Tobacco.org

Machinist turns activist over tax 

Ron Russell, a high-energy, outgoing machinist at Hav-A-Tampa cigar factory, isn't an activist, but every so often the outrage wells up. . . . Now 43, Russell is speaking out again on what he considers another outrage: the upcoming closure of the Hav-A-Tampa factory near Seffner, where he's worked for about four years.

Russell crafted a letter he plans to send to congressional supporters of an increased federal cigar tax, chastising them for "short-sightedness" in taxing a 102-year-old local factory out of existence. He got more than 90 co-workers to sign it.

Local radio talk-show hosts have seized on the issue and read Russell's letter on the air, singling out U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor for criticism.

Jump to full article »

NEWMAN: Hav-A-Tampa closing an avoidable tragedy 

Cigar-makers supported expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program. We believe everyone should have access to quality health care.

What we opposed was Congress' decision to fund the expansion of this government program by taxing a single industry. Health care should be a shared responsibility.

We pleaded with the leaders of Congress not to tax us out of business. We explained how a 700 percent tax increase would cost jobs and force some cigar companies to close their doors.

Sadly, our pleas fell on deaf ears and what we feared has become reality.

When will Congress understand that it cannot dramatically raise taxes on businesses without costing jobs?

How ironic it is that many former Hav-A-Tampa employees could soon need assistance from the very government program whose expansion cost them their jobs and health insurance in the first place.

-- Eric M. Newman is president of the J.C. Newman Cigar Co., which was founded by his grandfather in 1895, and president of the Cigar Manufacturers Association of Tampa

Jump to full article »

• Health groups back tobacco treaty  

With legislation to strengthen tobacco regulation now signed into law, public health groups are pushing for the Senate to ratify a treaty on tobacco control that has languished for five years.

Though the United States signed the treaty in May 2004, President George W. Bush never submitted it for approval by the Senate, the final step in the process.

The treaty requires a host of anti-smoking measures by the 164 signing nations. And it seeks to attack global issues such as cross-border advertising and tobacco smuggling.

Supporters say it is time for the Senate to act.

"There's no excuse, we really should," Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in an interview in the White House Rose Garden after President Barack Obama signed the new law that allows the federal Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products.

Opponents, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., believe American participation in the treaty is unnecessary. . . .

The global treaty threatens the future of tobacco growers in Kentucky and other states, as well as around the world, said Roger Quarles, president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association.

"It's basically a pathway to eradicate tobacco consumption and production throughout the entire world," said Quarles, who is also president of the International Tobacco Growers Association.

Jump to full article »

BROWN : New tobacco control act  

The annual health care costs in New Jersey directly caused by smoking amount to $3.17 billion. Residents' state and federal tax burden from smoking-caused government expenditures is $664 per household. Regardless of the state of the economy, no one wants any of his or her hard-earned money going toward these costs, let alone $664. Finances aside, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act will save something much more precious than money: It will save lives. The law "gives us hope," as President Obama said, adding that, "It will help protect the next generation of Americans from growing up with a deadly habit."

To learn more about cessation resources on how to quit smoking, visit lungusa.org or call 1-800-LUNG-USA, ext. 2.

Jump to full article »

ADLER: Philip Morris Gets Its Tobacco Bill 

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act is revealed as yet another Beltway deal for Big Government and Big Business. Those who proclaim it a victory for public health and the public good are blowing smoke.

While supporters trumpet the legislation as a major advance for public health, any benefits will be quite modest. The Congressional Budget Office projects the bill will reduce adult smoking by 2 percent and youth smoking by 11 percent over the next ten years. These reductions will come at the cost of a new regulatory bureaucracy and a more intimate relationship between the federal government and Big Tobacco.

Some provisions could actually hamper the bill’s ostensible purpose of protecting smokers and others from tobacco. The bill grants the FDA the authority to limit nicotine in cigarettes, but not eliminate it altogether. . . .

The bill also creates burdensome regulatory requirements for new tobacco products that have the potential to reduce the risk of smoking. . . .

In their zeal to limit tobacco advertising and promotional activities, the bill’s sponsors also trampled the First Amendment. . . .

Limiting tobacco advertising and stalling the development of new tobacco products won’t help public health, but it will certainly benefit the nation’s largest cigarette manufacturer. Government regulation is the most tried-and-true way for incumbent firms to squelch smaller competitors, which helps explain why Philip Morris supports the bill and smaller tobacco companies oppose it. Harder to fathom is why public-health advocates who should know better celebrate the law as a major advance.

Jump to full article »

NELSON: This once was a free country  

‘When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country,” G. Gordon Liddy lamented in his book by the same title. I found the book unexceptional except for his longing for a country long gone. He takes the reader through a stroll of America in its more untrammeled days and contrasts it with the constantly harried, henpecked regime we find ourselves in now.

Liddy has a few years on me, but I, too, remember freer days. Political correctness hadn’t yet completely stifled free speech, and kids with hunting rifles in their cars at school parking lots or little girls with aspirin in their purses weren’t whisked off by zero-tolerance twits. . . .

The Forum Editorial Board, which apparently never met a nanny it didn’t love, has held forth again on the evils of tobacco. Pay no attention to the subversive notion of letting people enjoy their vices in peace and privacy; nay, the new Puritans will hound smokers until the last leaf of tobacco is extinguished. The recently enacted Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act will now, under the Food and Drug Administration, further choke tobacco users and pile on more useless regulations.

You might think alcohol would be a fitter subject for nannyism, since it’s more addictive and orders of magnitude more damaging to its users and to society than tobacco could ever be. . . .

I voted against North Dakota’s Measure 3 setting aside tobacco money to help stop smoking. Not only are there better uses for all that cash, it’s blood money anyway. Extorted from the producers and users of a perfectly legal substance, it’s money we have no right to whatsoever.

Jump to full article »

Experts: Big Tobacco dead by 2047, possibly sooner 

The pair published "Stealing a March in the 21st Century: Accelerating Progress in the 100-Year War Against Tobacco Addiction in the United States" in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Michael Fiore and Timothy Baker, director and associate director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention (UW-CTRI), respectively, chart milestones in beating tobacco addiction and map a battle plan to eradicate tobacco use in the next few decades. The researchers analyzed data from the 1960s, when the first systemic tracking of smoking rates began, until the present.

"Numerous observers have claimed over time that tobacco use has plateaued and progress against its use has stalled," the authors write. "However, the remarkable decline in rates of tobacco use since the 1960s belies this claim and underscores the remarkable success of tobacco control efforts to date."

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show adults smoking between 1965 and 2007 dropped by an average of one half of one percentage point per year, from 42 percent to the current rate of about 20 percent rate. While this rate of decline hasn't occurred each year, the overall decrease has been quite steady.

The two researchers urge a nationwide effort designed to accelerate the rate of decline over the next 50 years

Jump to full article »

Warning: Quit-smoking drugs can kill ... but they're still on sale here  

Two drugs to help smokers kick the habit will continue to be sold in Hong Kong despite claims they may trigger depression or induce suicidal thoughts. . . .

A spokeswoman for the Hospital Authority said Champix is a self- financed medicine, but added frontline medical staff will heed FDA warnings.

Pfizer Corporate Affairs director Geraldine Ip Pui-see said depression and suicidal tendencies are among symptoms contained in the drug description.

Jump to full article »

• VIDEO: Up in Smoke: How the Tobacco Industry Shaped the New Smoking Bill 

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dr. Nitzkin. Would you say this bill was written by Philip Morris?

DR. JOEL NITZKIN: I would say so. The bill was negotiated between Philip Morris and Tobacco-Free Kids, and it appears from the actual text of the bill that the Philip Morris people did their homework very well and knew exactly what they wanted, while those appointed from Tobacco-Free Kids to negotiate on behalf of the public health community really had no understanding of tobacco-related science, of how and why kids initiate tobacco use, or the steps that could be taken to stop them. So it resulted in a bill that gives the appearance of effective regulation, but not the substance. And with the exception of the graphic warnings, which were added in the Senate, not in the original House bill, every provision having to do with restriction of marketing of tobacco products falls into one of two categories: either it’s already in place as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement, or it has already been thrown out by the US Supreme Court.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And why this alliance between the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Altria?

DR. JOEL NITZKIN: Well, it appears that a political decision was made that the only way they could get tobacco regulation through the Congress is if they could get Philip Morris, our nation's largest and most dominant cigarette company, to endorse the bill. And they felt that without that endorsement, they could not get a bill through Congress. . . .

DR. JOEL NITZKIN: There were strong objections from the African American community about the menthol exclusion. To satisfy those requests, Representative Waxman wrote in a provision saying that the Science Advisory Committee to the FDA would have to consider the menthol issue and issue a ruling on it.

The problem is, the guidelines that the committee is mandated to go by, written into the law, says they can only ban things on the basis that they increase the risk of cancer or some other serious disease, or they increase the addictiveness of the tobacco product. There is nothing in the law that would allow them to ban any ingredient that’s there for the purpose of attracting people to cigarettes who otherwise would not smoke. . . .

To make things even worse, if I could continue for a moment, if somebody with a smokeless product wants to prove that their product is of lesser risk than cigarettes, they have to undergo basically impossible-to-do scientific studies. But if a cigarette company wants to market its cigarette as lower exposure, all they have to do is change the chemical composition by that small amount, and then they can advertise it as lower exposure without any scientific proof that it’s safer or less risky.

Jump to full article »

Congressman Henry Waxman headed back to work  

U.S. Representative Henry Waxman, hospitalized in Los Angeles for a fainting spell days after spearheading House passage of a landmark climate change bill, will be back at work on Capitol Hill next week, a spokeswoman said on Thursday.

Doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Waxman, 69, was admitted on Tuesday after collapsing in his district office, planned to discharge the veteran California Democrat on Thursday, spokeswoman Karen Lightfoot said.

Jump to full article »

LETTER: Quit smoking for us 

A recent editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that health care expenditures in the United States for tobacco-related diseases come in at just under $100 billion annually. Over the course of a decade that amounts to, you got it, $1 trillion.

So, for those who persist in thinking that the decision to smoke affects only them individually, think again. Make the choice now to quit, and put on the path to recovery not only your own health, but the health of our nation.

Jump to full article »

'The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works' by Henry Waxman with Joshua Green  

his account of his congressional career is fascinatingly detailed, filled with blunt behind-the-scenes anecdotes and crisply drawn portraits of allies and opponents.

Most of all, it's a detailed inside account of just how the nation's laws are made. It succeeds as storytelling because Waxman and Green have structured most of the book as a series of narrative examples built around major bills. Thus chapters are titled, for instance, "HIV/AIDS and the Ryan White Act," "The Orphan Drug Act," "The Clean Air Act" and "The Tobacco Wars." There's a fascinating chapter on baseball and steroids as well.

Most of all, there's a persuasive declaration of faith in that particular brand of liberalism that the late Arthur Schlesinger called "the politics of remedy." As Waxman puts it, "In Boyle Heights, everyone thought of government as an institution that helped people."

Jump to full article »

• POLITICS: Moustache of Justice  

Henry Waxman is to Congress what Ted Williams was to baseball -- a natural. As you read this nicely proportioned, fast- paced book, you realize that Waxman was born to be a member of the House, ideally the chairman of an important committee. He's just five-feet-five, he's woefully short of hair, he's neither charming nor funny, but none of that has mattered. Waxman has been one of the most effective members of Congress for 35 years.

Part of being a natural in Congress is owning a healthy ego. Ego can be the fuel on which the legislative branch runs, and Waxman is in no danger of running out of gas. He makes this clear in the first pages of his book, ably co-authored by Joshua Green, a senior editor of the Atlantic Monthly: "Nearly every worthwhile fight in my career began with my being badly outmatched," Waxman confides. "The other guys always have more money. That's why Congress is so important. Run as it should be, it ensures that no special interest can ever be powerful enough to eclipse the public interest." . . .

In these pages Waxman teaches the importance of good staff work, patience and the willingness to make unexpected alliances to advance your causes. He believes in oversight hearings, Congress's most basic tool, but one that has fallen into disrepair through disuse. He begins and almost ends the book with what must have been his favorite hearing of all time, one he held on April 14, 1994, just months before he and his Democratic colleagues would pass into the minority in the House, a kind of purgatory for an activist like Waxman.

On that occasion Waxman presided over the self-immolation of the seven chief executives of America's biggest tobacco companies, who, despite mountains of compelling evidence to the contrary, testified clumsily and unpersuasively, under oath, that they never believed smoking cigarettes was addictive. This hearing generated no immediate legislation, but it helped destroy the reputation of American tobacco companies and surely contributed to the environment that produced any number of new controls on smoking and the mammoth tobacco settlement with the states in the years that followed. . . .

"The Waxman Report" explains, at least, how Congress can work, and it is fun to read. You finish it with gratitude to the voters of Beverly Hills and nearby areas who keep returning this ornery fellow to the House to challenge entrenched special interests. More Henry Waxmans on both sides of the aisle would give us a much better Congress than the one we've got.

Jump to full article »

• QUICK: Smoke Rings in the Oval Office  

When questioned at a press conference, Barack Obama admitted that he smokes cigarettes despite spirited efforts to quit.

The latter is awful news for several reasons.

First, the President apparently promised his wife he would quit smoking if she let him run for President. While far more momentous spousal vows have probably been broken by at least a billon or so married men, it would be nice if the President would honor his non-smoking pledge to his wife.

Second, it is estimated that every day 1,100 American kids take up smoking. If ever there were a President who is a role model for youth, it is Barack Obama. . . .

Barack's dirty little habit compromises the anti-smoking campaigns that seek to keep teens from trying tobacco. Do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do simply doesn't work with youth.

Next, smoking steals lifespan. . . .

Obama in the role of "Smoker One" has got to stop. Maybe the "stimulus package" passed by Congress could fund a "shovel-ready" cessation program and move our beloved President into the ranks of the ex-smokers. His family needs it. Our nation's children need it. The world needs it.

Jump to full article »

Lung Cancer Alliance Hails Signing of Tobacco Control Legislation Into Law; Urges Action on Lung Cancer 

The federal government can now regulate the amount of nicotine in tobacco products, ban flavorful additives, require every chemical ingredient to be detailed on the label and prohibit deceptive marketing and ads that target the young.

Lung Cancer Alliance President Laurie Fenton-Ambrose said, "This puts us on a whole new track in helping current smokers to quit and in preventing new generations of young people from ever becoming addicted in the first place."

"And, hopefully," said Fenton, "this will also mark a new track for lung cancer research and early detection."

Congresswoman Donna M. Christensen (D-VI,) the first female physician in the House of Representatives and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus's Health Brain trust, was acknowledged by President Obama at the signing ceremony at the White House today for her leadership in Congress on the legislation.

The congresswoman is also the primary sponsor of the Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Act of 2009, H.R. 2112, which calls for a multi-agency comprehensive approach to all aspects of lung cancer from prevention to earlier detection, research and new treatments.

Jump to full article »