Tobacco.org

• Barbados to host meeting on tobacco surveillance and policy development  

Over 50 delegates from across the region are expected to converge in Barbados for the Caribbean Sub-regional Meeting on Tobacco Surveillance and Policy Development, slated for November 16 to 20.

The meeting, a collaborative effort among the Pan-American Health Organisation - Office of Caribbean Program Coordination and the Tobacco Control Team Washington DC; the Office of Smoking and Health - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention USA; and Barbados' Health Ministry, will look at the implementation of Articles 5.3 and 13 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

Article 5.3 of the FCTC addresses "Protection of Policies from Commercial and Other Vested Interests of the Tobacco Industry", while Article 13 examines "Tobacco Advertising, Promotion and Sponsorship".

The forum will also assess the use of tobacco surveillance data for the development of effective and evidence-based tobacco control policies.

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Great American Smokeout to be held on UCO Campus 

The University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) will host an event for the 34th Annual Great American Smokeout on November 17, 2009. The event will be in the Pegasus Theatre in the Liberal Arts building from 8:00 PM to 9:30 PM. The Great American Smokeout is a day to encourage smokers to quit as well as inform them of tools offered to help them quit.

The event on UCO's campus will include watching a section of the movie "Scene Smoking" with discussion and questions to follow. There will be booths available outside the theatre with resources and tools to help people quit smoking, as well as information on other tobacco related topics.

One of the booths at the event will focus on the tobacco industry marketing towards college-age adults. This is an ideal group for the tobacco industry to target because they are of legal age to smoke, yet they are vulnerable to being influenced because they are exploring new freedom living away from home. These young adults also have a desire to fit in to their new environment and the tobacco industry works to make it appear that the norm on campus is to be a smoker.

Tobacco companies help make smoking "cool" by sponsoring fraternity and sorority events, bar nights, concerts, as well as other events that appeal to this age group. They give out free gifts and free cigarettes, and also host popular concerts. Tobacco companies hire attractive individuals to attend these events to ask these students to let them scan their driver's license to enter them in a drawing or in exchange for a free gift. They use the information that was scanned to begin sending direct marketing to the student in the form of coupons and cigarette offers. These and other techniques for marketing will be shared at the Great American Smokeout event.

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• Industry dodges ad bans by pushing smokes online 

The tobacco industry is using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to promote its products and persuade people to become smokers, a study revealed yesterday.

"The ban on advertising does not mean the tobacco industry has stopped advertising its products," said Becky Freeman of Australia's University of Sydney, who conducted the study.

She presented her findings in Bangkok at a threeday regional training workshop held by Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA).

Freeman said most tobacco companies were interested in viral marketing (using preexisting social networks to increase brand recognition) to persuade or influence audiences to pass products on to others.

A million people had visited video clips on YouTube reviewing cigarettes, she said, and thousands more had become fans of the products on Facebook. "The Internet has made it easier to engage consumers by allowing them to contribute directly to marketing campaigns and brand development," she said.

The use of social networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, podcasts and RSS would be one of the main topics up for discussion at Tabinfo Asia 2009 . . .

Another marketing device was the use of product and pack designs - such as colourful and glowinthe dark packs - to entice specific groups.

"For example, we found cigarette packs designed like lipsticks or wallets - a new way to lure more and more women to become smokers," she said. . . .

A group of 650 people, including teenagers, led by Action on Smoking and its alliances, will today demonstrate against the Tabinfo Asia 2009 at Impact Arena.

"This is a nightmare for our people," SEATCA's director Bungon Ritthiphakdee said

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Adolescents’ Perceptions of Cigarette Brand Image: Does Plain Packaging Make a Difference?  

Results: When brand elements such as color, branded fonts, and imagery were progressively removed from cigarette packs, adolescents perceived packs to be less appealing, rated attributes of a typical smoker of the pack less positively, and had more negative expectations of cigarette taste. Pack appeal was reduced even further when the size of the pictorial health warning on the most plain pack was increased from 30% to 80% of the pack face, with this effect apparent among susceptible nonsmokers, experimenters, and established smokers.

Conclusions: Removing as much brand information from cigarette packs as possible is likely to reduce positive cigarette brand image associations among adolescents. By additionally increasing the size of pictorial health warnings, positive pack perceptions of those who are at greater risk of becoming regular addicted adult smokers are most likely to be reduced.

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• Cigarette Packaging Influences Teens to Buy and Try  

Even before adolescents try smoking, they have preconceived ideas about what smoking is like. They often glean these images from the appeal of a cigarette pack. Colors, images, logos and font sizes all play a part in increasing teens’ susceptibility to future tobacco use.

“We found that when branding is progressively removed from a cigarette pack, adolescents not only perceive the packs to be less attractive, they associate the brand with people who have less favorable attributes. They also assume the cigarettes have a more negative taste,” said study co-author Melanie Wakefield, Ph.D.

Wakefield is director of the Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer of the Cancer Council Victoria. The study appears online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

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UK hopes bill will tackle smoking in children  

23 000 children aged 11—15 years bought cigarettes from vending machines in 2008, estimates the British Heart Foundation. And so the recent vote by members of parliament in the House of Commons for a health bill to ban cigarette vending machines and point of sale tobacco displays in the UK is being applauded by antismoking campaigners.

Smoking costs the UK's National Health Service £5 billion a year. Antismoking efforts in the UK over the past decade have been aggressive and there has been some progress but current statistics indicate that there is still a long way to go. In the past 10 years, the number of smokers has dropped by almost 2·5 million; however, more than 10 million adults in the UK are smokers and 80 000 people still die from smoking-associated diseases every year in England alone.

But the focus has now moved to child and adolescent smokers, particularly as new statistics indicate that 66% of adult smokers started when they were under age.

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• SANDFORD: Forget what the tobacco industry says 

There are many reasons why children take up smoking but youth exposure to tobacco marketing is a key factor. Although most forms of tobacco promotion were outlawed in the UK by the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002, the tobacco industry has continued to use its marketing muscle to lure children to its products through elaborate displays and fancy packaging. . . .

Naturally, the tobacco industry disputes the evidence because of its need to recruit and maintain new customers. The industry has an established track record of contesting research evidence to delay regulation. Tactics include challenging the evidence in order to create uncertainty and using apparently 'independent' researchers to do its dirty work. Such allies include the Cato Institute, for example. . . .

Furthermore there is simply no evidence to support the claim that putting tobacco out of sight at the point of sale leads to an increase in illegal sales. The vast majority of retailers are law-abiding and would not be tempted to try and sell illicit products. The rise in smuggling in both Ireland and Canada predates the implementation of display bans and there is no evidence of any causal association. Tobacco smuggling is clearly a huge problem that requires a strategic response but abandoning a policy that would stop tobacco being promoted to young people is not the answer.

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EDITORIAL: Waiting On The SGA 

SGA finally returned from its fall recess this week to debate the Hopkins Kicks Butts (HKB) proposal to ban smoking on campus . . . Wait, was it not in recess? Has it been meeting all year? . . .

Still, after this page published a condemnation of the attempted campus-wide smoking ban by HKB last week, it was nice to see a resolution debated, even if it was tabled, at this week's SGA meeting.

Unfortunately, the response came a little late to save some Hopkins events, such as Hookah and Hemp on the Beach. Their currently unpassed resolution states that "the SGA is also strongly opposed to the imposition of a fine on smoking and a ban on events that promote tobacco" citing the limiting of the "expression of rights" of other student groups as reason for their lack of support for the HKB proposal. Too little, too late.

Had SGA been more decisive at an earlier date, perhaps this event would have been saved. Instead HKB has been allowed to speak on behalf of students without an opposition voice until last week's editorial.

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• Judge rejects challenge to tobacco marketing regs 

A federal judge ruled Thursday that tobacco companies hoping to block new restrictions on their marketing have little chance of succeeding.

The companies had asked U.S. District Judge Joseph H. McKinley Jr. to issue a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit they filed in August claiming new tobacco regulations violate their right to free speech.

The companies, including two of the industry's three largest, are challenging provisions of a law that gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration new authority over tobacco. In a 29-page decision, McKinley outlined the arguments in the lawsuit and found that blocking the provisions was not warranted. . . .

The companies say the law, which takes full effect over three years, prohibits them from using "color lettering, trademarks, logos or any other imagery in most advertisements, including virtually all point-of-sale and direct-mail advertisements." Their complaint also says the law prohibits tobacco companies from "making truthful statements about their products in scientific, public policy and political debates."

The tobacco makers say new mandated warnings for cigarettes would relegate their branding to the bottom half of cigarette packaging and make it "difficult, if not impossible, to see."

In its response to the lawsuit, the FDA said the new marketing rules do not restrict free speech and serve a greater public health interest.

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Tobacco Deal With Tennis Organisation May Breach UK And International Law 

Six years after the ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship in the UK, a London-based sports body stands accused of breaching the law by promoting a cigarette brand on its website.[1] The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) which represents the world's top male tennis players, is responsible for the sponsorship contracts for the various international tournaments. The next ATP World Tour tournament, which is due to take place in Basel, Switzerland from 31 October to 8 November, is sponsored by Davidoff, a cigarette brand manufactured by Imperial Tobacco. The Swiss indoor tournament is believed to be the only one in the world to be sponsored by a tobacco company.

British-based Imperial Tobacco acquired the Davidoff cigarette brand in 2006 and has exploited the weak law in Switzerland which still allows events to be sponsored by tobacco companies, although tobacco advertising on television is banned. However, the televising of the event means that tobacco advertising will be beamed into the homes of more than one billion people worldwide, [2] contrary to Article 13 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control which has been signed by 160 countries worldwide. [3]

ASH has written to the ATP urging the organisation to end its ties with the tobacco industry when the current contract comes to an end and is seeking clarification from the Department of Health regarding the possible breach of UK law.

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• Hazard in plain sight? 'Crossover products' may help hook kids on smoking, drugs 

Redford recently spoke about the products at a Marblehead Board of Health meeting, unloading for the board a bag of such products that she's collected throughout the year. Her presentation left most board members in disbelief.

"Are we the only ones who don't know about this stuff?" asked a bewildered Helaine Hazlett, the board's chairman.

Take a walk into the 7-11 store in Marblehead, and here is what you will find: "grinders" (small metal contraptions that are used to grind up tobacco or drugs), pipes, hookah pipes for smoking specially made flavored tobacco, flavored chewing tobacco, boxes of blunt wraps (tobacco-based rolling papers), cigarettes that are packaged like Chanel perfume boxes, and smokeless-tobacco gum that comes in a candy-mint-like container. The list goes on.

None of these products are illegal to sell, although in most states, including Massachusetts, to buy any tobacco-related product a person must be 18 or older. In fact, as a local tobacco-control officer, Redford's job is to conduct "compliance checks," . . .

Cigarette companies spent approximately $13 billion on advertising and promotional expenses in 2005 for those tobacco-specific products, nearly double what was spent in 1998, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Of that money, Redford says advertisers are more often targeting women and teens.

In 2008, tobacco company Philip Morris USA unrolled its sleek "purse pack" cigarette packaging containing ultra-slim cigarettes; the packaging is made to look as if it is a cosmetics case.

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• Tobacco Law date: 31 Dec. 

Cayman Islands lawmakers have set a new date for the implementation of a smoking ban in bars and restaurants after deciding a 30 October deadline could simply not be met.

The new date, set out in a legal amendment to the Tobacco Law (Commencement) Order, 2009 will be 31 December.

Health Minister Mark Scotland had earlier vowed to have the smoking ban in effect "no later than that date" and said the current government fully intended to implement and enforce the smoking ban.

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Call for moratorium on new tobacco products 

At the 6th Conference on Tobacco or Health being held in Montreal this week, numerous stakeholders are urging government authorities to declare a moratorium on new tobacco products to counter the innovative product launch and marketing strategies of cigarette manufacturers.

Several public health and tobacco control experts point out that tobacco companies are constantly developing new marketing strategies to circumvent the laws and regulations currently in force in Canada. These strategies include the introduction of new products such as 'activated carbon filter cigarettes' and flavoured cigarillos, which are alone responsible for increasing smoking rates in young people in Quebec.

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Anti-Smoking Commercials Target Sports Fans Watching TV 

For one in three sports fans, watching the game and lighting up a cigarette go hand in hand. And those are the fans an anti- smoking group hopes to reach during the World Series.

[ WEB LINK: ( Tobacco Free Wellness Program ) ]

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National Federation of Retail Newsagents Backs Newsagent Member in Tobacco Lawsuit 

Donegal newsagent and NFRN member Maurice Timony will tomorrow morning lodge a High Court challenge to contest the Irish Governments ban on tobacco display. He is backed by the world's largest cigarette company Philip Morris in the joint lawsuit which seeks to overturn the ban on the display of tobacco products at retail stores in Ireland.

While the NFRN supports the Governments intentions on public health, a display ban is simply bad policy. Firstly, it is ineffective in stopping children smoking and helping adults quit. Secondly, without a coherent approach it will lead to further significant growth in illegal smuggled and counterfeit tobacco products - as already experienced in Ireland - to the detriment of both public health and retailers' livelihoods. Similarly, the NFRN`s newsagent members in the UK are not being listened to - NFRN members do not wish to resort to legal action but we may have no other options left open to us.

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