Tobacco.org

Call to shelve cigarette displays  

ANTI-SMOKING campaigners have urged Scotland to follow Ireland’s lead in banning cigarettes from going on display in shops. ASH Scotland believes such a move would help people to quit or cut down and would ultimately save lives.

Ireland will put cigarettes out of sight in all stores from July 1 next year. ASH Scotland is pushing for a similar licensing scheme to be introduced here, believing it protects young people from unscrupulous retailers and will curb the illegal tobacco trade, which in many cases is linked to organised crime.

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Give Our Children The Best Start In Life, Says BMA Scotland 

Giving your child a healthy start in life is one of the greatest gifts you can give them, the Chairman of the BMA in Scotland said. The call came as BMA Scotland published a briefing paper on the health impact of smoking and alcohol consumption during pregnancy on the unborn child. The paper also highlights how existing health inequalities lead to an increased risk for certain groups of Scotland's children.

One in every seven babies born each year in Scotland requires some form of special care. Two of the main reasons for requiring this care are premature birth and low birth weight. Smoking and drinking alcohol during pregnancy both increase the risk of these.

- 25% of women in Scotland smoke during pregnancy, affecting 12,500 babies . . .

Key recommendations in the paper include:

- For certain groups - in particular those with young children and those on low incomes - attendance at smoking cessation services may present barriers. Smoking cessation outreach programmes aimed at reaching such groups should be established. Pregnant women and their partners should be targeted

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Doctors fired up on 'glamour' of smoking  

KEIRA Knightley in Atonement; Bruce Willis in Die Hard; Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction – all three have used smoking to great effect, creating enduring images of stars lighting up.

But now, in an attempt to de-glamorise tobacco, the British Medical Association (BMA) has called for the portrayal of smoking to be taken into account when classifying films.

The BMA, which is holding its annual conference in Edinburgh this week, also wants anti-smoking adverts to appear before television programmes which show people lighting up.

Images ranging from chain-smoking young people in Channel 4's Skins to Dot Cotton lighting up in EastEnders can all contribute to making cigarettes seem acceptable, several international studies suggest.

A new report by the BMA – Forever Cool: the Influence of Smoking Imagery on Young People – said that most smokers started before the age of 18, with virtually all taking up the habit before 25. . . .

Shona Robison, Scotland's public health minister, welcomed the BMA's report.

"Like clinicians, the Scottish Government recognises that smoking is one of the main causes of preventable ill-health."

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• Sly smokers spark more pub inspections  

Plans to scale down smoking inspectors are to be scrapped after new research suggested many pub customers are lighting up during lock-ins.

Health officials had hoped that the ban on smoking in pubs and clubs would become self-policing.

The study on the effectiveness of the ban – introduced in Scotland in March 2006 – was carried out by a team of academics from Stirling, Strathclyde and Central Lancashire universities. Over 18 months, they sent secret observers to eight pubs to check whether drinkers and staff were keeping to the law.

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Pub chain stubs out smoking ban effects  

STRONG food sales within its pubs since the smoking ban has helped profits at Lothians-based Belhaven surge by 16 per cent.

The Dunbar-based firm, which owns Edinburgh pubs including the Albanach and the World's End on the Royal Mile, Pivo on Calton Road and Drouthy Neebor's on West Preston Street, saw revenues rise six per cent to £126.1 million in the year to May 4. . . .

It attributed the success to repositioning specialist pubs to appeal to a wider customer base through an increased focus on food and value for money.

Greene King, the pub company that owns Belhaven, said the performance of its Scottish operations was particularly encouraging. . . .

"Scotland's smoking ban came over a year before England's. In the second year of the ban, the Belhaven team have developed the business significantly towards food and families, and delivered operating profit growth of 18 per cent."

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Libby Brooks: The truth is some smokers are more equal than others  

Last week, friends and supporters of the smokers' lobby group Forest raised a doleful cigarette to the first anniversary of the smoking ban in England. On the terrace of a smart private members' club in London's Belgravia, the redoubtable David Hockney - a regular contributor to the letters page of this newspaper on the subject - bemoaned for the umpteenth time the Labour government's curtailment of his liberties, fag in hand.

Across the room, Forest's director Simon Clark - a non-smoker, please note - told me of social lives destroyed and publicans in peril. Clark makes a rather dubious distinction between habit and addiction. "There are some people who are addicted," he told me, "but for many it's a pleasurable habit that they like to do in social situations." And yet the fact is that 70% of smokers say they want to quit.

As a smoker myself, I've always been faintly embarrassed by the pronouncements of this group . . .

What troubles me most about Forest, which is now campaigning against proposed restrictions on the selling of tobacco, is that it completely fails to acknowledge that smoking is a class issue. When cigarettes initially entered the marketplace, it was the upper classes who first took them up. Smoking spoke of wealth and sophistication. But, as the product filtered down through society, it lost its class glamour. By the time that details of the serious health implications of smoking were made public, the rich were already predisposed to giving up. . . .

Last week, Tayside health service drew some criticism when it announced a scheme to encourage smokers in Dundee, where half the population lives below the poverty line, to quit smoking in exchange for grocery vouchers. . . . One of its leading advocates, Cass Sunstein - a former colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago Law School - has coined the oxymoronic term "liberal paternalism" to encapsulate his theory: while freedom and transparency remain essential, it is possible and legitimate for governments to guide people towards better lifestyle choices when, whether through apathy or befuddlement, they exhibit tendencies to plump for bad ones.

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Pub chain stubs out smoking ban effects  

STRONG food sales within its pubs since the smoking ban has helped profits at Lothians-based Belhaven surge by 16 per cent.

The Dunbar-based firm, which owns Edinburgh pubs including the Albanach and the World's End on the Royal Mile, Pivo on Calton Road and Drouthy Neebor's on West Preston Street, saw revenues rise six per cent to £126.1 million in the year to May 4.

Operating profits climbed to £27.5m, compared to £23.3m last year.

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Festival grows up in world with high-rise tobacco plants  

A TOWERING office block sprouting tobacco plants, private gardens transformed by sculptures and random video screens installed around the city centre will be just some of the stranger sights of this year's Edinburgh Art Festival. . . .

The first UK retrospective of Tracey Emin's work, being held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, is this year's major exhibition, and the controversial artist is expected to draw huge crowds. Among the more striking highlights on show around the city will be East Lothian-based artist Ettie Spencer's Tobacco House, which will see large tobacco crops growing out of the windows of St Margaret's House on London Road, as well as an outdoor crop grown behind the Craigmillar Arts Centre.

The artist hopes that the installation in the former pensions building will raise questions about the issues of slavery, poverty and taxation surrounding the tobacco industry, as well as brightening up the "grim" building.

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LETTER: Up in smoke 

REGARDING the article 'Smoking's hidden death toll revealed' (June 22), I would like to see a report on a study into reasons why many smokers can get through 8,000 cigarettes a year for 40, 50, 60 or more years without any ill effects.

We keep hearing that smoking kills as if it is inevitable, the fact is that it is not inevitable but merely possible, and even then it is likely that tobacco might not be the actual cause.

Something to think about when all we hear are staggering and shocking statistics.

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BOWDITCH: Bribing voters is the fag end of politics  

As parenting techniques go, however, bribery is the last resort of the truly desperate and not something about which to boast at the toddler-group coffee morning. Long term it is a disaster, reinforcing bad behaviour and selfishness. It assumes a baseness on the part of the recipients and a cynicism on the part of the bribers.

The news that it is to become official policy in Dundee, where the nicotine-stained palms of smokers are to be greased by the health board in return for giving up the wicked weed, comes as something of a surprise, then. NHS Tayside, in a joint venture with the Scottish government, is planning to pay up to half a million pounds of taxpayers' money to Dundonians who quit smoking. . . .

“The taking of a bribe or gratuity should be punished with as severe penalties as the defrauding of the state,” wrote William Penn, the Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania. But what if it is the state that is doing the bribing?

We have seen what happens in other countries when the state uses favours to further its own ends. It may seem a leap from paying a few wheezy souls in Dundee to give up smoking to the corruption of large swathes of Africa or South America, but there is a principle at stake here.

If Scotland is to become a country which bribes people into behaving in ways deemed acceptable by the government, we should at least have a debate about it. We all know money talks. What it has to say is not always edifying.

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• Smoking's hidden death toll revealed  

SMOKING causes hundreds of thousands more deaths each year than previously thought, dramatic scientific research has revealed.

A study, led by experts in Glasgow, showed heightened chances of dying from cancers of the colon, rectum and prostate, as well as from lymphatic leukaemia.

These illnesses cause 930,000 deaths worldwide each year, in addition to more than five million smoking-related deaths estimated by the World Health Organisation as being caused by diseases such as lung cancer, which have long been linked to smoking.

Scotland's health minister and anti-smoking campaigners have welcomed the study as further proof of the need to clamp down on the habit. . . .

The new study, which has been published in the journal Annals of Oncology, was carried out by a team led by experts at Glasgow University and was based on data from 17,363 male civil servants based in London.

Information about their health and habits has been collated since the 1960s

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Stop Smoking Bribe Draws Early Support  

Ms Boris, 39, smokes up to 30 a day and lives in the Provanhill area of Glasgow, which bears some of the highest smoking rates in he country with 46% of adults addicted to nicotine.

If she lived in Dundee, she would qualify for payments of £12.50 a week - incentives laid down by Tayside Health Board to get those in the most deprived areas to give up cigarettes.

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• Smokers To Be Paid 50 A Month To Help Them Quit Habit  

Smokers in deprived communities are to be paid £12.50 a week to encourage them to quit the habit.

The initiative is to be tried in Dundee and if successful will be rolled out across the country.

It follows the major success of a similar scheme "Give it up for Baby" in which pregnant women in the city were offered financial incentives to encourage them to stop smoking. That resulted in the numbers quitting rising sevenfold in the first year and this year a 15-fold increase is expected. advertisement

The new £500,000 initiative is being funded jointly by NHS Tayside, Dundee City Council and the Scottish Government.

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Smokers offered £50 a month to stub out  

SMOKERS are to be offered a cash incentive of £50 a month to quit the habit, it was revealed yesterday.

NHS Tayside, in a jointly funded pilot scheme with the Scottish Government, is planning to spend £500,000 over the next two years in a bid to persuade almost 1,000 smokers in Dundee to kick their nicotine addiction.

And health specialists claimed yesterday that, compared to the costs of treating smokers for smoking-related diseases, it would be money well spent.

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• Tayside and Central | Smokers offered money to give up 

Smokers in the poorest areas of Dundee are being offered £150 worth of groceries by the health service if they are able to give up cigarettes.

Participants in a 12-week scheme will be given £12.50 a week by NHS Tayside if a carbon monoxide breath test proves they have not been smoking.

The money will be credited onto an electronic card which cannot be used for cigarettes or alcohol.

There are 36,000 smokers in Dundee, about half of whom live in poverty.

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