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Castro's regime (and American attempts to eliminated it) prompted the Bay of Pigs debacle, closed off a beautiful country with a vibrant music culture, and -- possibly worst of all -- triggered a 46-year-old trade embargo that has deprived Americans of Cuba's most prized export: its vaunted cigars.
Though Cuban cigars are perhaps the world's most revered, the stogie probably didn't originate on the island. Cigar smoking first took hold elsewhere in the Americas--exactly where and when remains uncertain. . . .
Ulysses S. Grant's cigar habit proved his undoing, saddling him with the throat cancer that killed him. And Freud was a chimney: Patients on his couch had to endure not only running commentary about their suppressed Oedipal complexes but the acrid stench from his 20-a-day cigar habit (which ultimately killed him too).
Despite the obvious health risks, cigars remain a fixture of pop culture. An episode of Seinfeld centered around a box of Cubans, while the stogie's famous champions include Michael Jordan, Rush Limbaugh and Lil' Wayne. Politicians dabble too . . .
Yet Washington is where cigar-lovers looking to enjoy a smooth Cohiba or Romeo y Julieta -- without skirting the law -- can look for hope. President-elect Barack Obama has indicated a willingness to discuss with Raul Castro the repeal of bans on Cuban-American travel and remittances--gestures that could ultimately lead to scrapping the trade embargo. For aficionados, that would be a welcome tonic for the grim times ahead. As Evelyn Waugh said, "The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana cigar."
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* Slide 1: Tobacco industry tactics – Influence over policies –Use of litigation as a tool
* Slide 2: Litigation & Tobacco Control Use of litigation as a means of achieving public health policy goals Litigation can complement to a broader, comprehensive approach to tobacco control policy making Though it is believed that public health goals are more directly achievable through the political process than through litigation . . .
* Slide 6: Is the Industry Prepared? Industry strategy in 80’s to counter second- hand smoke issue
* Slide 7: Is the Industry Scared? That’s why the tobacco industry is paying over 250 Billion U$ Dollars to all 50 states in USA as damages (Settlement) Though the industry earned some longevity but the industry is definitely on way out . . .
* Slide 9: The GTC Case in California THEREFORE, default having been entered by the clerk against GTC, as requested by Plaintiff, JUDGMENT is accordingly entered in favor of the Plaintiff and against GTC with respect to all claims, . . .
* Slide 10: Initiating Through Litigation SUPREME COURT ORDERS IN MURLI S. DEORA Vs. UNION OF INDIA CASE IN THE SUPREME COURT OF INDIA CIVIL ORIGINAL JURISDICTION WRIT PETITION d in the Third Cause of Action, for a total assessed penalty of $50,000 in addition to the penalty specified in Paragraph C of this judgment. D. GTC shall, within fifteen (15) days from the date of this Order, shall appoint an agent for service of process in California (pursuant to Revenue & Taxation Code section 30165.1(f)(1) for enforcement of this judgment and order until this judgment is satisfied, the order is obeyed and the injunction is dissolved. E. -------------
* Slide 10: Initiating Through Litigation SUPREME COURT ORDERS IN MURLI S. DEORA Vs. UNION OF INDIA CASE IN THE SUPREME COURT OF INDIA CIVIL ORIGINAL JURISDICTION WRIT PETITION . . .
* Slide 14: Implementation Through Litigation The case of “Pictorial Warnings” in India . . .
* Slide 22: The restriction of “depiction of smoking” smoking” in movies case IN THE HIGH COURT OF DELHI AT NEW DELHI . . .
* Slide 23: The “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Act” Organizations Act” Verdict . . .
* Slide 24: The Solution
Tobacco Companies have explored all corners of the legal system but still……… There are limited versions of the GAME (More or less similar across the world) The way to beat them in their own game is to BE BETTER PREPARED (Understand all the versions of the legal games the industry plays) & BE PROACTIVE AND AGRESSIVE
When Altria Group Inc. agreed in September to buy UST Inc. for $10.4 billion (U.S.), it seemed like an obvious combination: largest North American cigarette maker buys largest North American "smokeless tobacco" maker. But while the two companies share one common material--tobacco--cigarettes and chew are otherwise very different businesses. . . .
Few businesses are as profitable as smokeless tobacco. UST dominates the trade in the U.S., with a 73% share of industry revenue and 60% of volume. Its operating profit margin of around 50% is double that of Philip Morris's. Of course, its revenue--estimated to be about $2 billion (U.S.) in 2008--is much smaller. As a result, smokeless tobacco will amount to just 9% of Altria's revenue base once the deal is done. The hope is that smokers will turn to chew when they're unable to light up. . . .
While sales, advertising and display of smokeless tobacco at retail are controlled in Canada, the U.S. does not prohibit the industry's sponsorship of events such as hot-rod racing and bull riding.
In Canada, social conventions are the main constraint on public use (including occasional "no spitting" rules). So far, Yukon, B.C. and Alberta are the only jurisdictions to have banned chew on schoolgrounds.
"The World Health Organization recommended that if you don't have it in your country, don't let it in," says Harvard's Gregory Connolly.
Cigarettes and vaccines may not have much in common, but Philip Morris International Inc. (PM) is dabbling in research that has links to both.
The company - which sells Marlboro cigarettes outside the U.S. - recently invested C$16 million (US$13 million) in Canadian biotechnology company Medicago, which is tapping the tobacco plant to develop influenza vaccines.
The investment could potentially boost the company's understanding of the tobacco plant, but Philip Morris hasn't specified how it plans to use the research. . . .
Philip Morris International, which operates outside the U.S., has the benefit of operating in many markets that are still seeing growth in volume. But for U.S. tobacco companies the research and development of new products, including they could highlight as less harmful than conventional cigarettes, is getting more crucial. Cigarette volume in the U.S. have been on a steady decline, partly due to smoking bans in many public places. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration may ultimately regulate tobacco products, and that development may determine the fate of new tobacco products in coming years.
The cigarette volume declines in the U.S. have the largest tobacco companies putting greater effort into their research and development, a move they hope will ultimately provide products that could help make up for those declines.
Bill Phelps, a spokesman for Altria (MO), which sells Marlboro cigarettes in the U.S., said the company's strategy has been to develop and commercialize new products that may reduce the health risk associated with tobacco products. But developing these products is a challenging task, he says. The company has to identify the components that are potentially the most dangerous and remove them, he said, and has to be able to communicate the benefits of such products.
In 2003, Swedish Match built a snus production facility in Kungalv, Sweden, with a capacity of 60 million cans per year, to better serve the country’s 240-million-can snus market. Recently, the company announced an investment of SEK265 million ($43.7 million) to increase production capacity to 100 million cans by 2010. Swedish Match clearly believes in the potential of its product. The company has a 90 percent market share in Sweden and Norway, and its General brand has dominated those markets for decades. Its most recent investment indicates the company’s commitment to taking its product beyond current markets in a big way.
Swedish Match’s CEO, Lars Dahlgren, says smoking bans and regulations have created more “usage opportunities” for smokeless tobacco products. “And those trends are basically true in the entire world,” he says. “So I think smokeless is a product category with a future.” . . .
After testing the American waters in a limited deal with Lorillard, Swedish Match can enter the U.S. market with nine different varieties of snus, with different flavors, strengths and blends. The company is well positioned for the move. It spent the past several years restructuring its cigar and lighters operations and making acquisitions that added to the bottom line. Today, the company is in good financial position, unaffected by the world’s current financial volatility, says Dahlgren.
Swedish Match understands that launching a new tobacco product in the U.S. will not be easy in the current social and regulatory climate. The U.S. Congress is expected to give the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco products, a move that could result in additional product and marketing restrictions.
Contraband cigarette production and smuggling at the Canada-U.S. border that costs Canada an estimated $2 billion a year in lost revenues is not a priority for U.S. law enforcement, says the district attorney for a New York border county.
"We kind of have a clash of cultures, so to speak," said Derek Champagne of Franklin County. "Obviously the flow of marijuana is our No. 1 priority and on a local level, the tobacco is just not even an issue."
Federal, Ontario and Quebec officials estimate they lose $2 billion a year in tax revenues due to cigarette smuggling through the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, which spans both the interprovincial border and the international border across the St. Lawrence River near Cornwall.
Sgt. Michael Harvey said those cigarettes largely come from up to a dozen factories on the U.S. side of the Akwesasne territory. . . .
"Until the federal [bureau of] alcohol, tobacco and firearms … makes a serious decision that they're going to address the tobacco, it's something that's so large, it's just too big an issue for any local agency."
For its makers - Pfizer - Champix has been a huge success.
In its first full year on the market, the drug brought in a staggering $883m for the company.
But about a year ago, I became aware of stories emerging in the media in which people who had taken Champix were said to have suffered severe depression. . . .
I discovered that across Britain, more than 3,000 people have complained about adverse reactions to Champix.
About 260 have reported suicidal-related reactions to the drug. Of these, 16 had attempted suicide and 10 had killed themselves.
But 260 reported bad reactions, no matter how severe, sounds like a drop in the ocean compared to millions of Champix prescriptions. I wanted to know whether these extreme reactions were just isolated cases.
I went to the US where the drug - marketed there as Chantix - was developed and first launched.
I met James Elliott, a veteran of the war in Iraq, who had been given the drug by the US Government's department of Veterans Affairs, as part of his treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
One night, a few days into the Chantix course, he fought with his girlfriend, grabbed a handgun, walked into the Washington DC night, and forced the police into an armed stand-off. . . .
Ashes to Ashes: Is Champix safe? Will be broadcast on Wednesday 26 November at 8.30pm on BBC One Scotland.
You can also download it via the iPlayer.
It's an area where 50 or more boats loaded with tobacco products speed across the St. Lawrence River from the U.S. side of Akwesasne Mohawk Territory each day before "runners" leave Cornwall Island and drive across the bridge to the mainland, according to one officer.
Smuggling has always carried risks, not just for lawbreakers, but the public.
Former Cornwall mayor Ron Martelle once described events in his city during the 1990s as "rival smugglers exchanging gunfire across the river, houses sprayed with automatic weapon fire and firebombed, countless high-speed chases, the bombings and destruction of a shopping mall, and bullets ripping through the doors of Cornwall's Civic Centre and nearby Federal Building."
Almost two decades later, the spotlight has again turned to the area after a suspected cigarette smuggler and a senior couple from upstate New York died in a collision on the island Nov. 14. A van driven by the 21-year-old man slammed into a car containing Edward and Eileen Kassian, both 77, of Massena, New York, about 20 kilometres southwest of Cornwall.
A funeral for the Kassians was held Friday.
Anger over their deaths lingers, although much of it is directed at police who chased the suspected smuggler, rather than smuggling itself.
Many people simply shrug at smuggling. . . .
By now, supply lines are well-entrenched. Crime groups enlist members and runners of all ages.
Outside St. Joseph's Catholic Secondary School, Tony Thomas, 18, said it's easy for students to get into tobacco running through connections with relatives or other students. . . . .
With many of an estimated 12 factories on the U.S. side of Akwesasne now making cigarettes for $2 a carton, it's only too easy for smugglers to ship them across the St. Lawrence River by boat to temporary warehouses on the Canadian side.
Lennart Freeman has been appointed President of Swedish Match International (SMI), effective November 12. SMI brings the premium cigar businesses in both the US and Europe under one management. Swedish Match is the market leader in the US for premium cigars with brands that include Macanudo, Partagas, and Cohiba.
For me, banning tobacco in the United Kingdom's bars and restaurants could not have happened soon enough. Coming from California, where tobacco has been banned in public places since 1998, I have always found it shocking to walk into the soupy air of a British pub . . .
Surprisingly, according to the News@Nature.com article, many gaps remain in the science of how much damage secondhand smoke does to nonsmokers:
But the data supporting the link between second-hand smoke and cardiovascular disease are more controversial. The surgeon general's report states that "pooled relative risks from meta-analysis indicate a 25-30% increase in risk of coronary heart disease from exposure to second-hand smoke." Although most epidemiologists think there is a link, it's the size of the effect that surprises them.
"It seems to me that a 25% increase is not plausible," says John Bailar, a biostatistician at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, who thinks the effect should be proportional to exposure, as it is for lung cancer. . . .
Despite these concerns, the surgeon general's report takes a hard line on exposure, stating that there is no "safe" level. According to Terry Pechacek, one of the authors of the report and associate director at the Office on Smoking and Health at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia: "Exposure to second-hand smoke for even a short time can have adverse health effects--this is not subject to debate. Compounds in tobacco smoke have the ability to cause cancer in humans, it's just a probabilistic game of whether they will cause death in a certain individual."
Meanwhile, back in the United States, there are still numerous states where the fog of smoke remains in bars, restaurants, and workplaces. This includes our nation's capital, Washington, DC, which has no ban. I was there recently in a posh pub in a neighborhood within DC, Georgetown sitting near a woman who was waving her cigarette behind her and in my face--strategically out of the way of her friends. I didn't say anything, but I did wonder if this cigarette, which she was apparently enjoying, would be the one that would trigger that p53 mutation in her or in one of us in the room.
A nerdy, uncool thought, perhaps, but it's sad nonetheless that in the country that launched the antismoking movement with the 1964 Surgeon General's report, the fog remains.
Action Points
* Explain to interested patients that this study found that the majority of troops in a battalion serving in Iraq used some form of tobacco.
* Note that this study was published as an abstract and presented at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered to be preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
But again, I might be too harsh here as there are as many "studies" and papers published in favor of smoking as there are against it. That too is good for business, or so it seems. Somehow the truth falls victim to this health vs. wealth debate. A quick look at the annual reports of the top ten tobacco companies show that sales are growing in the developing world, compensating for the decline in sales in the developed world (and thus tax revenue for those governments). As such, the tobacco debate is always framed as a business discussion. The focus always shifts to the circulation of large sums of money as the centerpiece of the debate rather than to the product itself. Companies from the developing world (Korea, China, Brazil, Pakistan and Turkey) have joined their traditional rivals in a highly profitable public-private enterprise. . . .
Banning smoking in public places is a trend that started in the nations of the developed world. Somehow they discovered their product to be harmful to themselves but absurdly less so to foreigners. . . .
We have similar laws in Iran that ban smoking in public places (restaurants, coffee shops, government offices, etc.), sales to minors and any kind of tobacco advertising. But it has not slowed the growth of the cigarette market. Moreover, it is a business big enough to punch holes in the American policy of trade sanctions against Iran . . .
However, the American sales of agricultural products to Iran are allowed and manufactured cigarettes somehow fit this definition! Lobbyists and big business, take a bow please!
Jorge Abraham was a tobacco smuggler from El Paso who masterminded the trafficking of as many as half a billion cigarettes across the United States, sold largely by smoke shop vendors on Indian reservations in New York. A quadriplegic, Abraham could have received 300 years in prison when he was arrested in 2004. But when news broke that the government's star witness allegedly oversaw a dozen murders at a drug cartel "House of Death" across the border, prosecutors cut Jorge a deal he couldn't refuse.
The Deal -- How Jorge got his start in the illicit tobacco trade.
Marketing the Contraband -- Camels for Indians, Newports for blacks.
The First Seizure -- Not a big deal.
The Rat -- When seizures increased, Jorge knew he had an informant.
In his more than 30 years in law enforcement, John W. Colledge investigated cigarette smuggling, narcotics, money laundering, and arms trafficking. At the U.S. Customs Service, Colledge developed the International Tobacco Smuggling Program, which he oversaw between 1999 and 2002. In this interview, he talks about the tobacco industry's complicity in cigarette smuggling; the massive profits that prop up criminal organizations; and the new tobacco black market now booming on the U.S.-Canada border.
The Profits -- How cigarette smuggling finances organized crime.
Big Tobacco's Role -- Companies know exactly where their cigarettes go.
Canada's New Nightmare -- Made in the United States, smuggled across the border.
A Deadly Bargain -- Why consumers should care about tobacco smuggling.
Undercover FBI agents Lou Calvarese, Jack Garcia, and Tom Zyckowski know a lot about being patient. For six years, the trio painstakingly worked to cultivate Charles and May Liu's confidence. Over the course of some 1,000 meetings, their investigation -- dubbed "Operation Royal Charm" -- would pull the agents deep into a tangled Chinese underworld spanning coasts and continents. Together with a parallel California case, "Operation Smoking Dragon," the twin investigations would result in 10 indictments, with 87 individuals charged, mostly ethnic Chinese.
"We really got to see a network of cigarette smugglers up close," said Garcia -- who, like the other agents, has since retired and is sharing his full story with a reporter for the first time. "It's sophisticated, the way it works. And these guys are like hookers," he said. "There's a lot of them."
Calvarese, Garcia, and Zyckowski -- based out of Atlantic City, New Jersey -- first heard from an Italian informant about Charles and May Liu in 1999. The informant had fingered the pair as cigarette smugglers, wheelers and dealers who'd been sneaking counterfeit smokes into the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. But authorities had lately intercepted a few of their containers. The couple might be receptive to an offer of assistance at the ports, the informant intimated -- that is, from the right kind of individuals.