Tobacco.org

Justice Department Wants Public Release of Tobacco Warning Statements  

The Justice Department plans to ask a federal judge to make public the proposed statements the government wants tobacco companies to publish about the dangers of their products.

Department spokesman Charles Miller said the agency planned to file the proposed statements in a Washington, D.C., court Thursday, but ran into resistance from cigarette makers about whether the information should be made public now.

"It was our understanding that this would be publicly filed, but there is a difference of opinion on that," Mr. Miller said.

He said the agency will now raise the issue with U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler, who ruled in 2006 that tobacco companies violated federal racketeering laws by engaging in a decades-long scheme to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking.

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Boatman caught with contraband cigarettes 

THE Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) has seized 400 cartons of contraband cigarettes, worth RM5,200, from a small boat heading from Langkawi towards Kuala Perlis.

MMEA personnel were conducting patrols off the coast in Langkawi when they saw a man operating a fibre boat in a suspicious manner at about 10.10am on Tuesday.

They searched the boat and found 16 large boxes containing 25 cartons of cigarettes each.

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• In Search of the Perfect Search  

Three years ago, a handful of lawyers and scientists started the quest, a project to save litigation from being bur­ied in an avalanche of electronic documents. Since then, the Text Retrieval Confer­ence Legal Track has been using different types of computer searches to wade through huge piles of digital in­formation, hoping to get closer to a complete picture of what is issue-important in a computer’s data stores.

The good news: The TREC Legal Track team believes it is close to finding a protocol that can work. The bad: The project also found disturbing problems with the way lawyers work today.

And the harshest conclusion: Key­word searching—what most law­yers use to find litigation documents—misses the majority of relevant documents. . . .

Later, as director of litigation for the U.S. Na­­­tional Archives and Records Admini­stra­tion, Baron was assigned a request to review documents pertaining to tobacco litigation in U.S. v. Philip Morris. . . .

“It was obvious to me that the volume of information was overwhelming us in litigation, and the technology we have to deal with it was just not sufficient,” Baron says.

He figured someone somewhere in the federal government must have done some re­search on the topic of infor­mat­ion retrieval. In fact, he discovered that the U.S. De­partment of Commerce’s Na­tional Institute of Standards and Technology had been conducting a 15-year investigation on retrieval of text from large document collections.

When Baron approached the government scientists involved, they were thrilled to have a real-world problem to tackle as part of what had been a pure research project. TREC Legal Track, begun in 2006, is now co-sponsored by NIST and subagencies of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. . . .

Here’s where the tobacco litigation archive comes in. Legal Track is using the nearly 7 million publicly available documents from the master settlement agreement database, a collection of tobacco documents produced in relation to several state lawsuits against the industry. That database was chosen because it contains a wide spectrum of types of documents.

At that target cache, TREC Legal Track is aiming 13 hypothetical legal complaints (PDF). Written like normal legal documents, they contain all the information included in real-world complaints for fictional tobacco-related lawsuits, such as campaign finance violations, class actions, antitrust investigations, securities litigation, patent infringement and wrongful death suits. The most important part is the search terms these hypotheticals lay out.

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Alberta fenced in by smoking bans ($$) 

Alberta fenced in by smoking bans Coyote's Bar and Grill in Yellowknife encounters plenty of Calgarians who snicker when they learn a Northwest Territories law prohibits them from lighting up while they enjoy a pint at the pub.

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Cavan publican fined over smoking ban breach 

A Co Cavan publican has been fined the maximum amount of €3,000 for allowing people to smoke on his premises.

Gerard Lovett, who owns the Copper Kettle Pub in Kilnaleck, was also ordered to pay costs of just over €1,000 at Ballyjamesduff District Court.

Barry Coady, an Environmental Health Officer, told the court he visited the premises on 26 September and found four people smoking. They were using empty bottles and glasses as ashtrays.

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OK Gov. Wants Ads Against Tobacco Proposal Pulled 

Governor Brad Henry says ads funded by big tobacco companies opposing State Question 7-13 are misleading and should be pulled from the airwaves.

State Question 713 would increase the tobacco tax to fund health-care projects. Proponents say the tax would also discourage smoking, especially among children.

Speaking at a rally of trauma-care survivors in Oklahoma City, Henry says tobacco companies are interested in their profits, not the health of Oklahomans.

Opponents of State Question 713 say the ads are not incorrect and that the proposal isn't a health care issue.

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EDITORIAL: The smoke-free room 

Conspiracy theories don't always assume the worst. Sometimes, they are downright optimistic. Here's one we like: In a smoke-free room somewhere in Salt Lake City, a plot was hatched to take on the tobacco industry's troubling success in luring more young people, particularly gay and lesbian young people, into the smoking habit. Representatives from the Utah Department of Health, the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Utah and the Jordan School District were rightly alarmed by Centers for Disease Control data that show gay people between the ages of 18 and 24 are almost twice as likely as their straight peers to smoke.

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Strathcona smokers to butt out 

Strathcona County will have the toughest smoking ban in Alberta, and one of the toughest in Canada, next year after its council all but pushed through the controversial bylaw Tuesday.

As the lone council member to vote against the proposed smoking bylaw, Mayor Vern Hartwell temporarily delayed final passage.

Tough new limits on smokers, eventually including those in bars and lounges, are expected to pass next week.

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Fatal Fire Sparked By Careless Smoking 

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Tobacco Load 

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Health Costs, Tobacco Taxes Up in Alberta 

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$300m Allocated to Health Reform 

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Hike Tobacco Tax, Anti-Smokers Urge 

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Alberta Smokers Buck Trend 

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Schoolyard Smoking Stays 

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