Bills advance on roll-your-own tobacco shops

Roll-your-own cigarette stores could be headed for a Virginia endangered retailers list as bills to treat those merchants as tobacco manufacturers burn through the General Assembly.

Separate bills to reclassify shops with the automated rolling machines unanimously cleared a key House of Delegates committee and won full Senate approval on Monday.

The rolling devices stuff loose tobacco into paper tubes to produce a carton's worth of cigarettes in about 10 minutes. Several stores with the machines have sprung up in South Hampton Roads over the past year.

Patrons and other defenders of the niche industry say the machines make personalized cigarettes at a price lower than commercial brands.

Legislation targeting those businesses is backed by Altria, parent company of Philip Morris USA, the nation's largest cigarette maker.

Company officials contend that roll-your-own products can be sold for less because retailers avoid paying the same taxes as traditional tobacco manufacturers and wholesalers.

Mass. man in court on RI cigarette smuggling case

A Massachusetts man accused of participating in a contraband cigarette ring that cost Rhode Island an estimated $5.7 million in tax revenue is due to face a federal judge.

An arraignment is set for Tuesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Providence for Mohamad Mohamad of Cambridge.

Court records show Mohamad signed a plea agreement last week and agreed to admit to bringing more than 10,000 contraband cigarettes into Rhode Island.

The plea agreement says when Mohamad was arrested on Nov. 8, 2011, he had nearly three million cigarettes worth more than $500,000 in Rhode Island cigarette taxes.

The agreement says prosecutors have agreed to recommend a lesser sentence for Mohamad. He faces up to five years in prison.

Mother shocked at electric cigarette ban

A WOMAN said her birthday night out was spoilt after she was asked to leave a York bar for using an electronic cigarette.

Cherry Knott, 59, of Kingsway West in Acomb, York, was celebrating her birthday with her daughter, son and his partner in Yates’s in Lower Ousegate, when they were approached by a member of staff who asked them to stop using the e-cigarettes or to leave the venue.

The mock cigarettes emit an odourless water vapour and simulate smoking by producing a mist which is inhaled.

The group, who say they have used the cigarettes indoors in other venues in York without any issue, questioned the member of staff before deciding to leave.

Mrs Knott said they had been in the bar for a while and had even discussed the cigarettes with a barman, before being asked to leave by a member of staff who said they might encourage people to light up genuine cigarettes.

She said: “I never saw anybody light a cigarette. We tried to argue our point and said they were harmless. My son said there should be notices if we were not allowed to smoke them.

“We had just got a round of drinks in when the manager asked us to leave. He said we had to leave if we wanted to smoke them.

“It ruined my birthday a little bit because we were having such a good time.”

Mrs Knott said she wanted pubs and bars to have greater clarity on their rules about the electronic cigarettes, which she said had helped her and her family to reduce or quit smoking.

A manager at Yates’s, who asked not to be named, said that initially two people had been using the electronic cigarettes indoors, but then they were joined by two other people who were also using them, causing concerns other people in the bar might be encouraged to start smoking inside.

She said: “It’s something we have never experienced before.

“If people see them smoking what appear to be cigarettes, bigger groups might smoke themselves.

“They were seated in the food area and we had a few complaints.”

Sales of the electronic cigarettes have soared and are expected to top one million in the UK this year.

But it has been reported that medical experts have called for further research into their side effects, raising questions about what the devices contain and their impact on users.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said it was legal to smoke e-cigarettes indoors if they were only emitting a vapour and they are not ignited, but said it would be at the discretion of the owner of the premises.

Proposed cigarette tax costly but effective

State Rep. Mary Still, D-Columbia, has proposed legislation to increase the state cigarette tax and use the revenue to help fund higher education. We support her proposal and hope the Missouri General Assembly will pass the initiative to put it on the ballot so the public can eventually vote for it.

As of Jan. 1, Missouri has the lowest cigarette tax rate in the nation at $0.17 per pack, according to the Federation of Tax Administrators. According to the FTA’s figures for 2012, even after Still's proposed quadrupling of the tax to $0.89 per pack, Missouri would have the 18th lowest state cigarette tax, and 18th out of 51, (including the District of Columbia), is not bad at all.

The increased tax will affect businesses associated with the tobacco industry, but the impact cannot be concisely figured, and we think it is the right price to pay for higher education funding. Our only concern is that the tax could affect lower income individuals, who make up the largest population of smokers, according to the World Health Organization. We hope a cigarette tax will encourage those individuals to stop purchasing cigarettes, which is a luxury good and not a necessity. According to the WHO, a tax that increases cigarette prices by 10 percent decreases consumption by 4 percent in high-income countries like the U.S., and according to the American Lung Association, a 10 percent increase in the overall price of cigarettes results in a 7 percent decrease in the amount of smoke children consume. We understand quitting is difficult, but it is not impossible.

This legislation is not an attack on tobacco users or those businesses in the tobacco industry. It is an attempt to increase higher education funding, which has received cuts. The cigarette tax, even after being quadrupled, will still be well below the national average, which, according to The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and The Missourian, is $1.46 and below the national median, which, according to the FTA, is $1.25. This is not an unreasonable tax.

Presently, Missouri is one of four states to be given a failing grade by the ALA, which works to improve lung health and prevent lung disease in each of the four categories: program spending, smoke-free air, cigarette tax and cessation. If an increased tax on cigarettes is enough to convince even a few cigarette users to cutback on consumption, we consider the marginal health benefits a positive effect for our state.

Whichever House committee the bill is referred to must clear it, and the Senate and House must then pass it. Afterward, the vote will require voter approval. We urge that, in contrast to previous attempts to raise the cigarette tax in 2002 and 2006, the Missouri public expresses slightly more than 49 percent approval to put the approval rate over 50 percent and ensure the beneficial legislation is enacted.

If paying $0.70 more for a pack of cigarettes allows for increased funding, which Still estimates to be $4 million, for higher education, it is a very effective value. In an article in The Missourian, Still is quoted as saying, “I value funding education over having the lowest cigarette tax in the country.” We agree.

Our View: Tax cigarettes out of kids' budgets

During a recent trip to New York City, a member of the Post-Bulletin's editorial board noticed that there were relatively few cigarette butts on the sidewalks and streets. The air in Manhattan was rich with the smell of roasting nuts and fresh-made gyros and bagels, but cigarette smoke seldom intruded into the mix.

There's a simple explanation for this phenomenon: Cost. If you try to buy a pack of cigarettes in New York City, a $10 bill won't do the job. State and local taxes of $5.85 per pack have pushed the price up to $14 in some areas — the highest in the nation. A string of tax increases since 2002 has pushed 450,000 New York City smokers to kick the habit, and the smoking rate among high school students has plummeted to 7 percent.

In Minnesota, by comparison, The American Lung Association says the teen smoking rate is 19 percent.

That's reason enough for us to support Sen. Carla Nelson's proposal to add another dollar to Minnesota's state cigarette tax, which currently is $1.59 per pack.

Multiple studies have found that young smokers are the most price-sensitive, which means that the best way to keep kids from smoking is to make it too expensive. And, given that 80 percent of adult smokers became addicted before age 18, the benefit of the new tax is fairly obvious: If teenagers can't afford to smoke, they'll be unlikely to pick up the expensive, deadly habit when they get "real jobs" and higher incomes.

It's somewhat surprising for a Republican to be proposing a tax increase, but Nelson could rightly argue that this is a true "user fee." If you don't smoke, it won't affect you at all.

Furthermore, Nelson has specific purposes in mind for the new revenue the tax increase would bring in. She'd start by repaying the $700 million the state "borrowed" from K-12 public schools last summer. When that debt has been repaid, she wants to dedicate future revenues to reduce property taxes on businesses. That, of course, should make Nelson's proposal more popular with her Republican colleagues — while drawing criticism from DFLers who will have other ideas on how to spend the new revenue.

But ultimately, we can only hope that the state's revenue from cigarette taxes (more than $400 million per year) will begin to decrease, to the point that even the most draconian of per-pack tax increases can't make up the shortfall.

The goal, after all, isn't to maximize the amount of money Minnesota reaps from the sales of cigarettes; rather, it's to reduce our smoking rate to the point that tobacco taxes are no longer a significant source of revenue.

How would we fill that $400 million hole in the state budget? Well, the $3 billion we wouldn't be spending on smoking-related illnesses would be a good start.

Big Tobacco led throat doctors to blow smoke

Tobacco companies conducted a carefully crafted, decades-long campaign to manipulate throat doctors into helping to calm concerns among an increasingly worried public that smoking might be bad for their health, according to a new study by researchers at the School of Medicine. Beginning in the 1920s, this campaign continued for over half of a century.

“Tobacco companies sought to exploit the faith the public had in the medical profession as a means of reassuring their customers that smoking was safe,” said Robert Jackler, MD, the Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor in Otolaryngology.

“Tobacco companies dreamed up slogans such as, ‘Not one single case of throat irritation with Camels;’ then, to justify their advertising claims, marketing departments sought out pliant doctors to conduct well-compensated, pseudoscientific ‘research,’ which invariably found the sponsoring company’s cigarettes to be safe,” Jackler said. “The companies successfully influenced these physicians not only to promote the notion that smoking was healthful, but actually to recommend it as a treatment for throat irritation.”

Jackler is the senior author of the study, which was published in the January issue of The Laryngoscope. Hussein Samji, MD, a recent Stanford residency graduate, was his co-author.
Using internal documents from tobacco companies from the Legacy Tobacco Document archives, the study’s authors reviewed a wealth of correspondence, contracts, marketing plans and payment receipts that shed light on the industry’s multifaceted, highly effective campaign.

Jackler’s ongoing research into the history of tobacco company advertising has resulted in several published studies on the topic, sparked in part by his collection of thousands of historical cigarette ads exhibited online at http://tobacco.stanford.edu, the originals now donated to the Smithsonian Institution. He also spearheaded a group called the Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising, which analyzes the effects of tobacco advertising, marketing and promotion.

In the new paper, the authors describe how tobacco companies regularly hosted “hospitality booths” at otolaryngology conventions from which they gave out free cigarettes, sometimes with packs embossed with the doctors’ names. In major cities all over America, throat specialists were taken out to elegant dinners at which they were implored to “prescribe” their brand of cigarettes to patients with sore throats or coughs.

When the government, through the Federal Trade Commission, tried to intervene against “hucksterish” advertising slogans promoting the healthfulness of their cigarettes, prominent otolaryngologists were recruited to defend the validity of the blatantly false claims.

“The list of recruitments who served as experts testifying on behalf of tobacco interests includes a virtual who’s who of leading otolaryngologists in the 20th century, including many leading head and neck cancer surgeons,” Jackler said.
In 1949, the average physician income was $11,058. In that era, a $5,000 payment — which was common from tobacco companies to otolaryngologists — represented a major inducement.

Even after the Surgeon General’s Report of 1964 definitively linked smoking with cancer of the voice box (larynx), the otolaryngology departmental chairs of four major universities testified before Congress in opposition to the findings.

“It was especially disappointing to discover that leading otolaryngologists took public positions exculpating tobacco even after the definitive Surgeon General’s report,” the study said.

The authors emphasized the importance of collaboration between doctors and industry for continued advances in medicine, but pointed to this study as a reminder to the medical community of the need to adhere to the “highest standards of scientific validity” and to remain vigilant in the advocacy for patients’ interests when working with industry.

“Ethically, a physician must always act on behalf of the well-being of patients,” Jackler said. “Responsible industries balance their need to maximize profits with a commitment to improve the health of their consumers.”

This research was conducted as part of the Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising. The school’s Department of Otolaryngology also supported the research.

Store Robber Gets Away With Cigarettes, Cash

Manchester police are looking for a man who robbed a convenience store overnight.
Police said just after midnight Thursday, a man walked into the Tedeschi Food Mart on Second Street and asked for a carton of cigarettes before demanding all of the money from the cash register.
The clerk said the man threatened to harm her. The robber did not show a weapon, but he had his hands in his pockets as if he was armed, according to the clerk.
Police said the man ran away from the store with some cash and the carton of cigarettes.
The robber is described as a 5'4'' tall man in his mid 20's and is clean shaven. He was last seen wearing blue jeans, a black baseball cap and a black quilted jacket over a gray hooded sweatshirt.
Those with information are asked to contact Manchester police.