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Croatia began enforcing a smoking ban in public places on May 6th. The law allows smoking outside facilities -- offices, bars, restaurants, and cafes -- but not indoors.
While some employers are lukewarm about the law, restaurant and bar owners are outraged, fearing that they will lose clientele. Restaurateurs have reportedly started an initiative to put Croatia on the list of countries that discriminate against smokers.
The blog community is divided, yet passionate, about the issue. Non-smokers are exhilarated, painting the law as a very positive step towards improving the nation's health, while smokers consider it repressive.
Nepusac praises the "healthiest law that was ever passed" in Croatia and warns that the tobacco industry is "trying to act through the restaurant and bar owners" to reverse the law. He finds their attempt outrageous, claiming they "promote the old myth that smoking is something entirely normal while non-smoking is not". He calls on everybody to support the government's stand, which reflects "civilisation, awareness and societal health".
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It's common knowledge that smoking raises risks of lung cancer. And yet researchers haven't known whether continued smoking by lung cancer patients would increase the risk of the cancer's spread.
Researchers at West Virginia University - studying the relationship between death rates from lung cancer and how much a person smoked - have found that smoking intensity in fact predicts how the disease will progress.
Patients who smoked two packs a day had a 58 percent higher risk of their lung cancers returning or spreading compared with nonsmoking patients.
Smoking intensity is one of only two factors found to predict lung-cancer mortality, according to the study published in the May issue of the journal Lung Cancer. The other factor is the stage of the cancer when diagnosed. Almost 350 patients with non-small cell lung cancer were studied.
What is the most effective way to discourage smoking? Chantix tablets? A support group? Nicotine patches? Or, how about sharply raising the price of cigarettes by jacking up the tax?
A new study compared the efficacy of the various methods in Israel for the first time, looking at medical efficacy and cost efficiency. The results are presented here in a ranked list. . . .
The team compiled two lists: One lists methods that save the state money. The other lists methods that may not achieve that end, but the methods in both lists have proved effective in helping people stop smoking.
The first contains methods that were found to be cost-effective, meaning they involve costs, but ultimately save the health system money.
These include raising the tax on cigarettes (which just happened, adding NIS 2 per pack of cigarettes), taking large doses of Champix tablets (2 milligrams a day), or drug therapy combined with a telephone hotline for quitters in crisis.
The second list includes methods that don't save the health establishment money. But they were found to be more cost-effective for the smoker: Each shekel invested in these methods had a considerable contribution to the health of both the actual smoker and his associates, who may suffer the effects of passive smoking. This list also contains Pfizer's Champix tablets, but at a lesser dosage of 1 milligram a day, as well as the drug Zyban. Nicotine patches also make this list, as did counseling.
On May 22, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia upheld a ruling that cigarette makers had lied for decades about the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke; that they conspired to mislead the public and that they marketed their products to people under 21.
The three-judge panel ruled that tobacco companies knew "that cigarette smoking causes disease, that nicotine is addictive, that light cigarettes do not present lower health risks than regular cigarettes ... and that secondhand smoke is hazardous to health." Yet they continued publicly to insist otherwise.
Tobacco companies say they've turned over a new leaf since the bad old days when they used to insist the science on smoking's health effects was "unsettled."
The truth is that tobacco companies have turned over enough new leaves to make a million cigarettes, yet they keep getting caught at their old tricks.
Industry documents show that cigarette companies paid to establish and sustain so-called "smokers' rights" groups in the 1990s when the first indoor smoking bans were proposed. The industry coordinated "grass roots" opposition to those bans.
Arguments first orchestrated by industry groups more than a decade ago -- years after they first became aware of the health effects of secondhand smoke -- still are being aired by smokers rights groups in Clayton, where the Board of Aldermen is considering a clean indoor air bill, and on the commentary page of this newspaper. . . .
The fact that Philip Morris, the nation's largest cigarette maker, supports FDA regulation worries many long-time public health advocates.
They're right to be suspicious. To paraphrase former President Ronald Reagan, lawmakers should trust, but regulate, Big Tobacco.
One of BAT’s greatest PR achievements was recruiting former EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection Pavel Teli•ka55 as ‘facilitator’ of its so-called “EU social reporting sessions”. Teli•ka, who is also a former ambassador and head of Czech mission to the EU with 20-year’s experience in the EU capital, is now the director of the Brussels office of Czech lobbying firm BXL Consulting, a Rond-Point Schuman-based company providing services to Microsoft, RWE, and the investment fund of a Czech billionaire. . . .
Indeed BAT’s social reporting process looks like a sophisticated PR strategy to meet and lobby key EU officials out of sight. According to Jacek Siwek, head of BAT Corporate Affairs Europe, “regulators, in a natural way, have a tendency to prefer to talk to associations rather than to individual companies”68. But through this ‘social reporting process’, BAT lobbyists managed to meet and lobby no less than 42 people including six from the Commission and eleven from the Parliament69. All this, of course, as well as BAT’s usual EU lobbying activities through business groups like CECCM, ESTA and ESTOC.
BAT claims that the objective of CSR “is not to affect legislation, therefore any costs associated with it have nothing to do with lobbying”70. But according to the Commission, “contacting members or officials of the EU institutions, organising events, meetings or promotional activities in support of an objective of interest representation” — the very essence of BAT’s social reporting process — are lobbying activities71. . . .
Conclusion
Of course the exact amount spent by BAT on EU lobbying is difficult to estimate. BATs lobbying tools are diffuse and varied. But there is no doubt that BAT’s contributions to think tanks, industry associations and member state activity total more than the amount BAT declares in the EU register.
In under-estimating its lobbying expenditure in this way, BAT is exploiting the ambiguity of the Commission's guidelines. In particular, it is exploiting the instructions on double-counting of lobbying costs, exposing one of the many flaws in the voluntary registration scheme. BAT has clearly failed to ensure that some of its contributions to lobby groups are disclosed by the lobby groups themselves.
BAT has also failed to report its expenditure on activities which it describes as “corporate social responsibility” (CSR). Under the euphemism of “EU stakeholder dialogue”, BAT has been able to directly access EU policy makers and put forward its views on legislation under discussion. By disguising this contact as CSR, BAT clearly contravenes the Commission’s definition of “lobbying”.
Why does this matter?
This report highlights just some of BAT’s attempts to influence the legislative process at EU level and also in the member states. The fact that these activities are primarily hidden from the public is one reason for concern, but this is overshadowed by the more damaging fact that BAT’s lobbying activities are so blatantly not in the public interest. The EU is responsible for legislation designed to protect public and consumer health. BAT is a engaged in marketing a product that is clearly damaging to public health.
Unless effective measures are implemented to help current smokers quit and prevent young people from smoking, tobacco use is set to kill 10 million people by 2020 in the world and one billion this century, according to the WHO89.
BAT, and other companies engaged in similarly damaging activities, should not be allowed to influence a debate in which they have such blatant commercial interests. And the EU has no business in allowing them into such debates.
A Republican senator who is also a doctor is calling for a new era of Prohibition — outlawing cigarette smoking and other tobacco use.
The unlikely demand comes from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), one of the staunchest free-market conservatives in the Senate.
Coburn, one of two doctors in the Senate, is well-aware of the health risks that come with smoking cigarettes and chewing tobacco.
“What we should be doing is banning tobacco,” Coburn said in a recent Senate floor speech he gave during a debate on a tobacco regulation bill. “Nobody up here has the courage to do that. It is a big business. There are millions of Americans who are addicted to nicotine. And even if they are not addicted to the nicotine, they are addicted to the habit.” . . .
Coburn made his case against the bill because he said it would send a mixed message to the FDA, which is charged with ensuring the safety of food and drugs. Coburn’s argument is that there’s nothing safe about tobacco and that it would make more sense for the Drug Enforcement Administration or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to regulate it.
Coburn suggests that putting cigarettes and chew under the authority of an agency that to this point has been tasked with ensuring product safety would only make it tougher to ban tobacco someday.
The teachers at Pennsylvania's state colleges and universities have succeeded in doing what their students couldn't: overrule a statewide ban on smoking on campus.
Some students in the Keystone State raised a ruckus last September when the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education banned smoking throughout its 14 campuses, including all outdoor areas.
But the students' outcry went largely unheeded -- until their professors chimed in.
The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties (APSCUF), the union that represents the 6,000 faculty members and coaches in the state school system, objected to the smoking ban -- and last month the state's Labor Relations Board overturned it, ruling that the education board had failed to negotiate with with the union.
The labor board ordered the education board to rescind the smoking ban for union members and to "cease and desist" from refusing to negotiate with the union. . . .
That leaves schools such as Clarion, West Chester and Kutztown Universities, among others, with tenuous holds on their smoking bans -- much to the delight of smokers like 21-year-old Clarion student Steven Dugan.
Fewer and fewer people are smoking in New York, and health officials peg part much of the decrease to higher taxes.
The Department of Health announced Thursday that just under 17 percent of state residents were smokers in 2008, a 12 percent or nearly 310,000-person drop from the year before. . . .
"For the first time, New York's adult smoking rate has dropped below 17 percent, which is well below the national average," said Dr. Richard F. Daines, the state health commissioner. "The data reported today show that New York's tobacco control efforts are having an impact and that keeping the price of cigarettes high is a proven intervention that has helped 310,000 New Yorkers become ex-smokers, who can now lead healthier, longer lives."
Dr.Manuel Cosio from the McGill University Health Centre, in collaboration with Italian and Spanish scientists, reports in the New England Journal of Medicine that an autoimmune mechanism, compounded by genetic predisposition in COPD, would explain the progression of the disease in some smokers and the evasion in others. COPD has a family connection and next of kin of patients with COPD have a much higher chance of developing the disease, a characteristic of autoimmune diseases.
Although smoking is the primary risk factor for COPD in the western world, open fire pollutant cooking and heating fuels in the home is an important risk factor for the development of COPD in women in developing nations. "Smoke can play an important role in autoimmune diseases such as COPD, and other diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, because it accentuates genetic predispositions to the disease," warns Dr. Cosio.
Yet contrary to previous scientific beliefs, COPD does not progress in the same way in all smokers. The authors describe three steps in the potential progression to COPD in smokers: "COPD does not go from stage one, two and three in all people," Dr. Cosio says. "Depending on their personal balance between immune response and immune control some people would stop at stage one, others at stage two, and some will progress to stage three, full autoimmunity and lung destruction."
A New Jersey man has pleaded guilty in Alexandria federal court to purchasing thousands of cartons of cigarettes, the latest in a growing number of cases targeting smugglers who buy truckloads of cigarettes in Northern Virginia and sell them in other states without paying taxes on them.
Mark A. Frondelli, 48, entered his plea May 26 in U.S. District Court to one count of transporting, receiving, possessing and purchasing contraband cigarettes. He admitted in court documents that he had purchased more than 77,000 cartons of untaxed cigarettes from undercover agents about 44 times in Northern Virginia, mostly in Alexandria and Annandale. He put them in a box truck to conceal the cartons and drove to New York and New Jersey to sell them, the documents said.
Christopher Amolsch, an attorney for Frondelli, said he was lured into smuggling by the high potential for profit. . . .
Smuggling operations have long relied on suppliers in Virginia, where the state tax of 30 cents per pack is among the nation's lowest, partly because of the tobacco industry's historic prominence and political influence in the state.
Smugglers purchase cigarettes in Virginia, through criminal means or legally in bulk from wholesale outlets, and sell them in the New York area. . . .
Campbell said cigarette smuggling in Northern Virginia and nationally is increasingly a large-scale criminal enterprise, run by Russian, Asian and other organized crime groups. Federal officials have also linked the smuggling to terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, saying that terrorists use it to fund their activities.
But there is one major problem. Upon further inspection, previous studies do not, on the whole, demonstrate that smoking bans don't harm bars and restaurants. In fact, appropriately done studies and basic economic logic demonstrate that they often do.
As several recent economic research articles have explained, many prior studies of smoking bans are riddled with statistical shortcomings. For example, some simply compare revenues of bars and restaurants for a short time period with a smoking ban with revenues during a short time period without a ban. But, they do so without making any adjustment for other factors that impact revenues over a given time period. . . .
In a peer-reviewed research article I published a few months ago, I performed an empirical study of the proposed smoking ban in India that examined its economic impact by looking at stock market prices. (This is a method that has been used in hundreds of peer-reviewed economic research articles.)
I found a statistically significant result that the proposed smoking ban lowered the market value of hospitality industry firms. . . .
So, even if legislators are reluctant to listen to arguments about individual freedom or those based on preserving the welfare of tobacco manufacturers, there are other, very real economic trade-offs they should consider when voting on a smoking ban.
British American Tobacco (BAT) spent more than €700,000 lobbying the EU last year, up to four times as much as the company declared on the EU’s register of interest representatives, new research by Corporate Europe Observatory has revealed. This report argues that BAT's hidden lobbying activities, which are clearly not in the public interest, should be exposed to public scrutiny.
As the world’s number two tobacco company, European multinational British American Tobacco (BAT) has been lobbying the EU institutions on a number of fronts in recent years. . . .
As this report shows, the most important part of this lobbying job has been done ‘undercover’, using two main channels. Firstly, BAT hides behind a myriad of associations which are used as ‘vehicles’ for EU lobbying. Some are Brussels-based, others are in member states or even in non-EU countries. Due to loopholes in EU lobbying transparency rules and a lack of enforcement, the amount of money paid to such lobbying vehicles is not available publicly. Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) has found that as well as the official amount registered on the Commission’s voluntary register of interest representatives (€150,000-200,000), BAT contributed twice as much again to three main lobbying bodies (CECCM, ESTA, ESTOC). . . .
Secondly, anticipating new international rules hostile to pro-tobacco advocacy, BAT has innovated in the lobbying field by using ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) as a lobbying tool.
some of the world's largest life-insurance companies still own billions of dollars in tobacco-industry stocks, Harvard physicians assert in a new report.
These latest findings, published this week in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), suggest that several life and disability insurers, both in the U.S. and abroad, have yet to acquiesce to calls from the American Medical Association and others to divest their holdings in companies such as Reynolds American, Lorillard and Philip Morris. Many insurers cited in the letter say the study wildly overstates their investments, but the authors disagree. "Insurers continue to put their profits above people's health," said Dr. J. Wesley Boyd, the lead author of the report. "It's clear their top priority is making money, not safeguarding people's well-being."
Smokers cost British companies more than £2bn ($3.2bn) last year, according to a study funded by the NHS and published on Friday.
In the first estimate of the direct cost to companies of staff who smoke, the London School of Economics said businesses lost £1.1bn from smoking-related illness absences, £914m from smoking breaks and £133m from fire damage. Indirect costs could be as high as a further £1.1bn.
“Smoking continues to have a detrimental impact on the UK workforce,” concluded the authors, led by Professor Alistair McGuire. “There remains a strong commercial case for employers to further reduce smoking prevalence among their employees, including through the introduction of workplace smoking cessation programmes.”
The work, sponsored by NHS Smokefree, marks the latest effort by the government to strengthen efforts to tackle smoking, a leading cause of illness and death that imposes a substantial burden on the health service as well as the economy.