Tobacco.org

Reduced Monoamine Oxidase A Activity in Pregnant Smokers and in Their Newborns 

Background

Tobacco smoking is associated with reduced monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) activity. Smoking-associated low MAOA activities in pregnancy and in newborns may have negative perinatal and postnatal consequences. We aimed to compare, in everyday clinical conditions, biomarkers of MAOA activity in smoking (SPW) and lifetime nonsmoking pregnant women (NSPW) and in cord blood and to assess the newborns' behavior during the first 48 hours of life. . . .

Conclusions

Smoking is associated with MAOA inhibition in pregnant women and in their newborns at birth. Further studies are needed to estimate the behavioral significance of these findings.

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• Lily Allen flouts French smoking ban in Paris as she performs in a plunging leotard 

Lily Allen showed her rebellious side last night as she flouted France's smoking ban on stage in Paris.

In between verses, Lily puffed away on a cigarette as she performed in a skimpy leotard at the City of Light's Le Zenith venue.

But the 24-year-old singer provided a distraction from her smoking with her slashed-to-the-navel leotard. . . .

Lily has publicly declared her love of smoking, so it's unlikely she'll be quitting any time soon.

She said: 'I love smoking… I don't really want to say it, but I do.' . . .

While Lily doesn't appear to be too worried about the health affects of smoking, she admitted she suffers from mild arthritis.

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French parliament committee approves cigarette hike  

A French parliamentary committee approved on Wednesday a measure that would add 6 percent to the price of a packet of cigarettes from next year.

The social affairs committee of the National Assembly, or lower house, adopted an amendment to the 2010 social security budget specifying a 0.6 percent hike in cigarette taxes that would lift the overall price of cigarettes by 6 percent.

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• Cigarettes On Sale On The Internet: ESC Press Statement 

The European Society of Cardiology wishes to comment on media reports this week that France is preparing to authorise the sale of cigarettes on the internet, to conform to European rights. Although Budget Minister Eric Woerth denies that this is the intention, the news is disappointing given the drop in heart attack rates following last year's smoking ban.

ESC spokesperson Professeur Ph.Gabriel STEG (Universit� Paris VII, Centre Hospitalier Bichat-Claude Bernard, Paris) said :

"While I understand that the alleged motive is that the French government needs to align itself with the European directive and the need to tackle the monopoly of cigarette retail in France, this move contradicts years of health policy to reduce tobacco consumption.

There is clear evidence that an increase in tobacco retail price and restricted access to cigarettes have led to less people smoking, with important health benefits. The government needs to take action to continue its previous policy which tackled smoking as an effective way to improve public health."

Daily financial newpaper Les Echos broke the news on 14 October, stating that the French government would propose the idea to Parliament in mid-November.

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• Le tabac en vente libre sur Internet ? [Tobacco counter on the Internet? ] 

GOOGLE TRANSLATION:

At the time of the fight against tobacco use is increasing (increase of 10% next tobacco endorsement under shock images on cigarette packs), a new provision could face a paradox. Thus, reveal Les Echos, under the transposition of a European directive on excise duties (indirect taxes) levied on tobacco and alcohol, cigarette sales should be possible on the Internet "by 1 April 2010 ".

The daily quoted the ministry's budget, that "the conditions of application of the Directive are far from being arbitrated. "But, adds the journalist, it does not seem possible to put the spirit in question. "The information Voices has led to an immediate denial from the ministry. "The sale of tobacco through the Internet is not permitted in France," says a press release stating that "it is not intended to authorize soon.

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• Jaques Chirac may have cigarette habit erased 

Officially, Mr Chirac, 76, delayed the release of Mémoires – the much-awaited tome recounting his life from birth until 1995 – so he could re-read it one last time.

But Le Parisien claimed there were concerns the picture would break laws banning the "direct or indirect" promotion of tobacco and may have to be airbrushed.

The cover photo, featuring Mr Chirac in deep thought and thick glasses, was taken in 1976, some 12 years before he kicked the habit.

Mr Chirac is the latest in a string of celebrities to have their tobacco habit airbrushed out of photos or posters. . . .

Mr Chirac's publisher, Nil, denied any "censorship or self-censorship", insisting the release had been delayed as Mr Chirac was abroad on a visit to Africa, and the fuss was "absurd".

The newspaper Le Figaro remained dubious, saying it understood that a politician might no longer want to be associated with this "accursed object", but that it was "questionable to want to erase from the past anything that doesn't correspond to our contemporary values".

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French cafe culture struggles to stay alive 

Sitting in a cafe in France is part of every tourist cliche. But with locals doing that less and less and the number of cafes dwindling at a rapid pace, is French cafe culture in danger of dying out?

In 1960, there were about 200,000 cafes across France. Fifty years later, there are only around 40,000 left and, according to industry statistics, two cafes go out of business every day. . . .

Bernard Quartier, president of the National Federation of Cafes, Brasseries and Discotheques, doesn't believe the trend is the result of new smoking or drink driving legislation. He says cafe owners simply haven't been keeping up with the times.

"I think cafes are out of sync with society." he says. "They were in sync during the 1950s, but they aren't anymore. A cafe has to be clean. The coffee has to be good. In many cases the coffee isn't good. The beer has to be good. And you have to be able to order non-alcoholic drinks, like fresh-squeezed orange juice or smoothies. You have to be able to find a newspaper in a cafe, or find a television where sporting events are broadcast. There has to be something to draw people."

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• Smoking ban, crisis hit French beer consumption  

The French, already more wine lovers than beer drinkers, cut consumption of ale by 5 percent last year due mainly to a smoking ban in public places and economic gloom, brewers said on Wednesday.

That follows a drop of 3.3 percent in 2007 when France prohibited smoking in restaurants, bars and pubs.

"We are in a severely falling market and this trend is strengthening," said Gerard Laloi, head of a group gathering some 70 breweries which make 99 percent of the French output. The French drank 18.6 million hectoliters of beer in 2008, which puts them in the next-to-last seat in the European Union with an average of 30 liters per year, far behind the Czechs with 160 liters or the English with 110 liters. . . .

ne and wine (OIV).

France's beer habits are also changing, Laloi said.

Consumers are increasingly choosing specialized beers -- Abbaye , amber or white -- or high quality beers.

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'Controversies' in Paris - When a Picture Is Worth a Thousand Debates 

All this is the familiarly messy, philosophical heart of photography, and it’s also the subject of a show that just closed here, itself a mess. “Controversies: A Legal and Ethical History of Photography” was organized by Christian Pirker and Daniel Girardin, a lawyer and a curator from Switzerland, where the exhibition originated. Louvre-length, two-hour lines daily snaked out the door of the Bibliothèque Nationale here until the end of last month. (The show moves on to South America.) Inside, scrums of visitors clustered before 80 or so pictures, more or less famous troublemakers, spanning the era of the daguerreotype through Abu Ghraib. . . .

A mess, as I said. But willy-nilly, some big questions arose. The biggest, as Mr. Girardin ventured by telephone the other day, was, “What is possible to show in a photograph?” He elaborated: “What does society accept or refuse? Why are some pictures shown over and over, and then they suddenly become unacceptable?”

In that case he was alluding to a portrait by Boris Lipnitzki from 1946, not a remarkable photograph but a curious case. Jean-Paul Sartre leans over the footlights at the Théâtre Antoine, pinching the remains of a smoldering cigarette between his fingers. This is the picture that in 2005 the Bibliothèque Nationale doctored for the cover of a catalog for a Sartre exhibition. The library expunged the cigarette. Nearly a decade earlier French postal authorities, as part of a national anti-smoking campaign, issued a stamp based on a famous snapshot by Gisèle Freund of André Malraux, tousled, perennial cigarette between lips. Authorities guillotined the cigarette.

That rightly burned French critics who decried — this was the French equivalent of freedom fries, you might say — what they called American-style political correctness, notwithstanding that the history of photography is rife with subterfuges concocted in the name of some greater social good, American and otherwise.

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VIDEO: Au Revoir Cigarettes 

TIME's Grant Rosenberg reports from Paris on the end of the very French custom of smoking in bars and restaurants.

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• Mon Dieu! A crise in France's cafés?  

The owner, a tall, slim, 50ish blonde named Chauvin Marc, knows the cash register will not brim with euros when she leaves tonight. “The young are quitting the bars because of the smoking ban,” she says. “It's also because of the [economic] crisis.”

She looks out the window. “The street is a little sad.”

Ms. Marc is not alone. All across France, cafés and bars are closing by the thousands and their mortality rate seems to be accelerating because of the recession, changing drinking and dining habits, and the stress induced by the money culture.

Work beckons and the French don't linger at cafés, bars and restaurants like they used to.

The smoking ban, introduced early last year, did a lot of damage, say café and bar owners. Penelope Semavoine, a young Parisian who works in public relations, notices that the cafés are particularly empty in the winter. “The cafés I go to are still full, but only in the summer, when the smokers can pull a chair outdoors,” she says.

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• From cigarettes to gold: French tobacconists boost falling incomes  

French women have found a way of drawing a line under an unwanted husband. They are selling their wedding rings to be melted down and turned into dentures and using the money to buy cigarettes and wine, or sweets for their children.

The practice has caught on as some of France's 29,000 tobacconists try to supplement their falling incomes with an offer to buy gold on behalf of a company that turns it into dental and medical products, including pacemakers.

The economic crisis, the rising price of gold and family breakdowns have combined to give impetus to what was initially a marginal activity. . . .

A total of 1,500 cigarette sellers have joined the scheme and a further 500 are expected to follow this year.

Among them is Jean-Luc Renaud, the general secretary of the French Federation of Tobacconists, who has a shop in Agen, southwest France.

Mr Renaud said that he needed “new ways of making money” because the number of cigarettes sold in France last year was 53.6 billion — down from 97.1 billion in 1991.

Gold was a solution.

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A French icon, up in smoke 

In a series of film comedies in the 1950s, among them “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” and “My Uncle,” the late French actor Jacques Tati created the iconic film persona of a quixotic, amiable nonconformist who blunders through life with a pipe clenched between his teeth.

What would Mr. Tati say now that his pipe has been censored? The Paris public transit system and the national railway recently refused to display posters for a Tati retrospective that showed him riding a scooter with his trademark pipe.

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Are social norms associated with smoking in French university students? A survey report on smoking correlates 

Policy implications

The results of this study have many implications for prevention policies. They result from the methodological choices made. First, as multiple predictors have been considered in addition to social norms, the relative importance of social norms can be assessed.

Non-social norms variables of interest for prevention

At the local, French level, we provide evidence of a strong demand among students for public health measures against tobacco, as shown by the fact that even smokers are for a majority supportive of smoke-free universities. Prevention campaigns are always subject to psychological reactance effects, in which individuals feeling their freedom is threatened will react by doing the opposite of what is advocated by the campaign [74]. The positive attitude towards tobacco-use prevention measures observed in this survey indicates that such reactance effects are less likely, and provides a favourable ground for university-based prevention actions.

Furthermore, the association found between tobacco and other substance use (cannabis and binge drinking) highlights the need to elaborate prevention campaigns that are not limited to tobacco use alone.

More importantly, we find evidence that social norms play an important role as predictors of cigarette consumption. The role of social norms has been evidenced in the U.S. for younger populations or other substance use (at university level, mostly alcohol). We show that social norms concerning tobacco also play a role in other populations (French university students). This finding implies that prevention campaigns based on social norms should be tested at university level to reduce tobacco use in these populations. However, perceived prevalence of smoking among peer students, a descriptive norm often used in social norm interventions, is not retained in our model. Instead, more proximal peers (our study measured friend-related norms, but partner-related norms have been documented to be even more predictive of smoking [75]) and injunctive norms appear to be more predictive of smoking. It is possible to use injunctive norms in prevention interventions (e.g. "75% of students disapprove of smoking"), and this possibility should be tested for tobacco prevention. Since friend-related (proximal peer) norms are more influential on students than peer student norms, prevention interventions in campuses could be expected to be more effective if students elect their friends among students from the same campus. In any case, many authors recommend that smokers should be considered not only as individuals but as members of a social group [70,76,77]. Another strategy would be to reinforce campus group identity by demonstrating similarity with other students [78], which could be achieved through correction of misperceived norms.

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Are social norms associated with smoking in French university students? A survey report on smoking correlates. 

CONCLUSION: Other substance use, injunctive norms (friends' approval) and descriptive norms (friends' smoking prevalence) are associated with tobacco use. University-based prevention campaigns should take multiple substance use into account and focus on the norms most likely to have an impact on student smoking.

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