Tobacco.org

• Arrested for selling false cigarettes mixed with bunny scat 

The Guardia Civil in Tenerife have arrested 12 men who formed an organized gang who smuggled fake cigarettes into the Canary Islands. The cigarettes, made in China, were found to contain a high proportion of rabbit excrement which padded out the tobacco. The cigarettes were sold in bars and shops mainly in the south of the island.

Operaci�n Chester is the largest counterfeit tobacco operation this year in Spain. One and a half million packets of false cigarettes with a street value of almost five million euros were seized. It is not known how many false packets have been sold but the value is expected to be millions of euros.

The operation started after the Guardia Civil started to receive a series of complaints from smokers about "terrible" cigarettes. . . .

The false cigarettes were made in China before being shipped to Spain via the UAE. Apart from the rabbit excrement, they also contained dangerously high levels of nicotine, CO2 and heavy metals.

Amongst the arrested was a corrupt customs officer who allowed the shipments into the Canary Islands.

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• Airing out the car won't remove smoking hazards 

Even when smokers roll down windows and flip on fans, they expose car passengers to hazardous levels of second-hand smoke, says a new Canadian study that buttresses efforts to ban smoking in automobiles with children.

University of Waterloo researchers found that levels of second-hand smoke in vehicles with the windows up exceeded U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines by up to 100 times in just 20 minutes of burning a cigarette. When drivers lowered windows halfway, the plume still surpassed EPA limits for 24-hour fine-particle exposure by six times.

The principal researchers, Taryn Sendzik and Geoffrey Fong, were astounded by their own findings, contained in a report by the provincial Ministry of Health's Ontario Tobacco Research Unit. . . .

"We tell all our members not to smoke in the presence of kids, in cars, in homes, ever," said Arminda Mota, president of MyChoice.ca, a smokers' advocacy group funded by Imperial Tobacco. "These health zealots - what's next, are they going to ban adults from giving junk food to kids? Are they going to come to our houses and see how you cook your meals? While they're there they might as well come to your bedroom and check out how you do it. Is this a free country?"

Mr. Cunningham dismissed that line of reasoning. "For 40 years, the slippery-slope argument has been used against every tobacco measure," he said.

"That's to be expected. It's pretty hard to argue that children should be exposed to poison."

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