Tobacco.org

• Hundreds fined for smoking in cars since new laws 

MORE than 400 people have been cautioned or fined for smoking in cars with children in South Australia since the controversial law was introduced.

The state led the nation by introducing a law prohibiting smoking in vehicles in the presence of people under 16 in May 2007, in a bid to protect children from passive smoking.

Since then, police have fined 317 people and cautioned 85.

Offenders can be issued with an on-the-spot fine of $75 and if it proceeds to court, the maximum penalty is $200.

A woman was recently convicted for the offence in NSW just three months after that state brought in the new laws.

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• Five nonsmokers’ paradises: a guide for globe-trotters  

The world's biggest tobacco-consuming countries that I profiled in my last post, including Greece, Russia and Austria, are also among the top travel spots, but the opposite isn't quite the case.

Countries with the lowest reported adult smokers, as you'll notice in the list below, don't all provide dream vacations. . . .

1. Ethiopia: This very well might be the first time that this landlocked African country was listed at the top of a travel guide. Just 4.3% of Ethiopians are tobacco users. . . .

2. Ghana: Adult tobacco use in this African country is at 5.5%. . . .

3. Republic of Congo: . . .

4. Nigeria: . . .

5. Cameroon: Nigeria's neighbor to the east has a similar proportion of smokers, at 7.4%.

If you'd prefer a trip outside of Africa, the United Arab Emirates is at No. 22 and Fiji is at No. 23 on the list.. Further down the list, Ecuador is at No. 28, Egypt at No. 33 and the Dominican Republic at No. 35.

Between Egypt and Ecuador is Jamaica

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• 10 smokers’ paradises: A guide for globe-trotters  

With so many places around the world instituting smoking regulations, increasing taxes and, quite literally, kicking smokers to the curb, it's getting harder to find cigarette-friendly vacation spots.

But not every country is trying to kill that buzz. On the flip side, some of them, such as Greece, are attempting to crack down but are failing miserably.

You may feel alone smoking in some major U.S. cities, so we've compiled a list of countries with the most prevalent tobacco use among people aged 15 or older, based on 2005 data from the World Health Organization.

Nonsmokers, too, will want to take note of the list. As you might guess, a smoker's paradise can be, in turn, a nonsmoker's hell.

1. Greece:

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• Queensland Car Smoking Ban 

Queensland has banned smoking in cars carrying children under the age of 16.

Deputy Premier and Health Minister Paul Lucas said the new laws would start from January next year and apply on all public roads.

"These new laws are about reducing the exposure children have to tobacco smoke," Mr Lucas said in a statement on Thursday.

The legislation was passed in Queensland parliament yesterday as part of measures contained in the Health and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2009.

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• Province plans smoking ban 

Cars, patios and pharmacies are all in the Saskatchewan Party government sights as they plan "quite encompassing" new anti-tobacco legislation expected to be introduced later this fall, Health Minister Don McMorris said Monday.

The government promised new anti-tobacco measures in the throne speech starting the legislative session last week.

Among the measures being contemplated are banning smoking on restaurant and bar patios and in vehicles carrying minors, setting new limits on how close people smoking can be to public buildings and curtailing tobacco sales in pharmacies.

"Allowing pharmacies, especially the big box store pharmacies, to be selling tobacco products, it's a little counterintuitive to be passing out (smoking) cessation ... medicine, for example, as well as selling tobacco at the same time," McMorris told reporters at the legislature.

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• Government Stubs Out Car Smoking Ban Laws  

The Government has ditched plans to ban smoking in cars when children are passengers, Sky News Online can reveal.

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The news comes as a woman was convicted of smoking in a vehicle containing a three-year-old child in what is believed to be one of the first prosecutions of its kind in Australia.

Britain was considering moves to introduce similar legislation next year as part of its review of 'smoke-free laws' introduced three years ago.

But a spokeswoman for the Department of Health told Sky this has now changed.

"The Government does not have any plans at this point in time to introduce legislation to prohibit smoking in private cars," she said.

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• No Country for Smokers 

While the omnipresent electronic gaming and casinos in Montana don’t appear to be going anywhere, the iconic smokey barrooms of that state are now just a memory. On Oct. 1, Montana became the most recent state to prohibit smoking indoors of all public places. Bars across Montana have scrambled, several news outlets reported, to concoct new ways to provide alternative smoking areas, by putting chairs and heaters in adjacent garages, or even building makeshift “butt huts” outside.

The Wyoming state legislature, meanwhile, has declined to touch the issue, with few indications it might pick it up in the forseable future. Some have suggested the influence of tobacco lobbyists in Cheyenne is to blame. But others, including a state representative involved in the smoking issue in Teton County, say Wyoming legislators are politically hardwired to avoid what they perceive is over-governing, which would include passing a statewide smoking ban. Legislators have decided instead to let individual communities decide whether to implement local smoking bans.

So when the Teton District Board of Health took it upon itself in March to pass a county-wide rule that would prohibit smoking inside public places, with an exception or two, it followed a few other communities that have passed some kind of smoking ban. Cheyenne, Evanston and Green River have adopted smoking rules (yet bars are exempted in Green River), but no other county health board in the state has taken on smoking, according to county attorney Keith Gingery.

A lawsuit filed soon after the vote put the ban on hold, allowing people to keep lighting up in the Virginian, which happens to be the only bar in the valley that has not voluntarily prohibited smoking. The owners of the Virginian Saloon and three other organizations are challenging the ban. . . .

In her decision, Judge Guthrie will weigh whether the smoking ban meets equal protection laws, which state that a law must be evenly applied to everyone. Freudenthal argues the smoking rule should be struck down in part because it forbids employees from smoking in company-owned vehicles. . . .

The judge could rule on the case sometime in the first months of 2010, Gingery said.

Until then, smokers will continue to light up in the Virginian, where, according to some, cigarette smoke is as much a part of the atmosphere as the jukebox, the shake-a-shift and the baskets of free popcorn available at the bar. A smokey bar is an increasingly rare site in America, but it remains to be seen whether its time has come for Jackson Hole. One thing is clear: some form of public smoking ban found today in all but 14 states, including Wyoming, the spark of community bans across the state, and the dominance of voluntary smoke-free policies locally, has spelled out the shift against smoking in general.

“I think some people are already saying ‘Why didn’t we do it here sooner?’” Blue said.

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• Finland to ban smoking in cars carrying children 

The Finnish government on Thursday unveiled a bill to ban smoking in cars carrying children as well as in places frequented by children.

The government proposed a number of amendments in the Act on Measures to Restrict Tobacco Smoking, including penalties for selling or giving tobacco to children and a ban on the import and possession of tobacco by children.

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• Bus conductors can now fine you for smoking 

On a day when a Mumbai restaurant manager was done to death after he tried to stop drunk customers from smoking inside his establishment, the government said it would rope in bus conductors, railway ticket checkers and health officials to bolster a faltering anti-smoking drive.

Violate the ban on smoking in public places and you will pay Rs 200, according to a health ministry notification. The amount remains the same as the existing fine, just that more people have been empowered not just to stop smokers, but also to fine them.

Simply put, education inspectors, government counsels in courts, panchayati raj officials in villages, policemen above the rank of sub inspector and even bus conductors can fine you.

Since the ban on smoking in public places was imposed on October 2 last year, only 22,275 smokers have been fined: India has an estimated 194 million smokers.

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• Los Angeles DUI Attorney: Smoking Raises Breathalyzer Results 

Los Angeles DUI attorney Lawrence Taylor, author of the legal textbook Drunk Driving Defense, claims that smokers arrested for DUI may have false high results from breathalyzer tests.

Breath machines don't actually measure alcohol, Taylor says. They are actually designed to detect any compound containing the methyl group in its molecular structure and to assume that it is alcohol. They cannot distinguish the difference between alcohol and, among many other compounds, acetaldehyde.

Acetaldehyde is produced in the liver in small amounts as a by-product in the metabolism of alcohol. Unfortunately, the DUI lawyer says, alcohol moving from the blood into the lungs has been found to metabolize there as well. And scientists have found that acetaldehyde concentrations in the lungs of smokers are greater than for non-smokers - far greater. Translated: smokers arrested for DUI are more likely to have falsely high readings on a breathalyzer. "Origin of Breath Acetaldehyde During Ethanol Oxidation: Effect of Long-Term Cigarette Smoking", 100 Journal of Laboratory Clinical Medicine 908.

The Los Angeles DUI lawyer points to another scientific study that found cigarette smoking can influence absorption by the body of alcohol -- and thus attempts to estimate earlier blood alcohol levels when driving based upon levels when tested. Johnson et al., "Cigarette Smoking and Rate of Gastric Emptying: Effect on Alcohol Absorption", 302 British Medical Journal 20. . . .

With a national reputation and the highest professional ratings, The Law Offices of Lawrence Taylor has specialized in DUI defense exclusively for 29 years.

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• Smoking in vehicles brings higher nicotine exposure 

Sharing a ride with a smoker will give you a much heftier dose of nicotine than having a meal in a restaurant that allows smoking or hanging out at a smoky bar, according to new research.

Even opening the window or switching on the air-conditioner when a smoker lights up leaves significant amounts of nicotine in the air, according to the study by four researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

In fact smokers who put their windows down all the way averaged more nicotine in the air, perhaps because they tended to be heavier smokers or perhaps because the air whipping around inside their cars distributed smoke and nicotine more widely, said Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, one of the researchers and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins' School of Public Health.

"In any case it is clear that ventilation is insufficient to eliminate tobacco smoke," she said.

Nicotine, which is toxic, is the addictive substance in tobacco.

The Hopkins team believes its research, using air samplers placed in 22 drivers' cars last summer, is the first to measure nicotine concentrations in actual driving conditions rather than in laboratory simulations. Their results were published in the medical journal Tobacco Control. . . .

A handful of states, including Arkansas, California and Louisiana, ban smoking in cars when children are passengers. So does Puerto Rico. Beginning next month, Avis Budget Group Inc. will ban smoking in all of its rental cars, citing customers' complaints about tobacco odors and residues.

The Hopkins researchers said their findings were generally in line with recent studies suggesting that smoking two cigarettes a day inside a car leaves the air with about 20 percent more particulate matter than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ceiling for what it considers unpolluted air.

They said the drivers they studied all agreed that smoking posed a health risk to passengers, and that 15 percent would only smoke when they had no passengers in their cars.

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• Heart attacks plummet after smoking ban 

THE ban on public smoking has caused a fall in heart attack rates of about 10%, a study has found.

Researchers commissioned by the Department of Health have found a far sharper fall than they had expected in the number of heart attacks in England in the year after the ban was imposed in July 2007.

In Scotland, where the ban was introduced a year earlier, heart attack rates have fallen by about 14% because of the ban, separate research has shown. Similar results are expected in Wales where a third study is still under way.

The success of the smoking ban is emerging as one of the most significant improvements in public health that Britain has seen, even measured by heart attack rates alone. . . .

The early results of the study of England will increase calls for an extension of the ban. Ministers have already commissioned research into the possibility of banning smoking in cars, where children are at their most exposed. . . .

Gilmore's research is incomplete and she emphasises the final results for England will not be published for several months. However, the results for Scotland, where public smoking was banned earlier, have shown the benefits.

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• Unions see red over enforcing smoking ban ($$) 

More than a dozen unions have pledged to the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department that they will enforce the smoking ban, its chief said yesterday, though union leaders disputed that claim.

Director of Food and Environmental Hygiene Cheuk Wing-hing said that he had met the heads of 13 of the department's unions, representing more than 5,400 civil servants, and that all leaders had said they would implement the law. The department has 16 unions.

His claim comes after seven representatives from the department's two staff unions marched to the Legislative Council's complaints division on Tuesday to file a complaint about being made to enforce the ban. A union leader present at yesterday's meeting with Cheuk said that some unions had made clear their opposition towards enforcing the ban.

But Cheuk said that it was only "individual groups" who were unwilling to perform their new duty.

"Civil servants in their right mind will implement the new law," he said.

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• Campaign Salutes Avis and Budget Rent-A-Car for Going Smoke-Free 

Avis Rent-A-Car's famous advertising slogan "We Try Harder" was never more apt than it is right now. The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids applauds Avis Budget Group, Inc. for its announcement today that beginning October 1st, 2009, all Avis and Budget rental vehicles in the United States and Canada will be smoke-free.

By prohibiting smoking in its entire North American rental fleet, Avis will not only be saving on cleaning costs, it will be making renting a car a healthier and far more pleasurable experience for its customers.

In ridding Avis and Budget rental cars of the 4000 chemicals, including over 60 carcinogens, in secondhand smoke, Avis is protecting the rights of all of its customers to breathe clean air.

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• Tobacco acts signed into law 

Two pieces of legislation that dramatically increase smoking fines and crack down on tobacco companies have been signed into law, the National Council Against Smoking said on Monday.

The acts also make it illegal for adults to smoke in a car where there is a child under 12, and pave the way for picture warnings such as diseased lungs on cigarette packs.

"The new laws will have dramatic, important and far-ranging effects on public health and the tobacco industry's marketing activities," said council director Yussuf Saloojee.

The acts were passed by Parliament in 2007 and 2008.

Saloojee said fines for smoking or allowing smoking in a non-smoking area increased with immediate effect.

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