Tobacco.org

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Smoking ban: French transport chiefs outlaw cigarette-puffing Audrey Tautou in Coco Chanel film poster 

Famed for its cafe culture and Gauloises smoking inhabitants Paris has outlawed publicity images of Hollywood star Audrey Tautou playing style icon Coco Chanel - because she's shown smoking a cigarette.

In an extraordinary sign of the times, Paris' transport authority deemed the posters 'unhealthy and inappropriate'.

They show Tautou posing sensuously as the fashion legend responsible for a range of original breakthroughs including the little black dress, round-neck jackets and boucle jackets. . . .

Despite smoking up to 50 cigarettes a day throughout her life, Chanel was 87 when she died in 1971.

Almost all the original photographs of the designer and images from the film show a cigarette in her right hand.

Yet RATP, which runs the buses and trains in the French capital, considered historical accuracy secondary to good health.

'Cigarettes are banned on our entire transport system, and there is no reason why we should be giving them free advertising through this film poster,'

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Cigarettes are banned on our entire transport system, and there is no reason why we should be giving them free advertising through this film poster.
RATP (French transport) spokesman.

• Paris Métro censors Monsieur Hulot 

The Paris transport authority has made a fool of itself by doctoring an innocent poster featuring Jacques Tati, the late film-maker and actor who played the beloved eccentric Monsieur Hulot. . . .

Tati, who died in 1982, made only nine films but he left an impressive legacy. It's impossible to think of post-war France without Hulot, an old-world character baffled by modern fads and technology. Also, we are told that Tati never smoked the pipe. He just used it as a prop.

And note the moulinettes (windmills) in the opening of the film below.

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• Famed pipe at center of French anti-tobacco uproar 

French activists, defenders of the arts and even a government minister are up in arms over a Paris ad campaign they are calling too politically correct.

The RATP, the Paris public transportation authority, decided to doctor a photo of beloved French actor and director Jacques Tati, removing an iconic pipe from his lips for a poster advertising a Tati film festival.

They deemed the touch-up necessary for the poster to conform with a French law prohibiting the promotion of tobacco products. . . .

"We're brushing up against the ridiculous with this situation," French Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot was quoted as saying by the French daily Le Parisien. Bachelot herself voted for the 1991 law that bans tobacco promotion in France.

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• DICKEY: Ballad of the Sad Cafes  

The ban was a long time coming, and the French are, as they are wont to do, accommodating modernity with perversity, adapting to the world's changing norms in their own way and their own good time. But there's no question that something of the old Paris—something essential, it seems to me—has gone. A process of sanitation and homogenization, banalization and alienation is well under way, and probably unstoppable. . . .

The Saint-Philippe a few blocks from the Champs Elysées has become a dreary little hotel bar. So I have been clinging to Le Central, a café-tabac near my apartment, where the patron, 71-year-old Roger Peresse has always been a fount of opinions about history and politics, and of common sense about his own business.

"Why aren't you out protesting?" I asked him in 2007, when other owners were marching in the streets trying to make a last stand against the smoking ban. "You cannot fight the times," he said. "People are smoking less. They do not want this any more." In 2003, he said, he sold 30,000 units of cigars and cigarettes. In 2007, he sold 14,000. . . .

In recent months, I'd often missed Monsieur Peresse, and when I saw him he described his fight against cancer with a single, simple remark. "From here to here," he told me one day, putting his hands on his solar plexus and just below his belt, "it's Verdun," the devastated battlefield of World War I.

Maybe all those years in the smoke-filled café were part of the reason for his ailment. That's not an unreasonable assumption. But his doctors told him he should keep going back to Le Central, even when he could no longer work. They hoped the conviviality would keep him going where their treatments failed. At considerable expense, the café rearranged its walls to accommodate a little Siberia for smokers outside, and many still huddle there at lunch or in the early evening. But inside, apart from the lunch hour, the place was empty. In December, after the slowest month that Le Central had seen in 20 years of business, Monsieur Peresse died. I cannot help but feel that, too, is somehow a sign of the times.

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• French Cigarette Sales Fell by 2.3% After Smoking Ban, BAT Says 

French smokers bought 2.3 percent fewer cigarettes last year than in 2007, according to British American Tobacco Plc, Europe’s largest cigarette maker.

French sales were reduced by 1.2 billion cigarettes to 54.4 billion cigarettes, the London-based maker of Dunhill and Lucky Strike cigarette brands said today in an e-mailed statement.

“The official cigarette market in France has never been so low,” BAT said in the statement. “Market analysis shows that, in case of tobacco, lost ground is never recovered.”

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• Across France, Cafe Owners Are Suffering  

Cafes are suffering in towns in Burgundy and all over France. . . .

Not only are the French spending less, and drinking less, cutting down on the intensity and quality of the debates, but on Jan. 1 of this year, after much huffing and puffing, France extended its smoking ban to bars, cafes and restaurants.

Marco Mayeux, 42, the bartender of Le Relais, a Paris cafe in the 18th Arrondissement, said the ban alone had cut his coffee and bar business by 20 percent.

“A place like mine doesn’t appeal to everyone; it’s very working-stiff,” he said. “There is a coffee-at-the-counter feel that isn’t attractive anymore.”

Before, clients would go inside a cafe, have a coffee, a cigarette and another coffee. But now they go out to smoke, and sometimes they do not come back, many cafe owners said. . . .

In Paris, Mr. Picolet, of Aux Amis du Beaujolais, said simply: “The bar-cafes? They’re finished. Twenty years ago, people would go in the morning before work for a coffee and a cigarette. And now, it’s over. Young people don’t drink during the day, and when they drink, they drink to get wasted. Smoking is forbidden and they eat en route, with coffee in a paper cup. They smoke and drink at home.”

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• Smoky French cafés 'still bad for your health'  

according to a study released by the French non-smoker's rights association, DNF, "the benefits of the smoking ban in public places are cancelled out by the existence of smoking terraces, whether these are simply covered or entirely closed".

"The aims for protecting non-smokers and staff have not been reached in these places," said Gérard Audureau, president of the anti-passive smoking association, also involved.

The study found that tiny particles from cigarettes that pose a health risk were present in large numbers in the non-smoking sections of in 250 bars and restaurants in France. "Pollution comes in through doors when they are open all the time but also through air vents and air extraction systems," the study found.

The number of dangerous particles was between three and seven times higher than in the street.

"The problem is that most establishments have built heated, (totally) closed smoking areas in front of their façades. They are breaking the law," said Daniel Desrosiers, member of the non-smoker's association.

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• UPDATE 1-France denies trying to raise cigarette prices 

The French government denied a newspaper report on Friday that it was pressuring cigarette manufacturers to raise prices by 10 percent to help bolster public finances.

Le Parisien daily said the government hoped to raise an extra 500 million euros with an increase that would take effect on Jan. 1. It said the customs office had made the announcement to cigarette makers this week.

"Contrary to the article which appeared this morning, (Budget Minister) Eric Woerth declares that public authorities have absolutely not contacted tobacco manufacturers to encourage them to raise the price of their cigarettes from Jan. 1, 2009," the budget ministry said in a statement.

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