Tobacco.org

• College Students Continue To Use Tobacco  

According to an American Lung Association report released on Monday, roughly one in five college students in 2006 took up or continued to smoke cigarettes. The group is blaming aggressive tobacco industry marketing.

The report, "Big Tobacco on Campus: Ending the Addiction," was compiled from published research, surveys, and tobacco industry documents.

The American Lung Association reports says that in 2005 the tobacco industry spent over $1 million a day targeting college students.� In a recent survey, students at 109 of 119 surveyed colleges reported seeing tobacco promotions on campus.

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• ACLU backing tribe in smoke-shop suit 

The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Congress of American Indians are backing the Narragansett tribe in challenging the state's raid on a tribal smoke shop.

The Rhode Island Affiliate of the ACLU, the national ACLU and the NCAI filed a friend-of-the-court brief Wednesday arguing that the highly publicized raid violated the tribe's sovereign rights.

"This case raises issues of enormous consequence for Indian tribes. We are hopeful that the court will agree that the state's heavy-handed raid was incompatible with long-standing principles of tribal sovereignty," Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island ACLU, said in a statement.

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• Costs Make Employers See Smokers as a Drag 

Pointing to rising health costs and the oversized proportion of insurance claims attributed to smokers, some employers in California and around the country are refusing to hire applicants who smoke and, sometimes, firing employees who refuse to quit.

"Employers are realizing the majority of health costs are spent on a small minority of workers," says Bill Whitmer, chief executive of the Health Enhancement Research Organization, an employer and healthcare coalition in Birmingham, Ala.

Federal and state laws bar employers from turning down applicants or firing workers based on race, religion or gender. Some states have enacted laws offering similar protections for smokers. But experts say workers in nearly half the states, including California, have few legal options if employers decide to prohibit them from smoking outside the workplace.

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What you do in your own home after work or on the weekend is none of your bosses' business. The last time I checked, tobacco is a legal product.
Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J., a spinoff of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Employers are realizing the majority of health costs are spent on a small minority of workers.
Bill Whitmer, chief executive of the Health Enhancement Research Organization, an employer and healthcare coalition in Birmingham, Ala.