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Tobacco tax increases are the most effective way to encourage people to stop smoking.
Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko, citing concern for the tobacco industry, on Nov. 11 vetoed legislation that would have hiked the excise tax on tobacco products once more.
It is worth remembering that - even though tobacco excise taxes were increased in September 2008, and again in February and May of this year - cigarette prices in Ukraine remain among the lowest in Europe. This leads directly to a public health catastrophe for the nation and creates conditions for rampant smuggling of made-in-Ukraine cigarettes to other nations. . . .
However, tobacco companies in Ukraine claimed that this tax increase would have been disastrous for their business. . . .
Transnational tobacco companies came to Ukraine in 1993. They promised employment, investment and revenue. Now they control 99 percent of the tobacco production in Ukraine. In 1992, Ukraine produced 9,000 tons of tobacco leaves. However, despite huge increases in cigarette production, tobacco growing has almost disappeared in the country. In 1996-2008, the foreign trade balance of tobacco leaves and products was negative for Ukraine and totaled more than $2 billion. It actually means that Ukrainian smokers invested $2 billion in the economies of other nations.
What tobacco companies actually produce is death. . . .
Many politicians in Ukraine already understand that high tobacco taxes are good both for public health and public revenues. I hope that the current and future president of Ukraine will understand this as well.
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Need a nicotine hit? Want to beat the smoking ban? A smokeless cigarette could be the answer, for the long - or short - haul. Just be prepared for some funny looks, writes ROSEMARY Mac CABE . . .
Ryanair now sells the other most popular type, in the form of Similar smokeless cigarettes.
Ryanair's head of communications, Stephen McNamara, says the product was introduced due to customer demand. "Some passengers can find it stressful to spend long journeys without a cigarette so we introduced the product based on customer feedback and to cater to passenger demand. It seemed a logical step to introduce a product that could provide smokers with relief from nicotine withdrawal. . . .
I spent a day with Ryanair's Similar branded smokeless cigarettes: a packet of 10, purchased for €6 on board a Ryanair flight, to see how it feels to smoke on the right side of the law.
The first thing I notice is that they smell, to all intents and purposes, like what one's mother might call "sucky sweets" - irrefutably better than mainstream cigarettes, albeit slightly strange. They feel like real cigarettes and, crucially, they look like them. . . .
Smoking a cigarette that looks like a cigarette, acts like a cigarette but neither tastes nor feels like a cigarette (while giving you more nicotine than a cigarette) seems an odd choice.
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.
You may have seen recent news reports about Tennessee’s effort to stop the illegal sale of cigarettes that are removed from the pack and sold individually as “loosies.” . . .
Cigarette manufacturers who choose not to participate in the MSA must comply with state law requiring payment into an escrow fund from which the state can seek payment for certain judgments or settlements it obtains against those manufacturers. This year, my office filed suit and obtained a $1.2 million judgment against a Brazilian cigarette manufacturer for failing to make required payments. There are other pending cases against cigarette manufacturers in Canada and Indonesia, a Native American tribe in Oklahoma, and a South Carolina cigarette wholesaler.
The Internet poses another challenge to stopping illegal cigarette sales. My office sued two Internet cigarette vendors for selling cigarettes to Tennesseans in violation of state law. We also negotiated settlements in a number of cases resulting from illegal internet sales.
The effort to crack down on illegal cigarette sales is a team effort. The General Assembly has strengthened laws to discourage sales to minors and ensure that the state is able to collect money owed from cigarette sales. The Departments of Health, Agriculture, and Commerce and Insurance are working with my office in the effort to stop the sale of single cigarettes. The office of the Attorney General has a separate division dedicated to diligent enforcement of the MSA and related laws which works closely with the Department of Revenue.
My office is participating in a new working group on youth tobacco prevention to improve coordination among different agencies, pursue smoking prevention initiatives, and raise awareness of the health risks associated with youth tobacco use. This group will promote the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout on November 19, 2009 which is aimed at getting smokers to quit.
Hopefully, these efforts will help to discourage young people from using tobacco, help smokers quit, and take some of the profits out of the illicit cigarette trade.
Six years ago, when I asked an epidemiologist about a report that a smoking ban in Helena, Mont., had cut heart attacks by 40 percent within six months, he thought the idea was so ridiculous that no one would take it seriously.
He was wrong. . . .
a closer look at the IOM report, which was commissioned by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggests its conclusions are based on a desire to promote smoking bans rather than a dispassionate examination of the evidence. . . .
The largest study of this issue, which used nationwide data instead of looking at cherry-picked communities, concluded that smoking bans in America "are not associated with statistically significant short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for myocardial infarction."
It also found that "large short-term increases in myocardial infarction incidence following a workplace ban are as common as the large decreases reported in the published literature."
That study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in March, suggests that publication bias -- the tendency to report positive findings and ignore negative ones -- explains the "consistent" results highlighted by the IOM committee. But even though the panelists say they tried to compensate for publication bias by looking for relevant data that did not appear in medical journals, they ignored the NBER paper, along with analyses that found no declines in heart attacks following smoking bans in California, Florida, New York, Oregon, England, Wales and Scotland. . . .
Even while taking refuge in imprecision, the IOM committee tries to make transparently absurd claims seem plausible by intimating that spending a half-hour in a smoky bar just might kill you, even if you were completely healthy when you went in. If so, where are the bodies? The report concedes that "there is no direct evidence that a relatively brief exposure to secondhand smoke can precipitate an acute coronary event."
Siegel, who faults the IOM committee's "sensationalistic" approach, is a longtime backer of smoking bans who nevertheless tries to separate his political advocacy from his scientific analysis.
It's too bad the authors of the IOM report, who immediately used it as an excuse to demand strict smoking regulations throughout the country, did not follow his example.
Just kidding. The report, which an Institute of Medicine committee issued yesterday, concludes, per the press release, that "smoking bans reduce the risk of heart attacks associated with secondhand smoke." The committee's chairwoman, Lynn Goldman, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins, sums up the report's findings this way:
It's clear that smoking bans work. . . .
As with the 2006 surgeon general's report on secondhand smoke, the press release goes farther than the report itself, which in turn draws conclusions that are not justified by the evidence it presents. The judgment about the effectiveness of smoking bans is based on 11 studies that looked at heart attack rates in eight jurisdictions after smoking bans took effect. "None was designed to test the hypothesis that secondhand-smoke exposure causes cardiovascular disease or acute coronary events," the report concedes. Furthermore, "only two of the studies distinguished between reductions in heart attacks suffered by smokers versus nonsmokers." Even so, the report concludes that smoking bans reduce heart attacks, at least partly by reducing nonsmokers' exposure to secondhand smoke.
To accomplish that impressive feat, the report underplays two major problems with attempts to measure the impact of smoking bans through observational studies. First, in recent decades there has been a general decline in heart attack rates, driven mainly by improvements in preventive medication and treatment. A decrease in heart attacks seen after a smoking ban takes effect could be part of this pre-existing trend. . . .
Second, random variation means that some jurisdictions with smoking bans are bound to see significant drops in heart attacks purely by chance, while others will see no real change or significant increases. . . .
That study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in March, suggests that publication bias can explain what the IOM panel describes as the "consistent" results of the studies it considered . . .
The NBER paper was mysteriously excluded from the IOM report, even though the authors say they bent over backward to compensate for publication bias by looking for relevant data that did not appear in medical journals. They also ignored analyses that found no declines in heart attacks following smoking bans in California, Florida, New York, Oregon, England, Wales, and Scotland. . . .
The report is slippery in addressing the biological plausibility of attributing immediate, dramatic reductions in heart attacks to smoking bans. . . .
Although the authors work hard to make patently ridiculous claims seem plausible, they never settle on an explanation of how, exactly, these reductions in heart attacks are accomplished. . . .
Assuming that smoking bans do reduce heart attacks, that result could be due to declines in smoking, declines in secondhand smoke exposure, or some combination of the two. The report settles on that last explanation, even though only two of the 11 studies bothered to distinguish between smokers and nonsmokers. . . .
The main goal of this project, which was commissioned by the CDC, seems to have been producing a document that could be waved around at city council meetings and state legislative hearings. If so, the authors have succeeded. . . .
My own view is that the scientific findings are not relevant to the policy question, which is a matter of property rights. . . .
Yet the people conducting these reviews are not neutral observers either; as reflected by Benowitz's comments, they are committed partisans in the push to extend strict smoking bans across the country.
I certainly had no idea about any of this at the time. I take responsibility for publishing the piece, and feel that airing some of the internal fight over it would violate confidences. But at no point was I aware of a three-part series, claimed by the tobacco lobbyist. But I did not commission the piece as the Manhattan Institute notes.
I certainly had no idea about any of this at the time. I take responsibility for publishing the piece, and feel that airing some of the internal fight over it would violate confidences.Then-New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, on publishing "No Exit," the 1994 Betsey McCaughey item on Clinton's Health Care plan.
Betsy McCaughey has responded to my reporting in the latest issue of Rolling Stone that her infamous writings for the New Republic magazine, which helped torpedo the Clinton health care reform effort of the early 1990s, were shaped by the world's largest tobacco company, Philip Morris.
McCaughey calls the reporting "baseless" and "fictional." But here -- as in the health care debate -- McCaughey is the one distorting the facts. Rolling Stone never claimed that McCaughey "worked for a tobacco company." Further, McCaughey brags that her New Republic piece "No Exit" received a National Magazine Award in 1994. True enough, but McCaughey ignores the fact her willful misrepresentations of Hillarycare were exposed by James Fallows in the The Atlantic in 1995, and that the New Republic recanted her story in 2006.
Now for the truth in black and white: Here is a link to the March 1994 memo (click here for the .pdf) by a Philip Morris executive detailing the tobacco giant's strategy to derail the Clinton health care plan.
The coaching of McCaughey -- then a fellow at the Manhattan Institute -- is detailed on page 5:
A final note: McCaughey tries to attack the messenger, criticizing Rolling Stone for accepting tobacco advertising. Yet McCaughey's own political fortunes have been propelled by tobacco company funds. As this thank you letter on McCaughey '94 stationery reveals, her leap to become lieutenant governor of New York was made possible, in part, by a "generous" campaign contribution from the Tobacco Institute.
There can scarcely be an easier pitch to voters than promising to pass laws that could discourage kids from smoking. That's probably what the Conservatives thought when they promised during last fall's election to ban the sale of candy-and fruit-flavoured tobacco products. At a news conference, Stephen Harper wagged before the cameras rainbow-coloured packages of cigarillos, infused with flavours like banana split, bubble gum and cherry. "These products are packaged as a candy, and this is totally unacceptable," the Prime Minister said. "This can't continue." A nation of alarmed parents nodded its head in agreement.
But somewhere along the way, the Conservatives' attempt to make good on their populist promise set off controversies over NAFTA, unemployment and crime so serious that several Tory MPs who initially voted for the law have now withdrawn their unconditional support. Under scrutiny now by a Senate committee, Bill C-32 appears to have turned from a presumed legislative cakewalk -- it sailed through all three readings in the House -- into a political morass. Ironically, some critics think it is the bureaucrats of Health Canada who are to blame for the delay, and possibly the imperilment of the law.
"In addition to violating a fundamental principle, this legislation could have important negative repercussions," wrote Quebec MP Maxime Bernier on his blog yesterday, explaining why he now opposes the bill in its current form. "Among which [are] an increase in contraband sales, a violation of our international commercial obligations, and the closing of the Rothmans plant in Quebec City which employs 330 workers." . . .
"There is no justification to single out American blend cigarettes in the Canadian legislation, as the ban of this product would not achieve a meaningful public health benefit or discourage youth smoking," North Carolina Congressman G. K. Butterfield wrote in a letter to Canada's ambassador, Michael Wilson, this week.
Bill C-32 has also become a political embarrassment for the Conservatives in Quebec, and in its primary base there, the Quebec City region. American parent firm Philip Morris had planned to equip its Rothmans Benson and Hedges plant in the city to produce American blend cigarettes for the export market. Company executives warn the new law could lead to the plant's closure.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is in the middle of a major campaign to convince Australian smokers that they should not try to quit without taking anti-smoking medication.
The company sells over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) and prescription drug varenicline (brand name Champix). A Pfizer brochure "what makes you think you can quit this time?" and website stress that "only 3-5% of people who try to outsmart cigarettes without treatment succeed", that "a serious quit attempt needs a plan" and that most smokers "require help from a health-care professional".
Each of these claims is highly contestable. Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies see cold turkey as the enemy of their efforts to medicate as many smokers as possible. Smoking cessation has become increasingly pathologised to the point that public awareness of its natural history has become heavily distorted.
For years, cold turkey has been denigrated as a hopeless strategy and ignored in public campaigns. But ask 1000 ex-smokers how they stopped and you get a very different answer. As occurs with personal efforts to stop problem drinking, gambling and narcotics use, population studies consistently have shown that a large majority of smokers who permanently succeed in quitting do not use any form of assistance. . . .
Pfizer’s claim that "most require help" is not only nonsense, but contrasts with a reference it cites in its own brochure, which states "about one-third of smokers now use a medication when they try to stop", meaning that two-thirds don’t. Its claim that smokers need a plan is also highly debatable. A recent study (Nicotine Tob Res 2009;11(7):827-32) of unplanned cessation found that unplanned cessation attempts were twice as successful as planned attempts and significantly, that most unplanned quit attempters do not use any assistance.
The emphasis about the futility of people trying to stop smoking unaided acts to exclude popular understanding of what is the most common story of cessation: doing it without professional or therapeutic help. When citizens have common, ordinary and self-limiting ailments, traits and behaviours constantly redefined as needing treatment, avoidable iatrogenic consequences and burgeoning health-care expenditure can follow. But the steady erosion of human agency and self-belief as people lose confidence in their ability to recover or change unhealthy practices is perhaps of greater concern.
It's one of those issues where you may not agree with it in principle but it's part of a bigger issue that is a vital part of a culture of a people. Sovereignty to Six Nations is like clean air to humanity: it's not given up willingly and must be defended.
When the RCMP came calling at Six Nations almost two years ago to see what could be done about the selling of "illegal" cigarettes, the elected council told them that there were no such thing as "illegal" cigarettes being sold at Six Nations and it was their job to monitor Canadians to make sure they paid the taxes on products. Two years later, that is exactly what police are doing as they stop people and confiscate the cigarettes they have purchased on the reserve as they leave the tax free zone. That raises other questions: Can they stop everybody and confiscate their cigarettes? And can they monitor every exit leading out of Six Nations continually? The short answer is: no.
So, what's the solution? The government could lower taxes on cigarettes but that would be taking away their own revenue stream. They could pour more money into education, which could encourage more people to quit smoking and lower the demand part of the supply and demand chain. They could increase the penalties for non-native people not paying taxes on cigarettes purchased on a reserve. However, none of these possible solutions is guaranteed to decrease cigarette customers coming to Six Nations to purchase product.
I don't agree with the economic development at Six Nations in terms of the cigarette industry. I hoped the economy could be run by some product other than one that causes disease and death to so many people who use it. . . .
I grew up on the reserve. I lived at my grandparents' home at Sour Springs corner where the door was left unlocked the majority of the time. It wasn't like it is today. I only need to bring up the topic of crime and my ears are filled with stories about "gun-toting seniors" and "crack orphans." The social problems that result from an unsafe community are becoming more difficult to ignore. Community meetings where crime and safety are the only topics for discussion are happening now.
Yes, the cigarette industry has given the community a stream of revenue but in a very unbalanced way. To say the entire community has benefited would be an untrue statement. It has made some people multimillionaires. It has changed the reserve in a most drastic way. It has polarized the economic field of a small community. It has raised questions regarding links to crime. It has strained family relationships and it has branded the Reserve with an image that has overshadowed more positive ones.
The cigarette industry is the dark part of the issue of sovereignty. Having said that, I must defend sovereignty because to not defend it invites abolishment. I may not agree with what is sold but I must defend the right to sell it.
Kudos to New York City for planning to expand its smoke-free indoor air law to include outdoor spaces. Thousands of communities have 100% smoke-free indoor air laws, and many of those now have or are considering laws that expand protections to outdoor places where people gather or work, such as parks, beaches and dining areas.
In fact, 400 U.S. cities and Puerto Rico already have smoke-free parks laws in effect; 82 cities, the state of Maine, and Puerto Rico have smoke-free beach laws. An additional 158 cities and three states (Hawaii, Iowa and Maine) have smoke-free outdoor dining. Smoke-free outdoor spaces are quickly becoming the national norm, and we have the science and public support to continue moving in this direction.
Fueling interest in outdoor laws is the growing body of science on the negative health effects of secondhand smoke exposure outdoors and the environmental effects of cigarettes and toxic cigarette butts. In 2006, the California Air Resources Board classified secondhand smoke as a Toxic Air Contaminant and called it "an air pollutant which may cause or contribute to an increase in deaths or in serious illness."
Additional research demonstrates that individuals with compromised cardiovascular systems might be at risk from brief exposures to secondhand smoke, even outside. . . .
We applaud New York City for working to eliminate toxic contaminants and trash from parks and beaches, and expect to see more cities follow suit.
Indonesians should turn their attention away from Malaysian theft of their culture to American maltreatment of a rather different national icon – the kretek cigarette.
As of October 1 it will become a criminal offense in the supposedly free United States to sell kretek, the clove-enhanced cigarette dear to most Indonesian smokers and increasingly to foreigners. Indonesia should take this behavior to the World Trade Organisation. The country which in the name of free trade has for decades ensured that its tobacco companies are foisted on the world has the temerity to ban somebody else's exports to the US. . . .
The hypocrisy of the US is stunning. According to a study by Frank J. Chaloupka and Adit Laixuthai for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the US in the 1980s and 1990s used Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to force open the cigarette markets of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand. "Estimates from fixed-effects models indicate that the market share of US cigarettes in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand increased dramatically after the agreements as consumers switched from the brands produced by domestic monopolies to the brands of US cigarette producers," Chaloupka and Laixuthai wrote. "In addition, simulations based on the regression results indicate that per capita cigarette consumption in 1991 in the four affected countries was nearly 10 percent higher than it would have been had the markets remained closed to U.S. cigarettes." . . .
In fact smoking disease patterns suggest that American-style flue-cured, Virginia tobacco with chemical additives which are the most dangerous cigarettes – certainly compared with the air-cured black tobacco ones such as France's traditional Gauloises and Gitanes.
The ban on kretek is discriminatory. One can be sure that if cloves were grown in the US there would be no such ban. As it is, Indonesians might think a reasonable riposte would be to ban all US-brand name colas until the kretek ban is lifted. After all, who knows what noxious substances are in Coca-Cola? The formula is a secret.
First, I think some disclosures are in order. I was the presiding judge over the first two major tobacco cases -- Cippolone and Haines. After numerous tries, the cigarette companies were finally successful in having me removed from the cases because of the following, single paragraph in one of my many opinions in these cases:
All too often in the choice between the physical health of consumers and the financial well-being of business, concealment is chosen over disclosure, sales over safety and money over morality. Who are these persons who knowingly and secretly decide to put the buying public at risk solely for the purpose of making profits and who believe that illness and death of consumers is an appropriate cost of their own prosperity! As the following facts disclose, despite some rising pretenders to the throne, the tobacco industry may be the king of concealment and disinformation.
The history of tobacco advertising and public relations demonstrates that it was aimed at getting people to smoke by making it appear fashionable and safe; encouraging them to continue by debunking its risks; asserting the ease of quitting and denying the existence of addiction and finally encouraging the young to take it up to replace those who were quitting (with great difficulty) or dying from the product or other unrelated causes. . . .
Most of you are too young to remember when cigarette advertisements proclaimed, by way of someone posing as a doctor, that a particular brand was good for your "T Zone" -- somewhere, as I recall, around your chest and lungs. I don't consider anyone to be a greater advocate of free speech than I. Furthermore, I note that Floyd Abrams represents some of the companies. There is no greater expert nor anyone for whom I have greater respect in this field. I make no prediction as to the outcome of the litigation. But if history is any teacher, I can think of no industry more deserving of scrutiny and strict government regulation consistent with their free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Limits on free speech in the commercial world must be narrowly construed and directly advance a substantial government interest. Those limits should be imposed with great hesitancy, but if ever an industry deserves them based upon prior conduct, it is the tobacco industry.
CITY lawyers have come up with a novel way around Al bany's refusal to enforce state cigarette-tax law on New York's Indian reservations: Ask a federal judge to do the job.
It might even work -- to an extent. . . .
Of course, ultimately, no judicial remedy can take the place of firm executive action.
The Poospatuck injunction, for one, only covers several of the largest retailers on the reservation. Smaller stores, or new ones, can pick up the slack.
City lawyers say Amon's ruling would make it easy to move against new venders -- and wholesalers' records would show whom to target. But some Poospatuck retailers already get cigarettes from Seneca stores upstate -- who don't have to tell the state whom they're selling to.
So, while Amon's injunction could cut into Poospatuck business, keeping up the pressure would require a statewide game of Whack-a-Mole. And the city and state's hefty cigarette taxes will always provide a huge profit motive for smugglers.
Bottom line: This job can't get done without the state making sincere efforts to enforce the law. The courts can't do it alone.