the court of appeals decided was that the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act (FCLAA) does not preempt the ingredient disclosure law. The court expressly left open a challenge to the ingredient disclosure law based on the law's likely destruction of the manufacturers' valuable ingredient trade secrets. The companies intend to pursue that avenue vigorously."

About 15 protesters organized by the American Lung Assn. of Los Angeles County picketed at the Fairplex's front gate in Pomona, calling on the fair's board of directors to scrub its arrangement with Marlboro Music, which is sponsoring three concerts in exchange for displaying Marlboro banners near the stage and setting up a booth to give away non-tobacco merchandise. Protesters, holding signs such as "Cotton Candy, Clowns and Cigarettes?" and "Our Kids Are Not for Sale," accused the fair of sending a pro-smoking message to children who will be brought to the fair's family-oriented environment.

Nonsmokers with a specific variant of the cytochrome P450 2E1 enzyme (CYP2E1) gene are at increased risk for nasopharyngeal carcinoma, according to findings published today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Because nasopharyngeal carcinoma is disproportionately frequent in people of Chinese ancestry, the authors of the report conducted their study in Taipei, Taiwan. Lead author Dr. Allan Hildesheim of the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, with colleagues there and in Taipei and England, explains that CYP2E1 is known to activate carcinogens. Dr. Hildesheim adds that specific alleles of the gene are "thought to be more highly expressed than others" and that these alleles are distributed differently among Asians and Caucasians. . . J Natl Cancer Inst 1997;89:1207-1212.

The ruling Communist Party daily Granma said that while the target for 1997 still fell short of world demand, it was a big improvement on a production low three years ago of just 55 million cigars. Production for export last year was 70 million cigars and the state firm Union de Empresas de Tobaco was aiming for an annual production of 200 million by the year 2000. Cigar-making, Cuba's fifth export with earnings of more than $100 million a year, was badly affected by the economic crisis that hit the Caribbean island from the early 1990s.

I hope that if the Independent Television Commission gets its wish to ban smoking on commercial television before 10pm (except where dramatically relevant ­ that is, to show somebody as a serial rapist), they will make the ban retrospective. The censors will have a lovely time, cutting the cigarettes out of Casablanca and old newsreels like the shots at Yalta where the Great Powers clearly felt their power enhanced by the white cylinder held between the fingers.

The Agricultural Bank of China plans to lend up to 12 billion yuan ($1.45 billion) for cured tobacco purchasing in the southwestern province of Yunnan, the Financial News said on Wednesday.

As the tobacco companies strike a contrite pose in negotiating a multibillion-dollar federal settlement for damages caused by cigarettes, they have declared all-out war on Glantz. "Philip Morris is running a jihad against me," Glantz said. This spring, a Web page went up devoted, in part, to discrediting him and his work. A state organization -- Californians for Scientific Integrity -- was formed in May to sue the university, contending that Glantz fraudulently used taxpayer money to fund studies they say supported his own political agenda. Tobacco industry lawyers have been securing restraining orders, requesting subpoenas, taking depositions and filing suits alleging misdeeds dating back 15 years. The tobacco companies want to copy every sheet of paper in Glantz's office and every disk on his computer. Last month, they got a temporary restraining order preventing Glantz from tossing away even his junk mail. (It was lifted after a couple of weeks.)

Contrary to the characterization in an article yesterday about tobacco foe Stanton Glantz, the American Cancer Society does not support the proposed tobacco settlement in its present form. A society spokeswoman said the organization is recommending changes to seven major areas of the settlement, including a higher tax on cigarettes and release of all tobacco industry documents.

The 16th annual politically incorrect tribute to the cancer-causing plant is under way across the street from a cemetery without a shred of embarrassment in this tobacco-growing community 50 miles east of Cincinnati. "We're smokin' and chewin' and we're still livin',"

"Although Ohio isn't well-known as a tobacco-growing state, it is one of Ohio's most important cash crops. And the people who grow tobacco are inviting everyone in Ohio and Kentucky to come celebrate our way of life at the 16th Annual Ohio Tobacco Festival," says Chris Koehler, Festival Committee President. "Tobacco has a long, proud history in The United States. And while it seems to be politically correct to bash tobacco, a festival like this gives the public a chance to meet the men and women who make their livings and raise their families by the sale of tobacco," says Bill Pfeffer, a local farmer and "Tobacco Ambassador." "Smoke 'em if you got 'em, I say, but if you don't smoke, heck, we'll make you feel welcome, too," he adds.

MYN: MINNESOTA YOUTH NEWS A page of Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune which features stories written by teens in grades 9-12.

In Minnesota, smoking among ninth graders has increased 50 percent since 1992, according to Health Partners. And Minnesota's smoking rates are higher than national estimates for ninth and 12th graders. This is the case despite active, well-meaning programs including DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the Smoke Free Coalition and the Partnership for Drug Free America. In a survey conducted last fall of the class of 2000 at Macalester College in St. Paul, nearly 38 percent of the 491 freshmen smoked either occasionally or every day.

"It's something that's stable. Everyone should be addicted to something once just to know what it's like."

On the forbidden list: clothes that depict "profanity, vulgarity, obscenity or violence" or advertise the use of alcohol, tobacco or drugs; clothes that reveal underwear or skin between the upper chest and mid-thigh; and any kind of hats, caps or hoods (except those worn for health or religious reasons).

The Intabex purchase accounted for most of the $184.2 million fourth-quarter increase in sales in Dimon's tobacco division and led the company to a net income record, even after restructuring charges related to the purchase.

Accelr8 Technology (NASDAQ: ACLY), Denver, CO . . has signed a contract with one of America's largest tobacco companies for Year 2000 assessment, planning and remediation services. The value of the contract is estimated to be in excess of 1.5 million dollars. The initial phase of the contract, which calls for an analysis of the tobacco giants DEC VAX, Alpha, and PDP environments, is scheduled to begin immediately. Accelr8's vice president of sales, Tim Fitzpatrick, noted that the engagement calls for Accelr8 to analyze VMS FORTRAN, C, C++, Pascal, Macro, DCL and FMS code sets.

The county's Department of Health is exploring ways to place anti-smoking ads in movie theaters and has been cleared by the Board of Supervisors to spend up to $2 million on the effort by mid-1998. The money, if used, will come from the 25-cent-per-pack cigarette tax revenues generated under Proposition 99, approved by California voters in 1988. The goal is to combat the image of coolness that smoking still carries when performed on the silver screen by a major star like Roberts in a successful movie like "My Best Friend's Wedding" or by Tommy Lee Jones as K in "Men In Black."

Perhaps it's mere coincidence, but the ACLU's zealousness in protecting commercial speech and its extreme views on political contributions are simultaneous with sizable corporate contributions to the organization. Philip Morris, for example, one of the granddaddies of soft-money contributions, gave the ACLU a cool half-million dollars over six years. Whatever the original purpose of soft money--made possible by a foolishly naive 1978 Federal Elections Commission decision--the suggestion that this is a party-building device is far-fetched. . . Moreover, without radical reform, this sleazy system is only going to get worse. In 1996, the two main political parties received $262 million in soft-money donations--from the tobacco companies, the trial lawyers, the unions, the gun lobby. That's three times as much as four years earlier.

The government is trying to get 320 million smokers in China to quit, but the state owns the world's biggest tobacco company. The Chinese treasury relies on cigarette sales for 10 percent of its revenues, but health officials say smoking-related diseases and fires cost more than tobacco brings in. Premier Li Peng says selling cigarettes is immoral, but with the help of foreign partners, the China National Tobacco Corp. has boosted its exports to $650 million a year. Beset by such conflicting forces, this country with one-third of the world's smokers has become the site of the newest battle between tobacco companies and anti-smoking forces. The struggle will be highlighted this week when 1,500 health experts from around the world converge on Beijing for the 10th International Conference on Smoking or Health. President Jiang Zemin plans to speak, and participants are to release new data on smoking deaths.

An Associated Press story about research into the long-term effects of smoking . . . erroneously quoted Dr. Vincent Miller of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York as saying the study was the first to explain why ex-smokers are twice as likely to develop lung cancer as those who have never smoked. Miller said several previous studies have tried to explain the phenomenon, and Dr. Jill Siegfried's research . . . offered yet another explanation for why ex-smokers are more likely than non-smokers to get lung cancer.

The switch is a protein that appears on the surface of lung cells of people who have smoked 20 cigarettes a day or more for at least 25 years. The American researchers examined the cells lining the lungs of 37 people, some non-smokers and others smokers. The protein they identified, they report in the Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, is a receptor which acts rather like a socket into which another protein plugs itself. When this receptor is present, it captures circulating hormones which are involved in the development of the lungs in the womb, and which encourage cells to divide in the mature lung. The result is the formation of a new cluster of lung cells, which themselves may continue to produce the same receptors in a self-sustaining cycle. This can lead to cancer.

Now a study suggests that long-term smoking triggers a biological change that increases the risk of lung cancer permanently, even for ex-smokers. Smoking the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes every day for 25 years appears to encourage both healthy and mutated lung cells to multiply, increasing the odds of developing cancer, according to a study released Thursday by the University of Pittsburgh. "Once this switch is turned on, it appears to be permanent, which may explain in part why long-term ex-smokers who have not had a cigarette in over 25 years are still at high risk for getting lung cancer," said Dr. Jill Siegfried, who directed the study. The study, published in the August issue of the Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, looked at lab-grown lung cells from 37 non-smokers, light smokers and heavy smokers.

A trendy and popular Fells Point bar has won a $100,000 loan from the city's federally funded empowerment zone program to help pay for an expansion that includes a cigar smoking lounge. The loan from a program designed to help blighted and decaying urban areas and increase employment is proper, city officials say. Jeffrey P. Pillas of the Baltimore Development Corp., which administers the loan program for Empower Baltimore Management Corp., said Max's on Broadway meets the standards for participation: It is located within the empowerment zone and the expansion has created six new jobs. "As long as it fits the criteria," said Pillas, "it's OK."

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) boosted the campaign of Republican lieutenant governor candidate John H. Hager tonight, demonstrating the interest of the national GOP in the state this year. The speaker's appearance at a twilight fund-raiser was billed as a welcome boost for Hager, 61, a former Richmond tobacco executive running for the first time -- against L.F. Payne Jr., a former five-term Democratic congressman. Hager is the only one of three Republicans on the statewide ticket to trail in the polls. The Republican National Committee and congressional campaign committees have poured more than $500,000 into the campaigns of Hager, gubernatorial nominee James S. Gilmore III and the Virginia Republican Party, which is battling to take control of the House of Delegates this fall.

Last spring I published two lists of smoke-free restaurants and restaurants with truly separate non-smoking and smoking sections (different rooms, different floors). Reader response has been tremendous. I have been getting regular requests to reprint the lists. So here you are, along with a few additions.

Farallon joins a growing list of places that feature full bars that aren't full of smoke. The San Francisco Health Department's Tobacco Free Project has a complete list. Call (415) 554-9151.

Political parties and congressional candidates have received $35 million since 1995 from six industries that fared particularly well in the recently enacted budget and tax deal, according to a report released yesterday by Citizen Action. In its report, "Tilting the Balanced Budget," the consumer group concludes that special interests such as the tobacco and insurance lobbies continue to use campaign contributions to win favorable treatment in Congress -- even as other Americans feel the budget pinch from Washington. "Members of Congress like to look the other way when it comes to providing special favors, tax breaks and other legislative goodies to some of their biggest domestic contributors," said Mike Gehrke, Citizen Action's research director. . . At the top of the list is the tobacco industry. The group calculated that tobacco companies gave $11.3 million in the past 30 months; the companies also received a promise that they may use a new 15 cent-a-pack tax increase as a credit against the proposed national tobacco settlement. That would amount to a $50 billion tax break. Philip Morris was the largest single contributor identified in the report, giving almost $4.6 million, most of it to the Republican Party and GOP candidates. Second on the list of donors was R. J. Reynolds, which gave $2.7 million.

"What I'm hoping is that the court will direct my wife to stop," he said. "Smoking is going to lead to irreparable harm. She'll incapacitate herself, or kill herself, which everyone who smokes does eventually." . . The Thomases have been married for 43 years, and he says the spark is still there. He proudly shows off pictures of Sally, the mother of his three children, and says, "She's a real babe."

If the law goes into effect, said Betty Gray, owner of the Desert Room in Gardena, "We'll have some healthy employees, but they'll be in the unemployment lines." . . . Last September, lawmakers delayed that ban until January 1998, stipulating that smoking could still be allowed in bars after that date if owners met yet-to-be-developed state or federal standards designed to reduce employees' exposure to tobacco smoke. Cigar smoking would also be banned. The bar owners, who gathered at Chasen's in Beverly Hills, said Thursday that a smoking ban would result in a severe loss of income for their businesses.

Single cigarettes are fetching up to $5 each on the black market, but inmates say they are hard to find. And prison officials have caught only a few inmates violating the ban or stashing tobacco. "Things are going absolutely great," said Erik Skon, assistant commissioner of adult facilities with the Minnesota Department of Corrections. "It really has been business as usual. The climate in all our facilities is very positive."

A spokesman confirmed, however, that the company is studying "various ways" to continue its involvement with sports amid growing pressure in the U.K., across Europe, and in the U.S. to impose stricter curbs on tobacco advertising and sponsorship.

BRITAIN'S biggest cigarette maker, British American Tobacco, is planning to spend up to £250 million on buying a Formula One motor racing team. The idea is to get round the Government's proposed ban on tobacco sponsorship of sport by becoming the owner rather than sponsor. The group, whose brands include Lucky Strike, said yesterday that it could either start up its own team from scratch or it could enter a joint venture with another team. It was not yet ready to announce details. A spokesman said: "We do not want to fuel speculation." BAT is keen to promote Lucky Strike, one of the biggest selling brands in the Third World. . . BAT said of its plan for Formula One racing: "It is a matter of principle. We think that sports should be able to accept sponsorship from whoever they like. We do not think that tobacco sponsorship encourages smoking."

Cigarros La Tabacalera Mexicana (Cigatam), a unit of Mexican conglomerate Grupo Carso SA, has merged with its marketing arm, Promotora Cigatam, the companies said on Thursday. Cigatam, which is half owned by U.S. tobacco giant Philip Morris Cos Inc (MO), will take over Promotora's assets and liabilities, according to information published in Mexico's official gazette.

The mainland will lower its tariffs on tobacco imports as part of its bid to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO), officials of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration said. The tariff cut would boost imports of cigarettes and exports of tobacco leaves.

China plans to streamline its tobacco industry, shutting or merging 40 per cent of its state-owned cigarette factories over the next five years to boost profits. State Tobacco Monopoly Administration deputy director Xing Wanli said it was to close or merge about 70 small factories with annual production of fewer than five billion cigarettes each, within five years. Most were losing money, he said.

Senior government ministers and lawyers have met a US Attorney-General to discuss whether to emulate the landmark multi-billion-dollar compensation deal struck with the American tobacco industry earlier this year. NSW Attorney-General Jeff Shaw met his Mississippi counterpart, Mike Moore, earlier this week to discuss whether the State should replicate the US settlement . . . Federal Health Minister Michael Wooldridge also met Mr Moore on Tuesday ­ although a spokesman for the minister said the meeting was informal and establishing a similar settlement was not discussed.

Historically, lawyers are expected to maintain confidentiality to their clients. But several recent cases highlight the dilemma lawyers face when they think their employers are breaking the law.

From June 1996 to June 1997, Philip Morris, which makes Marlboros, sold 687 billion cigarettes outside the United States while it sold 240 billion cigarettes in the United States. The company has scored a huge success in eastern Europe, with its sales there exploding from 30 billion cigarettes in 1991 to 181 billion last year, according to Feldman. . . R.J. Reynolds, which markets the Winston and Camel brands, sold 119 million cigarettes in the United States in 1996, while it sold 197 billion outside the United States.

Lincoln will serve as a more traditional test market than Chattanooga for Eclipse . . . A newspaper ad specifically for Lincoln shows a lone smoker at a table of friends with the tagline, "Smoke that disappears. Taste that doesn't." The headline says, "Less second-hand smoke. More first-hand pleasure," accompanied by the copy: "Be one of the first in Lincoln to discover what 80% less second-hand smoke and virtually no lingering odor can mean to you."

Attorneys for Reynolds have said in recent hearings that making health claims would invite regulation from the Food and Drug Administration . . . "It has an attraction for people who, for whatever reason, have secondhand-smoke issues," Walker said. Reynolds is promoting Eclipse as a cleaner cigarette. In a news release, the company said that the brand "leaves virtually no lingering odor or messy ashes, and it reduces staining on fabrics, such as curtains, drapes or wall coverings." David N. Iauco, Reynolds' senior vice president for business development and market research, said that smokers have told the company they want a cigarette they can enjoy in public without the social pressures that often come with smoking.

Former [Detroit, MI] mayor Coleman Young was downgraded to critical condition today, said officials at the hospital where he has been staying for about three weeks. A cardiac condition along with the emphysema Young suffers as a result of years of smoking caused doctors to downgrade his condition from fair, said Detroit Medical Center spokeswoman Julie Nemeth. "He's having some cardiac problems in addition to the advanced pulmonary state that he's in," she said.

But unlike many other growers -- how many is not clear -- Gooch, 45, does not necessarily want a continuation of the government's tobacco program, with its production quotas and jawboning to limit amounts of foreign leaf that cigarette companies buy. Why not? Too much uncertainty, Gooch said. Too many opponents in Congress, where the tobacco states are outnumbered. "We have held this program -- (U.S. Rep. Scotty) Baesler and them, with all their best efforts -- with one-, two- and three-vote margins. How long can that last?" Gooch said. "What's gone on the last four or five years that Clinton's been in office is nothing short of mental abuse. Because we constantly don't know what's going to happen to us. You never know what's coming next."

Though President Clinton signed an executive order this month severely restricting smoking in federal office buildings, and anti-smoking laws continue to toughen nationwide, one place remains a virtual haven for smokers: Congress. The House and the Senate, which dictate their own smoking policies, would remain exempt from the executive order.

Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), meeting with a group of Albany-area teenagers representing the American Cancer Society's youth tobacco team, explained his predicament. On the one hand, Bishop has introduced a bill to require states to crack down on smoking by young people in order to qualify for substance-abuse funding. On the other, Bishop also represents the interests of Georgia's tobacco industry. "We are looking at it as a shared responsibility" among the youngsters, the police and the storekeepers," he said

Now a legal exemption that permits smoking in bars and casinos is threatened, thanks to lobbying on behalf of bartenders who claim to suffer from second-hand (passive) smoking. Lou Mench, owner of a no-smoking Santa Monica pub, and 60 other bar owners have joined Breath, part of the American Lung Association, and seek "a level playing field" where no bar would have the competitive edge of welcoming smokers.

At least three convenience store workers have been arrested on suspicion of selling cigarettes to minors, police said. The arrests were part of a sting operation by the Police Department's Youth Services Bureau. "The idea is to suppress the sale of tobacco to minors," said police spokesman Chahe Keuroghelian. "It's a considerable problem in Glendale. . . "

After an in-house study, Inova Fairfax found a solution that's appealing to more and more companies, hospitals and government agencies: Outdoor smoking shelters. "We've located five shelters away from the entrances, but you can reach them without going out into the rain," Keene said. The shelter alternative is being pushed by a Michigan building company, Duo-Gard Industries Inc., which touts its products as an affordable alternative to indoor smoking rooms. . . A typical 8-by-11 shelter costs $4,170 and comfortably houses about 10 smokers, according to Duo-Gard's literature. The "translucent bronze, high-tech polycarbonate walls and strong aluminum framing" are "a far cry from the tents and open-air bus stops previously used," the company claims.

FIERCE lobbying by sporting organisations and cigarette companies has led the Government to scale down its proposals for a swift ban on tobacco sponsorship of major sporting events. The climbdown means that the name of leading cigarette brands will still be emblazoned around sporting venues on television up until the next general election.

Two U.S. airline giants, United and American, banned smoking on all their international nonstop flights in July, which means nearly all such flights operated by U.S. airlines - 97 percent, according to the Transportation Department - are now smoke-free. Other major airlines offering completely smoke-free international service are US Airways, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, TWA, Alaska Airlines and America West. The exceptions among U.S. carriers are service on Continental Micronesia between Honolulu and Tokyo, flights to and from Japan operated by Northwest Airlines and all international service operated by Tower Air.

"Here's the latest gimmick from the tobacco companies. Boy, these guys never rest. Now somebody's coming out with all natural cigarettes," says Jay Leno. "This is like making bullets that contain 10 essential vitamins and minerals." The American Medical Assn. has started endorsing commercial products, says Bill Williams. "Some doctors are stepping out on their own. Last week, Jack Kevorkian inked a deal to become the new Marlboro Man."

Although some concerns were raised about health hazards centuries ago, the dominant view was that smoking was actually a soothing, healthful habit. Soldiers were given cigarettes in wartime. Doctors promoted their favorite brands, and medical journals accepted tobacco ads. As mass media came on the scene, radio and television embraced the industry corporate sponsorship. Movie stars made smoking seem glamorous, sexy, and utterly natural. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the evidence began to mount linking smoking to lung cancer.

"Jurors have a very hard time paying the same degree of focused attention to material that is being simply read to them rather than live testimony," said Laurence Tribe, Harvard professor of constitutional law and a lawyer helping four states sue the industry. "If it goes too long, there's the danger of jurors drifting off into some not terribly attentive space." A chapter in one legal textbook is titled, "Depositions are deadly." Most of the depositions have come from out-of-state industry executives and scientists who cannot be legally compelled to show up in person for the industry's first class-action trial and first trial on secondhand-smoke issues.

Early this summer, many predicted that the record high prices for broadleaf and shade tobacco would bring a windfall to the region. But an outbreak of a fast-moving and devastating tobacco disease known as blue mold has put the $100 million industry at risk. The outbreak, the first since 1979, threatens as much as 90 percent of the crop in the tobacco-growing region of the Connecticut Valley, which extends from central Connecticut through Massachusetts to the Vermont border. It comes at a time when increasing sales of premium cigars, which sell for $1 to $25, have revived the industry, growers and manuf acturers say.

Weeks before Congress makes final spending decisions for next year's budget, some groups fighting to end "corporate welfare," or special subsidies to private business, have already tossed in the towel and have declared themselves losers for the third year in a row. "There's just no enthusiasm in this Congress to cut anything. I'm afraid we won't be able to kill any of these programs this year," said Stephen Moore of the libertarian Cato Institute, one of a range of groups across the political spectrum arguing against corporate subsidies. "Everyone says they support getting rid of corporate welfare, and yet we haven't managed to get rid of any of it," lamented Janice C. Shields, an associate of Ralph Nader with the liberal Corporate Wealthfare Project. . . "If we can't cut taxpayer handouts to tobacco, what can we cut?"

Gov. Carper says he'll support legislation to raise the tobacco tax to 24 cents, double the current rate.

Q: Some of your fellow Democrats have criticized your legislation that removed any legal doubt over California's ability to join the multi-state lawsuit against the tobacco industry. Some see you as having, in effect, let [Atty. Gen. Dan] Lungren off the hook and taken that potential issue away from Democrats in the governor's race. A: I don't know what those people have been smoking. My bill basically highlighted the fact the attorney general was not going to do what we believed was already available under the law. . . . The attorney general said he needed some clarification. Well, if that was the case, it was our duty in the Legislature to, in fact, give him the clarification. I don't think it took him off the hook. I think it put him on the hook.

We see her extract -- from her bra, it appears -- a pack of Marlboros. Hesitantly, shakily, she lights a cigarette. The viewer is supposed to see the cigarette and her nervous smoking as a visible counterpart to the panicky feelings of imminent loss that are sweeping over her. She's about to explode, and this cigarette, as it often is in films, is a fuse. Utterly desolate, out in the cold, Roberts never looked more appealing, huddled around a brief flame and warming cinder, smoke streaming glamorously from her nose. Smoking, once again, is hot in the entertainment media. Half the movies released between 1990 and 1995 featured a major character who chose to light up on screen, a significant increase compared with 29 percent in the 1970s, according to a recent study at the University of California, San Francisco. And the trend appears to be accelerating.

A good three-quarters of the film races along . . . intermittently punctuated by the predictable stogie-smoking colonel, the hard-as-nails drill instructor (Viggo Mortensen) spouting D.H. Lawrence, locker-jock resentment, back-stabbing, etc. . . O'Neil (Demi Moore) . . . secretly loves to smoke cigars herself and finally wins over her company not by being the best at everything . . .

Like "G.I. Jane," director Ridley Scott likes a good stogie, firing that big boy up, sucking in the hot nicotine, rolling it in his fingers and tapping off the ash. It's not the smoke that matters, it's the ritual with all its potent symbolism. A cigar is never just a cigar, it's a totem of power, wealth, the willingness to cause a stink. And Jane, played by dogged Demi Moore, certainly does just that as the first woman to tackle the grueling Navy Seals training program.

Tobacco usage ---including cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco ---on prime-time comedies is at its highest level since 1963. And on TV dramas, there hasn't been so much tobacco use onscreen since 1970, according to a study done at the University of California at San Francisco medical school.

Mary Louise Smith, 82, an outspoken champion of abortion rights and women's rights who was chairwoman of the Republican National Committee from 1974 to 1977, died of lung cancer Aug. 22 at a hospital here. In April, Ms. Smith said she was undergoing radiation therapy on her left lung after a tumor was found. She said the tumor was unrelated to breast cancer, for which she was treated in 1993. "I haven't smoked for 17 years, but the early cigarettes took their toll," she said. "My message is [that] we need to educate ourselves about smoking, which is a disaster for young people."

Mr. Bible's deposition offers just such a bonus: a momentary demonstration of how high a level of mendacity the society has learned casually to tolerate from the mouths of the big tobacco companies' leaders and spokesmen. You scarcely notice such a thing until it is withdrawn -- even if the withdrawal is only momentary. Ron Motley, the lawyer in question, went on TV afterward to praise Philip Morris for its unaccustomed "candor," Mr. Bible having acknowledged (under further questioning) that smoking "might have" contributed to the deaths of as many as 100,000 people. But it would be a mistake to assume this admission was either wrung from him by canny lawyering or blurted out in a sudden access of conscience. On the contrary, in the wake of regulation, litigation and a host of other pressures, and a year after the defection of Liggett Co. from the industry's longstanding nothing-has-been-proved position for the purpose of settling its own health claims, conditions for the industry's giants have changed enough to warrant a shift in strategy. . . We would guess some in the tobacco business must have decided that after all these years it is less trouble -- on this one point -- to tell the truth than not. Whatever the outcome of trials and settlements, conditions that can produce this kind of thought process in tobacco executives are an improvement.

The tobacco industry's historic accord with Florida to voluntarily restrict cigarette advertising would seem likely to provoke handwringing on Madison Avenue, because one state is finally doing what so many have vowed or sued or planned to do. But there is even some applause from ad agencies who envision a possible revenue boost from antitobacco campaigns. Billboard stock prices were mixed Monday

Lawyers on both sides say the Texas lawsuit is caught in a political and legal nexis that may result in the case going to trial, even if each side really wants to settle out of court. . . However, if industry leaders see that a national agreement is not going to pass Congress, they will make no settlement offer in the Texas case, analysts say. The companies' attorneys believe they have a much better chance of winning in Texas than they did in Mississippi or Florida, lawyers involved in the case told The Dallas Morning News.

Texas plans to press ahead with its $8.5 billion lawsuit against the nation's tobacco industry following Florida's landmark settlement, officials said on Monday. The Texas lawsuit is next up for trial, and there have been no substantive settlement talks of late as the two sides prepare for jury selection beginning on Sept. 29, a spokesman for Texas Attorney General Dan Morales said. "There's no offer on the table, let's put it that way," spokesman Ward Tisdale said. "We're not opposed to a settlement, but our focus right now is on preparing for a trial."

"It appears as though every time one of these cases get close to trial, the companies seem to be able to come up with something," Humphrey said. "Who knows, maybe that pattern will continue (in Minnesota), maybe it won't." Humphrey said Florida officials reached a deal with tobacco companies without compromising future federal regulation of the industry or granting cigarette makers immunity from other lawsuits -- two parts of a proposed $368 billion national settlement that Humphrey has opposed.

Attorney General Thurbert Baker said Monday he did not know how much Georgia had spent on Medicaid benefits for smokers, but it was likely to be "billions and billions of dollars."

A federal judge on Monday recognized Pennsylvania smokers as a class and said they could present claims against the tobacco industry for the costs of medical monitoring. The suit, filed a year ago by six Philadelphia area smokers and Pennsylvania Action, an ad hoc advocacy group, is part of a nationwide campaign to recover medical costs from the makers of cigarettes. Pennsylvania has filed a separate action to recover its Medicaid costs in treating smoking-related illness. . . Judge Clarence Newcomer released a written opinion on Monday holding that smokers in the state have enough community of interests to warrant a trial on claims that smoking presents a risk to their health.

A state judge dismissed part of an Iowa lawsuit against the tobacco industry Tuesday, ruling the state has no right to recover Medicaid dollars spent to treat sick smokers. . . "Iowa, unlike Florida, has not enacted any legislation which specifically grants the state the right to proceed directly against tobacco companies to recover for medical expenses paid by the state on behalf of Iowa citizens who have sustained alleged smoking-related illnesses," ruled Polk County Judge Linda Reade. . . Miller said Reade let stand counts that claimed the tobacco industry conspired to hide the effects of cigarettes and committed consumer fraud. A count of introducing a nuisance into the state can also be used to argue for Medicaid reimbursement, Miller said.

A countywide campaign for smoke-free cars and homes for children will be unveiled at the Los Angeles Children's Museum downtown today by the Youth Tobacco Control Coalition. . . Organizers will begin distributing 10,000 stickers asking for a smoke-free environment at today's ceremonies. "We need to remind the adult public again and again about the dangers of secondhand smoke," said Sergio Gonzalez, the anti-smoking coalition's project director.

Richmond International Airport's long-awaited smoking room will be open by the holidays, the Capital Region Airport Commission learned yesterday. Construction on the restaurant and lounge "is ready to start rolling," said William M. Barker, director of government and commercial affairs at the airport.

The Assembly passed a bill to permit California smokers to sue tobacco companies yesterday as tobacco industry lobbyists readied a measure to allow smoking in bars to continue until 2001. The measure that was approved would drop tobacco from a 1987 state law that prohibits lawsuits against manufacturers and sellers of products known to be inherently unsafe. Governor Pete Wilson has said he will sign the bill by Senator Quentin Kopp, independent-San Francisco

Scientists from the Public Health Institute in Berkeley, California, say that despair can do as much damage to the heart as smoking 20 cigarettes a day. . . A four-year study of nearly 1,000 middle-aged Finnish men found that despair led to a greatly increased risk of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. The Finns were asked to rate their feelings of despair, defined by the researchers as a feeling of "failure or having an uncertain future", as low, moderate or high over the course of the study. Ultrasound scans of their blood vessels showed that the men who reported high levels of hopelessness were 20 per cent more likely to develop atherosclerosis. The disease causes fat deposits to build up on artery walls, which become narrower and harder and deliver oxygen less efficiently to the heart and brain.

General Cigar Holdings Inc. (MPP) said Tuesday a blue mold discovered in New England should have a minimal effect on its shade tobacco because all of its crop has been harvested and the initial curing process has begun.

Canadian cigarette manufacturers cut back production in July, reducing their "high" inventories, Statistics Canada said. The drop in output was attributed mainly to holiday plant closings.

The American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association say that the ad campaign amounts to a claim that the all-natural version of Winstons has fewer health risks than other cigarettes. The groups want the FTC to use its authority over deceptive advertising to require substantiation for the claims. If the agency concludes that the ads are deceptive, it could file a complaint to block them. "This ad campaign implies not only that a Winston cigarette is healthier but that consumers will face reduced risks when smoking no-additive Winstons," said John Seffrin, the chief executive of the American Cancer Society. "We'd like to know how Reynolds can say this so boldly."

"We demand evidence to substantiate the claim that these cigarettes are safer than other cigarettes," said John Garrison, chief executive of the American Lung Association.

"There has been a calculation by the tobacco industry to put out a new face to the world," said Michael Pertschuk, former commissioner of the FTC. "So when the public-health agencies publicly point out the industry is up to its old tricks, that's an important statement." In the petition, the health groups argued that Reynolds should be required to prove that its newly reformulated Winstons are both additive-free and safer than regular cigarettes.

Other critics suspect that R.J. Reynolds is testing the new approach as a way of outmaneuvering tighter restrictions on cigarette advertising that are expected to be imposed on the industry. A simpler message, the argument goes, would be easier to sustain under the new rules. R.J. Reynolds, however, denies that its intent is to make any health claims about cigarettes. It says the only benefits implied by the "no additives" campaign relate to taste, not health.

When the N.C. Medical Journal published his limerick titled "Smoking," which details the hazards of tobacco, it prompted a letter from someone who complained he was insensitive to smokers. Tapson said his intent is not to offend.

"If individuals are so gullible that if they see a celebrity smoking that they think that's cool, that's a problem with the individual. That's a problem with the way society reveres celebrities and puts them on an unwanted pedestal," adds Glenn Kenny, senior editor of Premiere magazine. . . We need to tell our young people, 'Hey, smoking kills.' It is as addicting as heroin, and movie actors who smoke are being irresponsible," Reynolds argues. There are movie stars who agree. "Unfortunately, it's becoming romantic in films again," says Brooke Shields. "It gives you cancer; it kills you," adds Isabella Rossellini. "I have played characters who smoke, and I don't want to consciously do it again," says actor Gabriel Byrne. "It's a bad example."

In a year in which leading characters in movies are puffing cigarettes and cigars at a higher rate than in the past three decades, the Clinton administration has been carrying its crusade against tobacco to film industry leaders. The goal: to curtail gratuitous smoking onscreen and quietly look at movie studios' relationships with the tobacco industry. Vice President Al Gore addressed the issue of onscreen smoking at a private session with studio and network chiefs earlier this year in Los Angeles and requested a follow-up. On Sept. 4, Gore plans to meet in Washington with executives including Paramount Pictures chief Sherry Lansing. "The vice president thinks it's wrong for the tobacco industry and others, including Hollywood, to glamorize tobacco use, thereby making it appealing to younger people," says Gore spokeswoman Ginny Terzano. "He understands that producers, directors and actors have an artistic license to do what they want, but also believes they have a responsibility."

For those who can't get enough of the cigar fad, a movie featuring some of Hollywood's stogie aficionados is on the way, according to Variety. Actors such as Jim Belushi, Joe Mantegna and Joe Pantoliano have made verbal commitments to "Blowing Smoke," described as a cross between "sex, lies and videotape" and "Swingers," set in a smoking club.

Next, Fred and Ethel have a fight that Lucy tries to patch up, except that causes a fight between her and Ricky. The show's original sponsor, Philip Morris cigarettes, is generously plugged in one or two scenes. Lucie Arnaz, daughter of Lucy and Desi, has said in recent years that she wants to go back to all the "Lucy" shows and have scenes in which the characters smoked altered electronically to eliminate the cigarettes. She must be out of her mind. You don't touch "I Love Lucy." You just don't touch it. "I Love Lucy" is the Beethoven's Fifth of sitcoms. Nick at Nite, incidentally, is no longer showing the "Lucy" episodes uncut and unedited, as it did the first year. As of June 1996, editors have been snipping away to accommodate commercials and those funny-funny Nick at Nite promos.

In the rush for testing and remediation, the role of smoking is often overlooked. The EPA does note that smokers have a higher risk of radon-induced cancer than do nonsmokers, but it fails to observe that smoking multiplies the risk rather than simply adding to it. Changing one's lifestyle could bring greater benefits than the agency's expensive strategies.

The growing scale of smuggling could scupper a key part of the $368.5 billion tobacco settlement with US companies. According to the deal, before the Government can order them to cut nicotine levels in cigarettes, it must prove that this would not lead to a black market in high-strength cigarettes. Tobacco-opponents fear that new evidence about the surge in smuggling, partly caused by the opening of huge new markets in Russian and Eastern Europe, makes this impossible.

• 8/25/97 Cigarette Makers are Seen as Aiding Rise in Smuggling The New York Times. This long, important article is also posted as Tobacco Finds New Ways to Illegal Markets at the Detroit Free Press, and as Smugglers Might Get Help from Tobacco Cos at the Lexington Herald Leader
  
  The largest tobacco companies are selling billions of dollars of cigarettes each year to traders and dealers who funnel them into black markets in many countries, say law enforcement officials and participants in the trade. In the last decade, the volume of cigarettes smuggled around the world has nearly tripled, according to a leading tobacco research organization. . . The companies say they do nothing to encourage the smuggling and do not condone it. But recent criminal investigations in several countries show that people in the tobacco industry have played a significant role at times in stimulating and fueling it.
• 8/23/97 Jury Probes Smuggling, RJR Link AP/Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
  
  In a note contained in a recent quarterly filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, R.J. Reynolds, the nation's second-largest cigarette maker, said it had received subpoenas for documents on July 24 from a federal grand jury in the Northern District of New York. The grand jury in Syracuse, N.Y., indicted 21 people in June for allegedly participating in a huge smuggling operation that moved tax-free cigarettes and liquor across the Canadian border via the Akwesasne Indian Reservation from 1992 through 1996.
• 8/22/97 Smuggler with High-Priced Pals? Montreal Gazette
  
  Larry Miller owned a private jet, hobnobbed with prominent actors and politicians and sponsored lavish fishing parties at a remote B.C. lodge. Tens of millions of dollars poured through his bank accounts. Miller, arrested last month in Syracuse, N.Y., made most of his fortune smuggling cigarettes and liquor through the Akwesasne reserve on the Canada-U.S. border, say court documents unsealed last week by a U.S. grand jury. The documents, including reports by undercover agents, provide a rare glimpse at a criminal operation of startling sophistication and scale. The documents also raise questions about possible corruption among customs agents on both sides of the border, and hint at links between Miller's organization and the tobacco industry.

Turns out that Pantoliano is no Arnie-come-lately to the cigar world. He is co-creator of the Grand Havana Room lounges in Beverly Hills, New York and Washington. These cigar clubs boast celeb members that most directors would kill for, including Arnie Schwarzenegger and Robert De Niro.

In a statement, the ministry said the tobacco, which came from Gambia, was concealed in two containers and was impounded August 22 at Lisbon's Alcantara-Norte port.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co on Wednesday criticised the Romanian government's recent changes in cigarette duties, which are part of efforts to align the local tax system to European Union standards. "This is a bad law and it needs to be changed in a way to stimulate local producers," Adam Bryan-Brown, spokesman for R.J. Reynolds Central Europe, told a news conference. . . Brown was commenting on a move to set excise duties on cigarettes at a single rate for both producers and importers, and to add an "ad-valorem tax" of 20 percent, under the revised 1997 state budget, adopted earlier this month.

Local customs agents in Shanghai, China's largest metropolitan area, recently seized a cargo ship in the process of offloading smuggled cigarettes, according to an announcement released here today.

More than 250 people have been arrested in a government drive to shore up the mainland's multi-billion-dollar tobacco monopoly. Authorities said yesterday that the first mass arrests of black marketeers had been carried out in Fujian province following the introduction of laws against private tobacco producers. Of the more than 250 arrested in police raids on underground cigarette factories in Fujian since July, eight have been imprisoned, according to the official press. "The atmosphere is very tense," said the Beijing Youth Daily, which described Fujian as a hotbed of "fake cigarette production".

Three Chinese provinces and the Shanghai municipality will charge extra fees on tobacco products in a move to fund better healthcare and smoking controls, according to an official with the Ministry of Health, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Hubei province will collect 4% on sales of local tobacco products. Liaoning province and the Guangxi Autonomous Region are formulating similar plans, Xinhua said.

Thousands of local investors in Philip Morris Cos. Inc. took their first direct hits from a proposed tobacco settlement yesterday as the company ended four years of dividend growth to conserve money for legal expenses. Meeting in New York, Philip Morris' board of directors voted against raising the dividend "in view of the proposed resolution of litigation and regulatory matters affecting the domestic tobacco industry." Instead, it declared a regular quarterly dividend of 40 cents per share for shareholders of record Sept. 15.

Philip Morris Cos Inc said on Wednesday that it had elected Carlos Slim, chairman of Telfonos de Mexico . . . to its board of directors. Slim also serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Grupo Carso (CARA1.MX), a publicly traded Mexican holding company. Telmex is the largest telephone company in Mexico. With the addition of Slim, the Philip Morris board increases from 13 to 14 directors

If there is no proof that the additives are harmful, then why did the triumvirate denounce additives three years ago? Are they now suggesting that they had no evidence for their claims? Or is it that, having used the issue of additives as a wedge, they aren't about to let big tobacco get off the hook with any additive-free nonsense? . . . . If additives are harmful, then the pooh-bahs should be happy that smokers have an option that reduces their risks, if only marginally. If the additives are not harmful, then the pooh-bahs should apologize for having suggested that they were.

The tobacco industry conceded the first two points in reaching an $11.3 billion settlement of Florida's lawsuit, which demanded compensation for public costs in treating smoking-related illnesses. I was struck by the glee that greeted the tobacco executives' weasely admissions about the dangers of smoking cigarettes. It was one of those liar-liar-pants-on-fire moments.

California's Senate passed a bill Thursday that will make it easier for individual smokers in the nation's most populous state to sue tobacco companies. The Senate and the Assembly passed a similar bill last month, but it was returned by Gov. Pete Wilson, who wanted it changed to shield grocery stores and other retailers from tobacco liability lawsuits. The amended bill, which passed the Senate on a 25-10 vote, incorporates Wilson's suggestions and should receive his approval, legislators said. The Assembly passed the amended bill Monday on a vote of 46-22.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration rules prohibiting cigarette-vending machines -- scheduled to take effect today -- are on hold because of pending litigation over the agency's tobacco-regulation powers, the FDA said. . . The Justice Department recommended that the FDA delay implementing the vending-machine ban until a federal appeals court rules on the tobacco industry's challenge to the ruling. The government also appealed a portion of the ruling in April from Judge William Osteen, arguing that Osteen erred in denying the FDA the right to restrict tobacco advertising.

Glickman said that although many people are novices about tobacco production and sales, support for farmers should be easy to muster as Congress considers a settlement between state governments and tobacco companies over health-care costs related to illnesses associated with smoking. "One of the things I've been trying to do is let the American people know there's a difference between the grower and the (cigarette) companies," Glickman said. "What people need to understand is the president and I are committed to seeing tobacco farmers are treated fairly."

More than half of North Carolina's 150 tobacco auction warehouses are facing fines for participating in illegal sales schemes dating to the 1980s that bilked the federal government out of millions of dollars, investigators say. Included among the warehouse operators is former Lt. Gov. Jimmy Green, who has been convicted and sentenced to house arrest in a related criminal case.

Federal authorities say that tobacco dealers and warehouses in North Carolina and three other states owe more than $38 million in penalties for tobacco they sold illegally. The U.S. Farm Service Agency said that 116 warehouses and 35 dealers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia sold tobacco in excess of federal quotas but didn't pay the penalties as required.

Federal agriculture officials have imposed more than $41 million in penalties against 35 leaf tobacco dealers and 115 warehouses, claiming they sold tobacco in excess of federal price- support quotas.

The American Heart Association, Michigan Affiliate (AHA), the American Lung Association of Michigan (ALAM) and the Tobacco-Free Michigan Action Coalition (TFMAC) fully support this petition and ask the FTC to proceed immediately with an investigation. "At issue here is a perceived health claim," said Gerry Doelle, executive director of AHA, Michigan Affiliate. "By implication, a product without additives is perceived by the public, including smokers, to be a healthier, less risky product. The notion of a healthier, less risky tobacco product is absolute nonsense. It's the tobacco that kills people, not the additives."

Maryland's highest court has slammed the door on the City of Annapolis in its long battle to win a share of Anne Arundel County's state tobacco tax revenue. This week's decision by the Court of Appeals ends an attempt by city officials to challenge the county's decision to stop sharing its tax revenue a quarter-century ago.

Today, [Mark] Gehan finds himself handling some of the most sensitive and potentially damaging industry material that has been reviewed in 40 years of smoking-related litigation. It has become a 40-hour-a-week undertaking, at $220 an hour, while Gehan still takes care of his private clients. "The judge had hoped it would go faster. I wish it could go faster. But it's like turning an iceberg. It has so much inertia," Gehan said, talking about the complexity and sheer volume of the three-year-old case.

The University of Minnesota is conducting a study of teenage smokers who are quitting with the help of a similar patch from the pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham. Karen Hanson, the graduate student who is coordinating the study, said she hopes to show that teenagers can be helped to quit smoking with nicotine patch therapy.

[Sara] Nelson, a 1997 graduate of Mounds View High School, is an instrumental figure in the fight against teen smoking. As a member of a smoking prevention program called Kick Butts, sponsored by Smoke-free Coalition 2000, she lobbied for passage of the Youth Access to Tobacco bill, which passed in the last legislative session.

A federal judge in Texarkana wants to know if Attorney General Dan Morales intends to settle Texas' $10 billion lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

Starting next week, you can smoke 'em if you've got 'em at North Point Mall. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. is opening a smoking lounge inside the Alpharetta mall in what's being billed as the second operation of its kind in the nation. R.J. Reynolds opened the first a year ago at Northgate Mall in Chattanooga, where the tobacco titan was test-marketing cigarettes.

"Smoking prevention programs should begin as early as possible, and those aimed at pre-adolescents should target family and peer influence as well as attitudes that reinforce smoking behavior." "Curiosity was the main reason for having tried cigarettes," Greenlund's team wrote.

"The family was a major factor for initial experimental smoking," concludes a study of over 900 Louisiana schoolchildren, grades 3 through 6, carried out by researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans. Their findings, part of a larger ongoing research effort known as the Bogalusa Heart Study, appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health. . . `Overall, 14.8% of students reported ever trying cigarettes," the researchers say. However, just 11 (1.2%) admitted smoking "at least once a week." The investigators found that other forms of tobacco use were more popular than cigarettes -- 4.3% of the children said they currently used chewing tobacco or snuff (2.2%), or smoked cigars (1.3%). . . "Curiosity" was cited as a reason by more than 7 out of 10 of the youngsters. Next in line, however, was "because a family member smokes" (45.9%), and "because friends do" (19.5%). These results display a real discrepancy in smoking influences between adolescents and teens (who more often claim friends rather than family as the major outside impetus towards smoking), and the younger children in the Louisiana study, the researchers say.

Q: Recent reconstruction of my Orange County home has necessitated our moving into a nearby apartment until the work is done. The facility is quite nice, with the exception of the fact that we are in a second-floor rental above two chain smokers. We never were asked about this and we forgot to mention that we are very allergic to smoke.

Dear Harlan: A couple of weeks ago, I met the most amazing woman. She's everything I've been looking for, but there's one problem: She's a smoker. . .

British scientists said Friday they have identified a possible genetic link between an enzyme and chronic lung disease and emphysema. Christopher Smith of Southampton General Hospital in southern England and David Harrison of the University of Edinburgh found a mutation on the gene for microsomal epoxide hydrolase (mEPHX), an enzyme that detoxifies chemicals in lung and liver tissue. In a study in the Lancet medical journal, they explained that the mutation slows the work of the vital enzyme, and could explain why some people are more susceptible to emphysema, which cause enlarged air space in the lungs, and chronic lung disease. . . Their study could also help to explain why some life-long smokers never get lung cancer or pulmonary diseases while other people do. "To some extent that is what we consider the truth behind this," he said, adding that more epidemiologal studies are needed to see how protective these types of enzymes are.

But during a meeting in South Boston yesterday, warehouse owners from across Southside said they are largely being blamed for the wrongdoing of dealers and did nothing more than follow the law when they allowed dealers, licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to work in their warehouses. "We were totally unaware of wrongdoing, and we still are," said Hart Hudson, a South Hill warehouse owner who led the meeting. "We have absolutely nothing to hide. Procedures were followed as stated by the FSA." The warehouse owners said they will work together and join with counterparts in other states to seek congressional support.

People under 18 can be cited for smoking even though they have their parents' permission, a federal judge ruled. State law allows minors to smoke only at home or in the presence of their parents.

In the fall of 1998, it will launch what it says will be the world's first smoke-free cruise ship: the 2,040-passenger MS Paradise. Smoking will be banned everywhere -- cabins, bars and lounges, even out on deck.

He even quit his call-in radio talk show to work full-time on suing the subject of his wrath: shock-jock Howard Stern. In a recent letter to WTAM, Downey said Stern had falsely accused him of smoking. "He hasn't picked up a cigarette," Downey's publicist, Les Schecter, said Thursday. "He very much fears this will jeopardize his credibility." As host of television's syndicated "The Morton Downey Jr. Show" in the late 1980s, Downey, 64, usually had a cigarette in his hand. Sometimes he blew smoke at guests. He quit the habit and became an outspoken critic of smoking after he had a cancerous tumor and part of his right lung removed in July 1996. Schecter said a newspaper columnist -- who later ran a correction -- had reported that Downey had started smoking again. Schecter said Stern referred to the original column and criticized Downey.

That [Alicia] Silverstone does nothing to make us like young Emily -- a chain-smoking, hard- drinking, whiny, spiteful, sexually precocious, pampered 18-year-old princess -- might have been interesting. Except that rather than in tentionally making Emily repellent, Silverstone seems to be assuming a sympathy that she doesn't earn.

But as growers and dealers clamor for more attention in the settlement, and for compensation for losses beyond their control, they should prepare for the same close scrutiny currently focused on cigarette manufacturers. Rather than claiming persecution, as at least one warehouse owner did this week, the agricultural end of the tobacco industry would do well to get its affairs in order -- and keep them that way, if it expects to rely on public support.

[Sen. Ken] Maddy has agreed to have unrelated amendments inserted into a horse racing bill that would delay the January 1 implementation date of a ban on smoking in bars, taverns and gaming clubs until the year 2001. "People make choices, and I only think we can go so far toward removing all the risks in life," Maddy said in explaining why he would carry the tobacco industry-written legislation. He is wrong. This is not about choice. Like the non-smoking flight attendants who got lung cancer before the advent of non-smoking flights, employees in bars have little choice about suffering the ravages of other people's tobacco habits.

10th World Conference on Tobacco and Health

• 8/29/97 US Tobacco Deal Will Hurt Others, Groups Fear The Wall Street Journal (Pay Registration)
  
  Delegates at the 10th Annual World Conference on Tobacco or Health were adamant that the U.S. settlement shouldn't be seen as a global deal with the tobacco industry. A resolution passed at the gathering this week points out that settlements should protect the legal rights of those not involved in the settlements and that a deal in one country doesn't preclude the scrutiny of the tobacco industry by other countries.
• 8/29/97 Smoking Activists Wanted Resolution AP Washington Post
  
  A world anti-smoking conference demanded Thursday that tobacco be treated as a "uniquely dangerous" drug, but disappointed activists by failing to criticize a proposed U.S. settlement with cigarette makers. . . A resolution approved at the closing session of the meeting of 1,500 health experts urged governments only to make sure settlements don't hurt other countries.
• 8/28/97 Anti-Tobacco Lobby Seeks Overseas Curbs Los Angeles Times
  
  A coalition of public interest organizations sent a letter to President Clinton on Wednesday asking him to oppose a tobacco settlement that fails to include strict controls on the overseas operations of U.S. tobacco companies. . . The letter was signed by more than two dozen organizations . . . that gathered in Beijing for the World Conference on Tobacco or Health. "While the U.S. government must do everything in its power to stop the tobacco industry from addicting children in the U.S., it must not do this at the expense of the rest of the world," the letter says. Critics of the proposed settlement have said they fear that if it becomes law, U.S. cigarette companies will step up their overseas marketing to make up for decreased sales in this country that could result from price hikes that will be levied to finance the deal.

• 8/29/97 Anit-Smoking Activists Going Global Washington Post
• 8/28/97 Smoking Foes Abroad Fear US Deal is Sellout Lexington Herald Leader
  
  Anti-smoking advocates from around the world yesterday urged Americans to resist a proposed settlement with the U.S. tobacco industry, saying their countries would suffer more disease and deaths as a consequence of the deal. Mary Assunta, a Malaysian delegate to the 10th World Conference on Smoking or Health, said her country has been besieged with U.S. cigarettes and would become even more tempting a foreign target if the $368 billion American settlement is approved.
• 8/28/97 World Tobacco Conference Ends with Dire Warnings Reuters
  • 8/28/97 Breweries, Drug Cos Reach for Smokers' Cash Reuters
    
    Cigarette addicts concerned about their physical condition could ease their fears by quaffing a few bottles of Jinchuan health beer, said Xue Yongjun of the Linhe Health Brewery in China's northern region of Inner Mongolia. "Smoking threatens the health and affects the heart, liver and lungs -- but our beer can to a certain extent cure illnesses of the cardiovascular system and cerebral vascular system," Xue said in an interview at the Beijing tobacco meeting.
  • 8/27/97 Substances Used in Tobacco Industry Depleting OZONE LAYER Xinhua English Newswire
    
    Methyl bromide, a potent pesticide which is widely used in the tobacco cultivation both for soil pre-treatment and fumigation, is causing an estimated 10 percent of the global ozone depletion each year, said Fran du Melle, deputy managing director of the American Lung Cancer Association. "The odorless, colorless, tasteless gas is also known to be toxic to the central nervous system, the lungs and kidneys, and is a potential human carcinogen" Melle said. Chloroflourocarbons, used in the processing of tobacco, also are responsible for eroding the ozone layer, she said.
  • 8/28/97 CHINA: The Next Battleground for Tobacco? The New York Times/Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
  • 8/27/97 Cigarette Smoking Presents Beijing with Daunting Problems The New York Times
  • 8/27/97 US Settlement Seen Sending Smoking Habit Abroad Reuters
    
    "The tobacco companies are trying to get rid of the lawsuits in America to free up their finances to intensify their efforts to go overseas and peddle their deadly products there," said Professor Stanton Glantz of the University of California. "The settlement gets rid of that financial uncertainty so that the industry will be free to expand in Asia, Africa and the former Soviet Union," Glantz said in an interview at the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health.
  • 8/27/97 Activists Say Tobacco Cos Promote Smuggling Reuters
    
    Western firms used illegal shipments by independent brokers as a way to penetrate closed markets by introducing contraband brand-name cigarettes to low-income consumers, said activist Luk Joossens of Belgium's International Union Against Cancer. "Smuggling is part of the strategy of multinational companies to sell cigarettes at a reduced price," Joossens told a session of the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Beijing.
  • 8/27/97 CESSATION: New Study Shows Personalized Program Increases Smoker's Success in Quitting PR Newswire
    
    Results of a new study show that using computer technology to tailor a mass produced program to individual smoker's needs doubles the success of quit smoking attempts with over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapy, reported researchers at the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health held in Beijing. The study sponsored by SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare followed 3,800 US consumers who used Nicorette(R) nicotine gum to stop smoking. The personalized computer-generated behavior change program, Committed Quitters(R), is available with purchase of Nicorette nicotine gum or NicoDerm CQ(TM) nicotine patch. Speaking for the researchers, Saul Shiffman, Ph.D., Director of the Smoking Research Group at the University of Pittsburgh, today told the international conference that smokers who enrolled in the Committed Quitters program had a 50% increase in quitting smoking versus those who used nicotine gum alone.
  • 8/24/97 Cigarette-Happy China Hosts Anti-Smoking Conference AFP/Nando
  • 8/27/97 US Activist Says National Tobacco Deal a Gamble Reuters
    
    Casting away the chance of potential future victories against cigarette companies was like a punter on an old-style U.S. gambling boat putting all his money on one throw, Daynard said. "The proposed national settlement is a riverboat gamble," [Richard Daynard] told the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health.
  • 8/27/97 325 Million Smokers Can't Be Wrong MSNBC
  • 8/26/97 "Smoking Will Kill 1 in 3 Chinese Men" Irish Times
  • 8/26/97 Women Will Be Targets for Tobacco Firms Irish Times
  • 8/26/97 Money Talks in Smoking and Health Debate South China Morning Post
    
    Health Minister Dr Chen Minzhang yesterday revealed smoking-related illnesses were to blame for 750,000 fatalities a year, 50 per cent more than originally estimated. "To reduce cigarette production, we have to step up our educational efforts," said Dr Chen. However, he said, the US$10 billion (HK$77.3 billion) a year tobacco monopoly was a public service for 350 million smokers, in addition to millions of tobacco growers and factory workers. At the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Beijing, Dr Chen said: "The tobacco industry in China is a strong economic sector. "Besides, the smoking habit is not something one can quit in a day. Smoking has been around for a long time and exists on a large scale." Profits from the China State Tobacco Monopoly Bureau's manufacture and sale of cigarettes account for a tenth of tax revenue and generate a further US$600 million a year in exports.
  • 8/26/97 CHINA a Huge Paradise for Smokers Chicago Tribune
  • 8/25/97 Beijing Hosts World Tobacco Conference UPI
  • 8/25/97 Smoking Deaths Expected to Triple Philadelphia Inquirer
  • 8/25/97 Tobacco's Popularity Threatens CHINA MSNBC
  • 8/25/97 Smokers "at Greater Risk of Losing Foetuses Sydney Morning Herald
    
    Miscarriages occur more often in women who smoke compared with those who have never smoked, and the risk is greatest for those who take up the habit at a young age, a study shows. t also found that 37 per cent of middle-aged women report having had at least one miscarriage, a problem which the researchers believe has been previously underestimated. The findings, from the on-going national study called Women's Health Australia, will be presented this week at the 10th World Conference on Tobacco and Health in Beijing.
  • 8/25/97 Jiang Health Pledge Omits Tobacco Retreat South China Morning Post
    
    President Jiang Zemin says the Communist Party must promote healthy lifestyles but stopped short of pledging to curb the Government's role as the world's largest cigarette maker. Mr Jiang yesterday convened an international anti-smoking conference with a pledge to make "great efforts towards tobacco control" despite the state's multi-billion dollar cigarette monopoly.
  • 8/25/97 Fighting Tobacco in Beijing
    
    Anti-smoking campaigners are hoping an invitation to speak at a Beijing conference will help them take their programme to the mainland. LEAP - the Life Education Activity Programme - is Hong Kong's only preventative programme for children. Deputy executive director Margaret Chan Man-hung will speak at the Tobacco Conference in Beijing on Thursday. She said: "In view of the serious smoking problem in China we were extremely pleased to be asked to speak. It is a unique opportunity; not only for us to get our views across but to learn from the Chinese, to share information."
  • 8/24/97 Smoke Warriors Descend on Beijing MSNBC
    
    "China is a tobacco giant with tobacco production and consumption ranking first in the world," Dr. Wu Jieping told the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) after his country won the bid for the meeting. "It is therefore urgent that the international community be concerned about the tobacco problem in this enormous country. "If the smoking crisis in China were to be resolved, one fourth of the tobacco problem in the entire world would be done away with," said Jieping, vice chair of the National People¹s Congress of China and president of the WHO conference.
  • 8/24/97 WCTH: WHO Chief: Prevent Tobacco Expansion AP/Washington Post
    
    "We are fighting not against a virus, but against an industry that profits from addicting individuals who are often killed by their habitual use," he said.
  • 8/24/97 Tobacco Poses Death, Disability Threat to ASIA Reuters
    
    "China and many other countries in Asia...must do more if we are to prevent a tidal wave of death and disability from tobacco engulfing us in the next century," Lu told the opening of the conference in the cavernous Great Hall of the People. Western tobacco companies, squeezed by hostile anti-smoking activism back home, were increasingly eyeing Asian countries such as China as new markets, delegates said. "The battleground is moving to the countries of the developing world," organisers said in a statement.

• 8/30/97 GEORGIA Files $2.78 Billion Tobacco Lawsuit Reuters
  
  The lawsuit, filed Friday in Fulton County Superior Court, said the state's Medicaid program has spent $2.78 billion on tobacco-related illnesses and injuries in Georgia since 1968.
• 8/29/97 State Tallies Health Costs for Lawsuit; Smoking's price: State Attorney General Thurbert Baker will announce today how much money Georgia will request from the tobacco industry. Atlanta Journal & Constitution
• 8/29/97 GEORGIA Sues Tobacco Cos for $8.3 Billion AP Washington Post
• 8/29/97 Brown & Williamson Statement Regarding GEORGIA Lawsuit PR Newswire
  
  "We are disappointed that the state of Georgia has filed a lawsuit against B&W and the other tobacco companies, especially when considering that the proposed federal resolution will provide the same benefits to all states, whether or not they have filed a lawsuit. "For years, the states have been a partner with the tobacco industry in the distribution and sale of cigarettes, collecting millions of dollars in state excise and sales taxes. Georgia, especially, has benefitted from this partnership, not only through annual sales of Georgia-grown tobacco, but in the economic impact of the B&W Macon plant.

• 8/29/97 NORTH CAROLINA: No Plans for Tobacco Lawsuit Raleigh News & Observer
  
  It's going to take a lot more than a couple of multibillion-dollar settlements to convince Attorney General Mike Easley that he should sue the tobacco industry. Soon, Georgia is expected to become the 41st state to sue cigarette makers to recover the Medicaid costs for treating smokers. That will mean the only states that haven't done so are North Carolina, Alabama, Delaware, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming. Mississippi settled its lawsuit last month for $3.6 billion, to be paid out over the next 25 years. Florida topped that this week with an $11.3 billion settlement, fueling speculation that the remaining states might hop aboard the lawsuit gravy train. But Easley tells Dome he has "absolutely no plans" to sue. He's betting that a proposed national settlement on smoking now being debated in Congress will eventually rain $10 billion or more on the Tar Heel state -- all without a single visit to the courthouse.

• 8/29/97 KENTUCKY AGRICULTURE: UK Has Field Day on BLUE MOLD Lexington Herald Leader
  
  Blue mold, the scourge of tobacco farmers across the Bluegrass, was the center of discussion yesterday at a field day sponsored by the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture. About 25 farmers, extension agents and others gathered at UK's Robinson Experiment Station, near Jackson, to see 14 experimental fungicide treatments.

• 8/29/97 Bill Allowing Tobacco Suits Goes to Wilson San Francisco Chronicle
• 8/29/97 CALIFORNIA Amends Tobacco Suit, Seeks Punitive Damages Reuters
  
  Lungren's office said recent admissions by tobacco executives that their product caused cancer and damaging internal industry documents that surfaced during Florida's recent trial and subsequent settlement with the tobacco companies "provide new evidence that punitive damages against the industry were appropriate." "California's taxpayers deserve to be reimbursed for paying for treatment of smoking related illness. Evidence developed by my colleague, Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, indicates the appropriateness of punitive damages as well," Lungren said in a statement.

• 8/29/97 BUSINESS: BROOKE GROUP OKs Bond-Interest Payment Bloomberg/Winston-Salem Journal
  
  Brooke Group Ltd. agreed to pay $9 million in bond interest due Aug. 31 after failing to get concessions from its bondholders, according to a person familiar with the company's negotiations. Brooke Group is expected to make the interest payments today on 11.5 percent senior secured notes due 1999 and a variable-rate senior secured note due in 1999, the source said. The money is owed by Liggett Group Inc., Brooke Group's tobacco subsidiary based in Durham, N.C. Liggett makes Lark and Chesterfield cigarettes. Brooke Group, based in Miami, is seeking bondholder approval to restructure its debt and reduce its costs. The company had a larger-than-expected loss in the second quarter amid slumping cigarette sales in the United States.
• 8/29/97 BROOKE's LIGGETT Makes Payment on Notes Reuters

• 8/29/97 BUSINESS: HAVANA REPUBLIC to Continue Smoking Clubs Reuters
  
  Havana Republic Inc, which makes premium cigars, said Friday that yesterday's heavy trading and drop in stock value was not a result of any business-related occurrence, and it would continue its strategy of opening smoking clubs as well as selling cigars. The company's stock closed at just over $1 a share Thursday, but rose to 1-1/8 early Friday afternoon. It has traded as high as 5-1/2 in the past year.

• 8/29/97 HAVANA REPUBLIC Has Confidence in Performance; Reports Significant Progress in Implementing Business Plan PR Newswire

• 8/29/97 Air Crew Can Bind and Gag Passengers JAL in-air smokers at risk. Electronic Telegraph
  
  JAPAN Airlines has said its flight attendants can tie up unruly passengers after an increase of violence in its aircraft. Most of the trouble is caused by drunkenness. The permission to restrain passengers is included in the airline's new staff handbook. . . Unruly behaviour is defined as sexual harassment, causing disturbances and violating anti-smoking rules.

• 8/29/97 PEOPLE: CT AG RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: Tobacco Negotiator Considered for US Judgeship Reuters
  
  Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, one of the key negotiators of the proposed $368.5 billion tobacco pact, is being considered for a federal appeals judgeship, the New York Law Journal reported Thursday. The daily legal newspaper said Blumenthal has joined two others undergoing final background checks before their expected nomination by President Clinton to a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

• 8/29/97 Chicago Man Sues Smoking Wife AP Washington Post
  
  Retired Col. Richard J. Thomas filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court here Aug. 21, asking a judge to declare the smoke from his wife Sally's cigarettes a cancer-causing pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act. . . "I love my wife dearly," he said. "She's a great mother. She's a wonderful companion. We've been together for so long she's the other half of me. I don't want to lose the other half."

• 8/29/97 MOVIES: "She's So Lovely:" Drinking, Chain-Smoking in Pregrancy Washington Post
  
  Maureen, a cropped Clairol blonde with black nail polish and one eye to match, couldn't care less about fetal alcohol syndrome or what chain-smoking does to the baby growing inside.
• 8/29/97 "She's So Lovely: "Lots of Smoking" The Family Filmgoer, Washington Post
  
  There are instances of non-graphic gun and fist violence, mild sexual innuendo and lots of smoking.)

• 8/31/97 LUGAR Prepares for a War with HELMS LA Times/Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

• 8/31/97 BIBLE's Stand a Shift or Nuance? Richmond Times-Dispatch
  
  Ron Motley says he heard enough. He had three hours to question Geoffrey C. Bible, the chairman and chief executive officer of Philip Morris Cos., in an Aug. 21 legal proceeding for the state of Florida. But Motley stopped the question-and-answer session after an hour.

• 8/31/97 UK: Warring Smugglers Terrorize Dover Electronic Telegraph
  
  WARRING bootleggers - frequently armed - are turning the town of Dover into a no-go area. Southern smugglers, used to having the run of alcohol and tobacco smuggling in the Channel port, are facing competition from violent gangs from Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. Some are led by the heads of drug gangs who find the big money, and relatively lighter fines involved in smuggling tobacco, less risky than importing cannabis. The result, say besieged locals, has been a series of Wild West-style confrontations between the established gangs and the northern interlopers, culminating in a double shooting last week.

• 8/31/97 VIRGINIA Candidates Virginia Candidates Touting Race As Signpost Of National Feeling; But Poll Shows Voters Aren't Interested In Gubernatorial Contest Dallas Morning News
  
  Political analysts, meanwhile, are looking to assess the marketability of certain issues, mindful of the fact that 1993 Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey previewed the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress. One of those issues is tobacco . . . The tobacco industry, centered in the Richmond headquarters of Philip Morris, is strongly backing Mr. Gilmore. . . Analysts noted, however, that Mr. Beyer is not running as an anti- tobacco candidate.

• 8/31/97 GEORGIA: North Point Lounge Brings Smoke Screen Atlanta Journal & Constitution
  
  R.J. Reynolds officials weren't ready for the big announcement Wednesday about the smoking lounge they're opening next week in North Point Mall. So they didn't have all the answers down pat when a reporter called with questions. Perhaps that's why spokesman Nat Walker said the lounge won't be giving away cigarettes and won't advertise R.J. Reynolds' products ---a statement that prompted skeptics to wonder why the tobacco giant would pay rent on a pricey mall location if it would only make money from incidental soft drink and coffee sales. "We're nice guys, but there's a limit to it," Walker said Thursday, the day after his comments about the smoking lounge were published. "I expect we'll use it for some market research," he sheepishly backtracked. "There might be some wrinkle to this. But we just won't tell anything until we're ready to."

• 8/29/97 FLORIDA: Strange Bedfellows Fight Big Tobacco Conservative Republicans fight billboards. Orlando Sentinel

• 8/30/97 FLORIDA: Wanted: Cash for Classrooms Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
• 8/29/97 HUMOR: FLORIDA: Coming to a Neighborhood Near You: JOE CAMEL High School Orlando Sentinel
  
  Thanks to the Republican majority in the Legislature back in 1997, Central Florida's best and brightest in 2002 have swank new schools for the pickings: Virginia Slims All Girls Academy in Kissimmee, Marlboro Man Boys School in Orlando, Philip Morris Middle School in Lake Mary and Winston-Tastes-Good Culinary High School in Deltona.

• 8/31/97 TEXAS: New laws to greet Texas teen-agers, others on Monday Houston Chronicle

• 8/31/97 Tobacco Week in Review The New York Times

• 8/31/97 MOTOR SPORTS: The WINSTON MILLION Raleigh News & Observer
  
  A Winston Cup driver must win three of the four 'Crown Jewel' events to qualify for the $1 million bonus from the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co

• 8/31/97 HISTORY: Weed, the People . . . (New York) Daily News
  
  "It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of tobacco in the history of . . . the nation," says Robert Durden, a professor of history at Duke University.

• 8/30/97 EDITORIAL: Hollywood Lights Up Washington Post
  
  An actor or actress's lighting-up ritual, by contrast, is often peripheral, and one of many alternative actions available to imaginative actors. Jay Winsten . . . says he has heard producers say that they would have a difficult time walking away from such meat and potatoes as sex and violence, but that giving up celluloid cigarettes would have virtually no impact on an entertainment conglomerate's bottom line. And given the proven lethality of tobacco, it hardly strikes us as just one more initiative by the ministry of correctness. The government officials concerned with youth smoking are confining their film industry approaches to jawboning. We hope this will be enough to inspire Hollywood to snuff 'em out.

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• ©1996 Gene Borio, Tobacco BBS (212-982-4645). WebPage: http://www.tobacco.org).Original Tobacco BBS material may be reprinted in any non-commercial venue if accompanied by this credit

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