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A Winnipeg woman is hoping to succeed where all other smokers have failed in the fight against Big Tobacco.
Deborah Kunka has filed a class-action suit alleging the industry has intentionally misled the public about the health effects of smoking and targets children to maintain their profits.
Kunka, says the lawsuit, began smoking in 1976 when she was 12 years old "after seeing various tobacco advertisements which portrayed smoking as 'glamorous' and 'prestigious' and which failed to adequately warn, or warn at all, about the harmful effects of smoking."
Kunka, says the lawsuit, continues to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day despite suffering chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, severe asthma and reversible lung disease.
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IRELAND HAS become complacent about its smoking cessation achievements, with evidence that advice on giving up smoking was offered to just half of smokers who were seen by a primary care health professional, a report to be published today has found.
The analysis of data from the recent SLÁN national survey of Lifestyle Attitudes and Nutrition by the Division of Population Health Science at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) confirms that a previous downward trend in smoking rates has stalled.
Researchers, led by Prof Ruairí Brugha of RCSI, report smoking rates higher than the national average of 29 per cent in a number of occupational health groups. They found a particularly high rate of smoking in 18-29 year old women in social class 5 and 6 which, at 56 per cent, is double the rate found among women in the same age group in social classes 1 and 2.
Commenting on the relative lack of access to smoking prevention programmes in the country, Prof Brugha said, “a high percentage of smokers, at 72 per cent, who were interviewed in 2007 had attended a GP in the previous year, while only 38 per cent of smokers reported that a doctor or health professional had discussed ways of giving up smoking with them”.
the number of “social smokers” like Hynes is on the rise, according to a new study. Between 1996 and 2001, the rate of nondaily smoking jumped from 16 percent to 24 percent of smokers. And it has continued to climb since then. In California, for example, the percentage of smokers who light up only occasionally went from 26 percent in 1992 to 30 percent in 2005, state health figures show.
And that’s exactly the way cigarette companies planned it, says Dr. Rebecca Shane, a researcher at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California at San Francisco. She's a lead author on a new study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study aims to turn tobacco company research on its head, using industry data to help find ways to help social smokers quit.
In the 1970s and 80s — as the health risks of smoking became increasingly apparent — the tobacco industry spent millions studying social smokers to figure out what made them tick, Shane says. . . .
Tobacco firms targeted social smokers The tobacco makers hired anthropologists and psychologists to help design advertising campaigns that would make cigarettes more alluring to people who weren’t wired to become addicted to nicotine. The idea was to show that cigarettes could be a social lubricant, a necessary addition to any social gathering.
Shane and her co-author turned up the new information while searching through reams of tobacco industry documents that were released as part of a settlement in one of the landmark state suits against big tobacco.
Tobacco companies worked hard to develop an image of smokers as “cool,” Shane says. . . .
The challenge, Shane says, is to counter that alluring image and to find a way to get occasional puffers to acknowledge that they truly are smokers, too. Until experts figure out a way to do that, there won’t be much progress in getting social smokers to quit, says Dr. Antoine Douaihy, an associate professor of psychiatry and medical director of Addiction Medicine Services at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
“Conventional anti-smoking campaigns will fail to reach them,” Douaihy says.
Residents of South Dakota may have to wait until January 2011 for a statewide smoking ban to actually take effect.
According to an Associated Press story, enough signatures have been collected for a petition to allow voters to decide whether they want a smoking ban or not.
The petition needs at least 16,776 signatures in order to make it on the ballot for voters on November 2010, and Larry Mann, coordinator of the petition, said even more signatures would be collected.
"We're in good shape as far as signatures needed. Now we're just trying to build a buffer," said Mann, who leads the petition on behalf of the Video Lottery Establishments of South Dakota, the Licensed Beverage Dealers of South Dakota, the DeVitt Gaming Association and the Music and Vending Association of South Dakota.
As home to one of the nation’s first public smoking bans, and one of the first localities in the country to raise the legal age to purchase cigarettes to 19, Suffolk County has been at the vanguard of national efforts to break America’s addiction to smoking. But now a new, high-tech smoking threat has emerged in the form of “electronic cigarettes. “
Marketed towards young smokers, untested by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and lacking any governmental oversight whatsoever, the skyrocketing popularity of “e-cigarettes” has spurred Suffolk County Legislative Majority Leader Jon Cooper (D-Lloyd Harbor) to introduce legislation that would prohibit the sale of these devices to anyone under the age of 19. Cooper’s bill would also place the same public usage restrictions on e-cigarettes that are already in effect for traditional forms of smoking.
If approved by the Legislature, Suffolk County would become the first municipality in the nation, and one of only a small handful of governments worldwide, to place restrictions on these untested devices. . . .
“These devices combine the appeal of an iPod with that of candy cigarettes. But they also have the potential to create a life-long addiction to nicotine,” says Cooper. “They’re just too dangerous to be left unrestricted. I certainly wouldn’t want my kids to be able to get their hands on them.”
But kids are getting their hands on them. Besides being sold at numerous sites on the Internet, there are currently at least four known locations on Long Island where anyone can legally purchase e-cigarettes. And that literally means anyone. Since these devices are so new to the American market and they don’t contain tobacco, e-cigarettes are not governed by Suffolk’s Tobacco 19 law or any other state or federal regulation.
These devices [e-cigs] combine the appeal of an iPod with that of candy cigarettes. But they also have the potential to create a life-long addiction to nicotine. They’re just too dangerous to be left unrestricted. Suffolk County (NY) Legislative Majority Leader Jon Cooper (D-Lloyd Harbor) whose bile would prohibit the sale of e-cigs to anyone under the age of 19. and place the same public usage restrictions on e-cigs that are already in effect for traditional forms of smoking. If enacted it would be the nation's first such legislation.
A performer poses during a photo call for a body painting event, which is part of a government-sponsored anti-smoking campaign, in Seoul June 14, 2009.
A performer breaks off cigarettes as he poses for photographs during a photo call for a body painting event, part of a government-sponsored anti-smoking campaign in Seoul, June 14, 2009.
To hear Sharp rant is to understand why Kay Hagan, North Carolina's new senator, joined Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and 15 other senators to become the only Democrat to vote against the tobacco bill. And if any tobacco farmer has Hagan's ear, it is Sharp.
Last year, when Hagan was a little-known candidate running in an uphill battle to unseat Republican Elizabeth Dole, she campaigned at Sharp's farm. The fiscally conservative tobacco farmers along the I-95 corridor here make up a constituency that often helps swing statewide elections, and they backed Hagan strongly.
Hagan, 55, is no stranger to tobacco. A former lawyer and bank executive, she spent summers as a child stringing the leaves on her grandparents' farm. In the state legislature, she represented Greensboro, the headquarters of Lorillard Tobacco, which employs about 2,500 workers there.
To call Hagan merely a defender of the "golden leaf" industry would be an understatement. She is among tobacco's fiercest backers. In 2005, as co-chairman of the state Senate's appropriations committee, she helped shave back an increase in the cigarette tax from the 45 cents a pack proposed by the governor to 30 cents. During last year's campaign, Hagan received $19,200 from the tobacco industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Hagan's staff declined repeatedly to make her available for an interview for this article . . .
"In a district like mine, the public health concerns have just gotten stronger and stronger and are very, very well articulated," said Rep. David E. Price (D), who represents the high-tech Research Triangle area and voted for the bill. "I find that even in very conservative suburbs where Republican positions have a lot of resonance, people don't have any patience with misleading tobacco advertising. These suburban parents, no matter what their political persuasion, have no use for that sort of thing."
The state's politics are no longer dominated by tobacco interests.
The marketing and advertising restrictions in the tobacco law that Congress passed last week are likely to be challenged in court on free-speech grounds. But supporters of the legislation say they drafted the law carefully to comply with the First Amendment.
The law's ban on outdoor advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds would effectively outlaw legal advertising in many cities, critics of the prohibition said. And restricting stores and many forms of print advertising to black-and-white text, as the law specifies, would interfere with legitimate communication to adults, tobacco companies and advertising groups said in letters to Congress and interviews over the last week.
The controversy, legal experts say, involves tension between the right of tobacco companies to communicate with adult smokers and the public interest in preventing young people from smoking.
Opponents of the new strictures, including the Association of National Advertisers and the American Civil Liberties Union, predict that federal courts will throw out the new marketing restrictions. They say, for example, a 2001 Supreme Court decision struck down a Massachusetts rule that had imposed a similar ban on advertising within 1,000 feet of schools. . . .
Altria Group, which owns Phillip Morris, the nation’s largest cigarette company, and was the only major tobacco company to endorse the legislation, said in a statement last week that it believed some of the marketing restrictions were illegal