Opinion: 2012 initiative will take aim at cancer — and tobacco

Cancer is projected to become the leading cause of death worldwide this year. Without global action, the number of people living with — and dying from — the disease will triple by 2030.
As a cancer survivor, I'm overwhelmed by the toll this disease takes on humankind. Despite continuing advancements in medical treatment and prevention, cancer remains a leading cause of death in California, with more than 140,000 Californians diagnosed every year.
In economic terms, cancer's impact on California's fiscal well-being is far greater when viewed through the lens of the leading — and entirely preventable — cause of cancer: tobacco. Over the past decade, the tobacco industry has poured 10 times as many marketing dollars into California as the state has been able to invest in tobacco education. As a result, California loses $9 billion in tobacco-related health care costs per year.
The California Cancer Research Act will help turn that tide. This initiative will dedicate more than $500 million to the creation of new ways to prevent, detect, treat and cure cancer. It will fund anti-tobacco education efforts and save thousands of California residents from deadly smoking habits by creating a $1 tax on packs of cigarettes.
Led by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and endorsed by LIVESTRONG, supporters of the initiative, including myself, recently turned in more than 634,000 signatures to qualify the measure for the 2012 presidential primary ballot. Volunteers, most of whom are cancer survivors and their families, collected more than 115,000 of those signatures. Their effort has been inspiring.
The Bay Area stands to benefit substantially from the act's passage, as it is home to the UC San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. As a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, the act will ensure that the center is well-positioned to apply for funding — it is estimated that the tax on cigarettes will raise about $855 million per year at first, although that figure will decline as smoking wanes. In addition, the initiative will lead to the creation of new high-paying jobs and establish UC San Francisco as a leader in the global effort to combat cancer.
The act not only makes fiscal sense, but it is also a necessary investment in the future of our children. Funds raised through the proposed cigarette tax will protect them from secondhand smoke and teach millions of children the dangers of tobacco use, preventing more than 200,000 kids from becoming smokers themselves.
In supporting the act — learn more at www.californiansforacure.org — Californians have the opportunity to strike a serious blow to cancer and set an example for the rest of the nation. Your support could help eradicate a disease that kills more than 50,000 California residents each year. Please consider joining us as we take a stand and pick a fight with cancer.
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Fisher: A year later, the tobacco war still isn't won

A year ago this week, I was celebrating with health advocates across the country when they won their 20-year battle to get the federal government to regulate dumb and deadly cigarettes. I can't believe it took that long to convince Congress that nicotine, the powerful addictive drug in tobacco, should be treated like any other drug sold to the public.
After years of marketing cancer sticks to kids and denying that they manipulated the amount of nicotine in their products to hook smokers, shameless tobacco companies at last had to answer to the Food and Drug Administration. They were given a year to stop their clever tricks such as making candy-flavored smokes and using labels like "light" and "low-tar" to make cigarettes sound less harmful.
On Tuesday, the new rules will take effect. But those devoted to the anti-smoking cause know the toxic battles are far from over. With a $12.8 billion marketing budget, tobacco companies will find subtle new ways to attract new smokers.
"They are always just one step ahead of us," said Margo Sidener of Breathe California. "The tobacco companies have the best advertising people in the world, unfortunately."
Smoking on the screen
It doesn't help that cigarette makers get lots of free advertising in movies and on TV. When Sigourney Weaver infamously puffed on a cigarette in "Avatar," it wasn't just a ridiculous endorsement of smoking for the most massive worldwide audience of children and adults ever. Worse, it made no sense. This is supposed to be the future. Do we really think that brilliant scientists will be smoking in their labs in outer space?
In the Bay Area, we live in a smoke-free bubble, as I'm darkly reminded whenever I travel to other parts of the country. It's unsettling to walk into a hazy restaurant and be asked if I want a smoking or nonsmoking table. Or to check into a hotel and find out there are only slightly smelly smoking rooms available. Another reason to be happy to get back home.
While 20 percent of American adults smoke, the number in Santa Clara County is only 10 percent.
And because so many local cities ban smoking in business districts and other public places, smokers have been forced underground.
More kids are puffing
Still, the number of county teens who smoke has inched back up to 13 percent, from a low of 9.5 percent in 2004. And smokeless tobacco, which can cause mouth cancer, is catching on with high school boys.
"I think the public has the misconception that because they don't see as many kids out there smoking, that they aren't doing it," Sidener said. "But they are."
The county recently received a $7 million federal grant for tobacco education. Unfortunately, it's still pretty easy for local kids to buy cigarettes. One way our cities could deal with that problem would be to require stores that sell tobacco to be licensed. Then, if they got caught selling to kids, they would lose the right and the revenue.
And there still is a lot more that the FDA could do. I would like to see the agency exercise its new, long-overdue power by limiting the amount of nicotine in tobacco products to make them less addictive, just as it decrees how much codeine there is in prescription cough medicine.
That way if kids start smoking because they think it's cool, at least they'll be able to quit when they realize it's killing them.

Big Tobacco Takes On New York Smoking Regulation

New York City used to be the "murder capital" of the country. These days, it looks more like the nation's health club and spa.

In 2003, the Big Apple outlawed smoking in all bars and restaurants, and in 2006 banished trans fats from local eateries. In 2008, the city began requiring chain restaurants to post the nutritional content of their offerings, meaning New Yorkers would never look at a Big Mac the same way again. And earlier this year, a state assemblyman from Brooklyn introduced legislation that would prohibit restaurants from using salt "in any form" when preparing food.

New York has gotten its share of good-humored ribbing about its "nanny state" tendencies over the past few years. But the city's latest regulation is getting more serious pushback from a determined source: the tobacco industry.

For the past six months, New York has required retailers to display posters with nauseating photos that show the effects of prolonged tobacco use. The placards include the typical warnings that smoking "causes lung cancer" or "causes tooth decay" but also feature photos of, for example, a blackened lung or a rotted tooth, to drive the point home in an extremely visceral fashion.

On Wednesday, three leading tobacco companies -- Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, and Lorillard -- filed a lawsuit contending the signs improperly usurp the federal government's role of regulating tobacco packaging. The companies also argue that the law violates the First Amendment, since it forces storeowners to display the signs even if they disagree with their message. The New York State Association of Convenience Stores, a non-profit trade association made up of 250 companies, also joined the suit.

"The mandated signs crowd out other advertisements and otherwise dominate the point of sale in many smaller establishments, to the exclusion of merchandise or other messages chosen by the store owners," the suit says.

Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer who is representing the retailers, told The New York Times on Friday that the city "doesn't have the right...to force other people to adopt its expression."

Sarah Perl, assistant commissioner for tobacco control at New York's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told the Times in December that the posters are intended to target consumers "at the point-of-sale moment." Perl added that customers have learned to tune out the generic Surgeon General's warnings that appear on all cigarette packs and advertisements, in large part because those warnings haven't changed much since their introduction in 1966.

Regardless of the outcome, the suit will have far-reaching consequences even outside New York. Massachusetts, which was in the process of implementing a law requiring similar signs, has a special interest in the case.

"Any education and cessation material we can get out there, we would like to get out on a state level," Jennifer Manley, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, told Boston.com on Sunday. "We're going to keep watching New York City closely to see what the outcome is."

And even if the tobacco companies win this round, they'll take a hit in 2012, when federal standards will begin mandating more conspicuous warnings on cigarette packages. Unlike the subtle black-and-white boxes currently featured on the sides of cigarette boxes, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act requires that warnings cover at least 50 percent of the package and that the word "warning" appear in capital letters.

The Act was signed into law by President Obama, himself an occasional smoker, last June.

U.S. cigarettes triples the risk of cancer

U.S. cigarettes are most harmful of colleagues manufactured in Australia, Britain or Canada. It comprises a variety of nitrosamines (carcinogenic) very high, which increases the risk of cancer, up to threefold. The research supports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), conducted by Dr. Jim Pirkl and published in “Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention. Scientists worked with 126 smokers, considering the brand of “blondes” like and subjecting them to tests to assess the presence of nitrosamines in the lungs, urine and oral cavity. It should be noted that the researchers chose smoking faithful to a single brand and consumers of popular national brands.

The CDC investigation concluded as U.S. cigarettes were the most capable in promoting cancer, and this for two main reasons. First of all, they are made with dark tobacco, while the varieties British, Australian and Canadian tobacco exploit “blond.” In addition, producers of the U.S. favor a particular system of tanning and flavoring, can further increase the percentage of nitrosamines. Doctors involved hope their work can help company to produce safer cigarettes, even if they admit it big and how far from simple. Nor is it certain, in fact, if a reduction of nitrosamines would lead to a reduction of cancer among smokers, since they are involved in the process other chemicals.

Explains Professor John Spangler, of the Faculty of Medicine of Wake Forest University: “There are at least two dozen other carcinogens in cigarettes, not to mention the other 4000 chemicals that can contribute to heart disease and also cause respiratory” . Source: “Study: U.S. Cigarettes Have More Cancer Agents”, CBS News, 1/06/010

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Women Smokers Targeted on 'World No Tobacco Day'

Although cancer death rates for women are generally on the downswing, statistics indicate that female lung cancer fatalities are rising, the American Lung Association (ALA) says.
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More than 170,000 American women die every year from tobacco-related illness, the ALA estimates. And chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), including chronic bronchitis and emphysema, kills more women than men.

To draw attention to the harmful effects of tobacco use and tobacco industry marketing as it pertains to women and girls, the ALA and the World Health Organization are observing World No Tobacco Day on May 31.

The organization hopes awareness of World No Tobacco Daywill encourage female smokers to kick the habit, perhaps with the help of the ALA's "Freedom from Smoking Online" program, which provides both men and women assistance with quitting.

"Quitting smoking is the single most important thing that most individuals can do to improve their health, and World No Tobacco Day is a great day for all to stop using tobacco products," Mary H. Partridge, ALA's national board chair, said in a news release.

In addition to underscoring the importance of quitting, the ALA also seeks to highlight the ways in which the marketing tactics of tobacco manufacturers target women.

"The tobacco industry has a long and shameful history of targeting women and children," said Partridge. "The most recent example is R.J. Reynolds' Camel No. 9 cigarettes, a pink-hued version that one newspaper dubbed 'Barbie Camel' because of marketing that appealed to girls. Advertised as 'available in stiletto' with promotional giveaways of flavored lip glosses and pink purses, it seems clear who R.J. Reynolds was targeting.

Philip Morris consolidates cigarette-making operations in Richmond

Tucked between the new high-speed cigarette-makers and pack-loaders in Philip Morris USA's giant South Richmond plant, there now are lots of head-high, Plexiglas-walled boxes.

Inside, robot-arms load rolls of cigarette paper or package and carton blanks, keeping a continuous feed of material flowing. Overhead, a conveyor belt, also walled in with clear plastic, forms an eight-loop-high spiral of cigarettes.

The extra 3 feet between the cigarette-making machines and the beeping driverless cars that bring pallet-loads full of cigarettes to the loading docks are visible signs of a $230 million investment that the nation's No. 1 cigarette-maker has made to consolidate operations in Richmond.

"We're about 98 percent done," Eric Schardt, director of cigarette manufacturing, said about the changes at the plant, during a rarely offered tour of the secure area.

"And we did it while continuing to produce product."

The investment came as Philip Morris USA, a unit of Henrico County-based Altria Group Inc., consolidated all its cigarette-making in Richmond last July, when it closed its relatively new plant in Cabarrus County, N.C.

With the consolidation and the modernization here, the Richmond plant now makes about 149 billion cigarettes a year.

Adding to the challenge of doing everything in one place is that Philip Morris USA has launched dozens of new varieties in the past few years.

It now makes 27 different kinds of Marlboros in 43 different kinds of packaging. In addition to Marlboros, Philip Morris makes 88 other kinds of cigarettes in 114 packages.

It puts a premium on flexibility and on cranking out lots of cigarettes.

"We can handle orders from 360,000 a day of one brand to 500 million of another, at the extreme," Schardt said.

. . .

Each of the new machines in Bay 1 can produce 10,000 cigarettes a minute, using air pressure to shoot the equivalent of about 3/100 of an ounce of tobacco per cigarette into an endless tube of paper that's moving through its rollers at a rate of more than 22 mph.

That's 25 percent more cigarettes per minute than the old machines, which Philip Morris still uses in Bay 3 of the plant, for the smaller runs of its less popular brands.

One worker minds two of the high-speed machines in Bay 1. Each machine has its own operator in Bay 3.

One reason for having one worker overseeing one machine in Bay 3 is that the paper and unfolded packaging materials must be loaded onto the machines by hand, and often enough at the cost of sore backs and pinched fingers.

In Bay 1, ingredients come on larger pallet-loads that are fed into machines automatically by those robot arms in their Plexiglas-walled boxes.

Another key difference: There is one shipping-case machine for each six of Bay 3's cigarettes-makers. In Bay 1, there is one case machine for each pair of cigarette-makers.

In Bay 3, Robert Warren, manager of cigarette manufacturing, and his crew constantly are juggling to run the 10 different varieties the bay's 18 machines can handle.

In Bay 1, that headache's gone.

Altria employed the equivalent of 4,613 full-time workers in the Richmond area as of Jan. 1. The company won't say how many work at the South Richmond plant -- it keeps data about its production closely guarded so competitors don't get clues about its operation.

. . .

Even Bay 3, though, benefits from other investments.

Hand-held scanners, tracking numbers and tiny quarter-inch-square gray-and-white markings on packaging material signal automated loaders in the adjoining warehouse to pull exactly what papers, foils, films and packing flats each machine in the plant needs, when operators are about to run low.

The old Bay 3 machines have the latest computer monitors: Sensors test the cigarettes shooting out of the machine to make sure each is within tight limits for weight and how tightly the tobacco leaf inside is packed.

There are brand-new testing machines in the filter-making room, too.

Instead of the old days when operators grabbed a handful of new filters and used calipers and a scale to see if they met standards, the new shoulder-high metal boxes can pull filters after they're made.

The machines measure weight and circumference and even blow through air to check what cigarette makers call "resistance to draw," which means how hard a smoker must drag to get a puff.

. . .

A big part of Philip Morris USA's investment in the plant is information technology.

The cigarette-making machines, the pneumatic feed-lines from the tobacco-storage silos in the plant's basement, and its warehouse and the other cigarette-making supplies all talk to each other all of the time -- thanks to technology.

Battered, pistol-shaped hand-held scanners are used all over -- most workers are assigned one, and most have specially installed rubber guards at the corners, too.

"They really get a workout," said Schardt, picking up a particularly well-used scanner.

But then, most days feel like a sprint at the plant.

"From the time the tobacco comes up from downstairs, to pallets of cases being loaded on the trucks, you're talking maybe an hour," Schardt said.

Tobacco giant targets tax-free cigarette sales

Area stores unhappy with tax-free sales of cigarettes by the Oneida Indian Nation have found a powerful ally -- one of the world's largest tobacco companies.

“The state loses revenue. Retailers lose sales. Their employees could even lose jobs. And it adds to the burden on hard-working taxpayers,” reads a recent full-page advertisement paid for by Altria Client Services on behalf of Philip Morris USA. The ad was published in various Upstate New York newspapers.

The ad pictures large hands cradling sand, with grains falling between the fingers.

Oneida Nation officials say they feel betrayed by the stance Philip Morris has taken - saying it's a reversal of the company's previous position, which in the past has provided racking and signage to SavOn and other Indian stores.

“They were like a big brother almost, who has turned around and smacked us for some reason,” said Bob Hilburger, director of business development for the Oneida Indian Nation.

Tobacco industry officials say the ads and the website, Enforce The Law - Collect The Tax Coalition, are not questioning the sovereignty of Indian nations such as the Oneidas, who have built a commercial empire in the western portion of Oneida County and in eastern Madison County, complete with a casino, hotels, restaurants and convenience stores.

“It's really about the policy issue of tax collection,” said David Sutton, spokesman for Philip Morris USA. “It's about leveling the playing field.”

'Need for revenue'

There have been several similar coalitions formed throughout the years to peddle the same kind of message, said James Calvin, president of the New York Association of Convenience Stores.

Why does Calvin hope this one will have better results?

For one, he said, the effort now has “the leadership and participation of Altria,” which sells close to half of U.S. cigarettes.

Also, the state has a vested interest to collect these taxes now to close its potential $9 billion budget gap, Calvin said.

The sale of untaxed cigarettes from Indians to non-Indians has been a longstanding issue - especially in Upstate New York.

The initial promise to collect those taxes on Indian cigarettes was made by then-Gov. George Pataki, who pulled back from the measure in the 1990s after about 1,000 members of the Seneca Nation blocked the Thruway and other roads -- sometimes with burning tires.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer campaigned for governor on the same promise, but backed away once in office, leaving a gap in the 2007-08 state budget.

Now, Gov. David Paterson is giving collecting the revenue another shot, looking to enforce a law he signed in December 2008 in Utica.

Recently proposed state regulations would limit the quantity of tax-free cigarettes that may legally be supplied to Indian nations or tribes.

'Death notice'

But the longer this tax goes uncollected, the more it is hindering local convenience stores, Calvin said.

“You lose the sale of cigarettes, and you lose the sale of other products,” he said.

Sutton said his company is looking out for the interests of such stores.

“If you have one pool of retailers that we're obviously working with every day, and have another pool of retailers who are not colleting the tax, it's very difficult to compete,” he said.

As for the Nation, it has already made the decision to downplay product placement of Philip Morris' Marlboro cigarettes in SavOn stores, Hilburger said.

“Obviously you're not going to support someone to run expensive ads in the paper,” Hilburger said, adding of the advertisement, “It almost looked like a death notice. It was 85 percent black.”