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Video: Watch Rankin-directed anti-smoking viral  

NHS Birmingham North & East 'Fight Back' anti-smoking advert directed by photographer Rankin, in which a smoker is shown being beaten up by an invisible assailant as he smokes a cigarette Warning: contains scenes of graphic violence

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FAQS : Do Ryanair permit passengers to smoke onboard? 

No. You may not smoke in any part of an aircraft operated by Ryanair. All of our aircraft are fitted with smoke detectors to ensure this policy is adhered to. Failure to adhere to this regulation may result in severe criminal penalties being brought against you as well as disruption costs being claimed against you by Ryanair.

Any passenger who attempts to smoke on board a Ryanair aircraft will not be permitted to travel with Ryanair again.

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Puff, puff! Ryanair Airlines allows smoking on flights... sort of 

The Irish airline Ryanair is now allowing passengers to smoke on its flights, according to a press release.

But nonsmokers need not cancel their reservations for fear of noxious fumes. The "smokeless" cigarettes are not lit - nicotine is inhaled directly.

Packs of 10 smokeless cigarettes will be sold to passengers 18 years of age and older for 6 euros (about $8.72) on all flights.

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Tobacco Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act, 2009, S.O. 2009, c. 13 

CONTENTS

1.

Definitions and interpretation

2.

Direct action by Crown

3.

Recovery of cost of health care benefits on aggregate basis

4.

Joint and several liability in an action under s. 2 (1)

5.

Population-based evidence to establish causation and quantify damages or cost

6.

Limitation periods

7.

Apportioning liability

8.

Apportionment of liability in tobacco related wrongs

9.

Regulations

10.

Retroactive effect

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Ontario suing tobacco companies for $50B 

Ontario is looking for $50-billion from a group of tobacco companies to recoup health-care costs linked to illnesses stemming from tobacco use.

Under the Tobacco Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act, which passed the provincial legislature this year, Ontario can file suits against companies seeking the recovery of tobacco-related damages.

The legislation impacts alleged damages from the past, as well as ongoing tobacco-related health issues.

Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley told reporters Tuesday the government filed the suit in an attempt to reclaim the money dished out by taxpayers to fund the health-care system as it relates to ailments linked to smoking.

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Take a Stand Against Contraband Tobacco  

Niagara Region Public Health (NRPH) encourages residents to Take a Stand Against Contraband Tobacco. Niagara Region Public Health wants the public to know that cheap cigarettes are illegal, unregulated, and deadly. Research has found traces of insect eggs, mould and human feces in contraband tobacco, as well as the same 4000 chemicals found in regulated cigarettes.

Starting on September 28, 2009 and continuing through October, a number of promotional activities such as posters, information on the Niagara Region website, billboard advertising and a post card campaign, will occur to raise awareness about the dangers of tobacco and the contraband issue. . . .

The aim of the 'Take a Stand against Contraband' campaign is multi-faceted, and includes:

* Informing and educating the community on issues related to contraband

* Providing an opportunity for the public to advocate against contraband tobacco

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MPP moves to 'Plan B' on cigarette tax issue 

Tory MPP Toby Barrett says he is already working on another line of attack against the burgeoning trade in contraband cigarettes after his private member's bill to cut tobacco taxes was shot down after spirited debate in the legislature.

Barrett, who represents Haldimand-Norfolk riding, which includes the heart of Ontario's troubled tobacco growing sector, said Monday he was not surprised at the heavy rejection of his bill late last week by Liberal government MPPs who are averse to changing government tax policy.

Still, he is encouraged by the debate to bring forward another resolution that will concentrate more closely on enforcement questions surrounding illegal sales.

"I'm moving to Plan B," he said.

"That my bill didn't pass was understandable and predictable. What I found heartening, though, is that for the first time in five years we had a serious debate in the house about illegal tobacco. I got the sense from that debate that more MPPs have recognized we must deal with this problem seriously."

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Region wants to snuff out contraband smokes, says they are full of nasty substances 

Niagara Region public health is encouraging residents to Take a Stand Against Contraband Tobacco in new campaign to raise awareness of the danger of smoking illegal or legal cigarettes.

"The contraband cigarettes are unregulated so there's not a protocol to assess what's in these," said public health manager David Lorenzo.

And whether it's illegal or legal cigarettes, public health is urging people to kick the habit because research has shown that one in two lifetime users will die from a smoking-related disease.

Research has shown that such things as insect eggs, mould, dead flies and human feces have been found in illegal cigarettes.

That's on top of 4,000 other chemicals found in regulated tobacco products, said a news release from public health.

Because the illegal cigarettes are cheap and not being sold at convenience stores where identification has to be shown to purchase tobacco products, far too many are showing up in the hands of youth, said Lorenzo.

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EDITORIAL: Stranded in the Periphery -- The Increasing Marginalization of Smokers ($$) 

One of the greatest health advances in the past three decades has been the continuing decline in the prevalence of smoking, which recently hit a modern age-adjusted low of 19% of adults in the United States, down from a high of 57% of men in 1955 and 34% of women in 1965.1 Credit for these spectacular decreases has rightly focused on policy interventions such as increases in tobacco taxes, ordinances requiring smoke-free public places, countermarketing, and better ways to help smokers quit.2,3,4 These policy interventions are important tools, but how they have accomplished their results has not been clear. In . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network (Full Text) 

Background The prevalence of smoking has decreased substantially in the United States over the past 30 years. We examined the extent of the person-to-person spread of smoking behavior and the extent to which groups of widely connected people quit together.

Methods We studied a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. We used network analytic methods and longitudinal statistical models. . . .

Smoking behavior in contacts might influence smoking behavior in subjects by diverse biopsychosocial means, including changing the subject's norms about the acceptability of smoking, more directly influencing the subject's behaviors (e.g., a contact asking the subject not to smoke, or, conversely, a contact sharing cigarettes), or even fostering dependence through the inhalation of secondhand smoke. These mechanisms could not be distinguished on the basis of our data. We observed that geographic distance from a contact does not modify the effect of a contact's smoking behavior on a subject. This observation does suggest that social norms may be an important factor, since such norms may spread more easily over geographic distance than behavioral effects.

A change in the smoking behavior of more than one contact may be required for a subject to quit, and there may be additive or even threshold effects whereby a subject's probability of smoking cessation depends on smoking cessation by not one contact, but by two or more.30 This phenomenon may be especially likely in the case of smoking, since smoking is often deemed an explicitly social — and hence shared — behavior. Consequently, when a smoker runs out of easily available contacts with whom he or she can smoke, he or she may be more likely to quit. This possibility is also consistent with the group-level smoking cessation that we observed.

Network phenomena might be exploited to spread positive health behaviors.31,32,33,34 Indeed, cessation programs for smoking and for alcohol use that provide peer support — that is, that modify the person's social network — are more successful than those that do not.32,34 People are connected, and so their health is connected.35,36 Collective interventions may thus be more effective than individual interventions. Moreover, medical and public health interventions to encourage people to quit smoking might be more cost-effective than initially supposed, since health improvements in one person might spread to others.35,37,38 Finally, the isolation of smokers within social networks suggests that blanket policy approaches (e.g., advertising and taxation) may be usefully supplemented by interventions targeting small groups. In the case of smoking cessation in the past three decades, there is evidence of a cascade of salubrious behavior, and cessation of smoking in one person appears to be highly relevant to the smoking behavior of others nearby in the social network.

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Raphael Alexander: Big Hypocrisy in Ontario's pursuit of Big Tobacco  

Tobacco companies are the last refuge from which government can squeeze an endless supply of money. . . .

Am I really arguing in favour of Big Tobacco? That evil entity that kills the “size of a small city” every year in associated diseases? No. But I am saying that this has less to do with the inherent risks of smoking than it does the failings of having a single-payer health care system. If a millionaire wanted to smoke, for instance, and then take responsibility for his own decisions by paying for his treatment privately, then it wouldn’t be the business of the rest of society. Of government. Of Big Tobacco. It would be his decision as a consumer; nothing more, and nothing less.

The $50-billion figure comes from the represented costs the province says it has footed for providing care to smokers for 50 years. But the hypocrisy of this figure is staggering. 50 years ago, tobacco companies were advertising in the mainstream, smoking was socially acceptable and even encouraged, and medical knowledge pertaining to the inherent dangers of cigarettes and their carcinogenic properties were sketchy. In 1955 doctors smoked in the very hospitals where they treated their patients. In fact, they were doing that in 1975. . . .

And Big Tobacco has a good point to make. Government hasn’t had a problem with the billions of dollars collected in associated taxes that the companies paid in good faith as a legitimate and legal product. People have known the health risks of smoking for at least the past 25 years. But government has enjoyed the taxes too much to simply do what they probably should have done in the first place, instead of this agonizingly slow and tedious prohibition-by-stages.

As I said, it’s easy to blame evil tobacco companies. But our complicity is self-evident in not just government policy, but our inflexible health care system.

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• VIETNAM: Anti-Smoking Drive Fails to Curb Male Tobacco Abuse 

In Vietnamese tobacco is called 'thouc la', which means 'medicinal leaves'. Given a reported 40,000 die each year from lung cancer, it is not the most apposite name. . . .

Huong typifies the male-smoking population of Vietnam, considered one of the biggest in the world: 56 percent of the country's estimated 86 million population. The figure could be higher, said health officials who spoke with IPS. China, Malaysia and Laos all record higher figures, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

"It's a huge burden to the health system," Dr Nguyen Tuan Lam of the Tobacco Free Initiative of WHO told IPS in a telephone interview. He believes the official number of lung cancer deaths is massively underreported, saying it could be closer to 70,000. Compare this figure with the incidence of traffic accidents, often called a "hidden epidemic" in the motorcycle-riding South-east Asian country, which accounted for a comparatively lower 12,000 deaths in 2008.

Compared to men, there are extremely few female smokers in Vietnam. In fact, the communist nation has one of the lowest female smoking rates in the world at 2.1 percent of the population.

"The attitude here is that only naughty girls smoke. It's not ladylike and it's not nice," said Lam.

Since Vietnam ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in December 2004, it has banned all forms of advertising, increased taxes on cigarettes and last year added larger warning labels to packaging.

In late August government announced that starting Jan. 1, 2010, smoking would be prohibited in public places

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• Fewer California stores sell cigarettes to minors, state says 

Tobacco sales to minors are at their lowest levels in more than a decade, according to state health officials, who mostly credit stronger enforcement efforts for the downturn.

The percentage of tobacco retailers selling to minors fell from 12.6 percent in 2008 to 8.6 percent this year, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Department of Public Health.

"This is an all-time low for us," said David Cowling, a research scientist for the California Tobacco Control Program, which is funded by cigarette taxes. He called it a "meaningful decline."

A growing number of communities, including Sacramento County, have passed rules that require tobacco retailers to obtain licenses and pay fees, sometimes in the hundreds of dollars.

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Sask. may join Ontario suit lodged against 'Big Tobacco' 

Saskatchewan could soon be joining a legal battle against "Big Tobacco" after Ontario announced Tuesday it would sue the industry for $50 billion to recover smoking-related health-care costs.

The previous NDP government passed enabling legislation that would allow the government to sue tobacco companies. But the province never launched a lawsuit because most large provinces -- specifically Ontario -- had shied away from legal action, making it too large a burden for Saskatchewan alone.

With Ontario reversing itself, Health Minister Don McMorris said the Saskatchewan Party government will likely decide in the next month whether to launch legal action.

"It is a huge deal," McMorris said of Ontario's decision.

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Tobacco sales to minors hit record low  

Tobacco sales to California minors dropped to a record low of 8.6 percent this year, state health officials announced Tuesday.

That's down from 12.6 percent last year and 37 percent in 1995.

"I am very pleased to see the continued drop in tobacco sales to minors," Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a news release. "There is simply no reason why minors should be able to buy tobacco products."

Drug stores and pharmacies had the lowest rate of illegal sales, 2.3 percent. Retail stores commonly associated with tobacco sales -- grocery, tobacco, liquor or gas stations -- had an all-time low of illegal sales, 8.5 percent, according to the state's annual youth tobacco purchase survey.

The decline is attributed to a variety of factors, including higher cigarette prices, strong local tobacco retail licensing laws, state and local enforcement and ongoing public education.

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