SALT LAKE CITY – Smoking is still legal in our state. But if you want to smoke e-cigarettes time could be running out.

Today a House sub-committee approved a bill that would ban e-cigarettes, or electronic cigarettes, and any other flavored tobacco products including those that look like candy.

The only exceptions would be products approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The bill now goes on to the full House.

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Some of those who oppose smoking in movies have just seen the future, and they are not happy about it.
James Cameron, the director, says the smoking scientist played by Sigourney Weaver, center, is not meant to be a role model.

Having caught up with James Cameron’s 3-D science fiction thriller, “Avatar,” over the holidays, Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, said his Smoke Free Movies initiative would soon come out swinging with an informational campaign aimed at what he saw as the movie’s pro-smoking message.

“This is like someone just put a bunch of plutonium in the water supply,” Mr. Glantz said in a telephone interview last week. He was referring to scenes in which an environmental scientist played by Sigourney Weaver drags lovingly on a cigarette as she works to save the moon Pandora sometime in the 22nd century.

Scenesmoking.org, which monitors tobacco mentions in films, gave the PG-13 rated “Avatar” a rating of its own: A “black lung.” Still, Mr. Cameron’s movie, distributed by 20th Century Fox, is not the only holiday picture to earn that distinction, which indicates unacceptable depictions of tobacco.

“Sherlock Holmes” and “The Blind Side,” which were distributed by Warner Brothers; “Nine,” from the Weinstein Company; “Did You Hear About the Morgans?” from Sony Pictures; and “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” also from Fox, were similarly rated with a “black lung” for tobacco use, even though they carried a rating of PG-13 or PG from the film industry’s Classification and Rating Administration.

In a statement sent by e-mail over the weekend, Mr. Cameron said he had never intended Ms. Weaver’s character, Grace Augustine, to be “an aspirational role model” for teenagers.

“She’s rude, she swears, she drinks, she smokes,” wrote Mr. Cameron. “Also, from a character perspective, we were showing that Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”

Speaking as an artist, Mr. Cameron said: “I don’t believe in the dogmatic idea that no one in a movie should smoke. Movies should reflect reality. If it’s O.K. for people to lie, cheat, steal and kill in PG-13 movies, why impose an inconsistent morality when it comes to smoking? I do agree that young role-model characters should not smoke in movies, especially in a way which suggests that it makes them cooler or more accepted by their peers.”

Smoking, Mr. Cameron concluded, “is a filthy habit which I don’t support, and neither, I believe, does ‘Avatar.’ ”

For the record, apart from the 3-D tobacco use, Mr. Glantz said he found “Avatar” to be “a great movie.”

By MICHAEL CIEPLY
January 3, 2010

The California State Board of Equalization (BOE) today announced that the BOE has notified wholesalers and distributors that it is illegal to sell flavored cigarettes or roll-your-own (RYO) under the federal U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provision of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. The BOE sent a special notice by email informing them of this new federal regulation. Under federal law, these products can no longer be manufactured, imported, or sold in the United States and could be seized by federal, state or local law enforcement authorities. Cigarettes and RYO products banned by the FDA have been and continue to be removed.

This federal ban prohibits a cigarette or any of its component parts (including the tobacco, filter, or paper) from containing, as a constituent (including a smoke constituent) or additive, an artificial or natural flavor (other than tobacco or menthol) or an herb or spice, including strawberry, grape, orange, clove, cinnamon, pineapple, vanilla, coconut, licorice, cocoa, chocolate, cherry, or coffee, that is a characterizing flavor of the tobacco product or tobacco smoke.

For general information regarding the FDA’s Tobacco Program and the ban on flavored cigarettes and RYO products, please refer to the FDA’s website at www.fda.gov/TobaccoProducts/default.htm.

To access the product listing on the California Tobacco Directory, please refer to the AG’s website at: http://ag.ca.gov/tobacco/directory.php.

It is illegal for distributors to affix a California tax stamp on packages of cigarettes or pay the tax on roll-your-own product unless the manufacturer and the brand family are listed in the California Tobacco Directory.

The five-member California State Board of Equalization is a publicly elected tax board. The BOE collects more than $53 billion annually in taxes and fees supporting state and local government services. It hears business tax appeals, acts as the appellate body for franchise and personal income tax appeals, and serves a significant role in the assessment and administration of property taxes. For more information on other taxes and fees in California, visit www.taxes.ca.gov.

Cigarettes don’t just kill people, they also kill fish.
So said San Diego State University researchers who are trying to build a case for labeling cigarette butts as toxic hazardous waste. That tag would prompt more rules to reduce their presence in the environment, though the bigger effect may be in public perception.

The San Diego scientists will present their conclusions today at the 137th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Philadelphia. They have submitted their results for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

“It’s another way of looking at cigarettes as a societal hazard,” said Tom Novotny, a professor of public health at SDSU. “If we reframe the butts as toxic hazardous waste, that adds another opportunity to change the social acceptability of smoking.”

Robert Best, regional director of the smokers’ rights group Citizens Freedom Alliance in Ventura County, is skeptical.

“This is just another attack on smokers and an attack on the entire tobacco industry, including farmers and distributors, in the midst of an economic crisis,” Best said. “We already have littering laws in the state of California that say you cannot throw any trash out on the ground or in the waterways.”

In recent years, community and health activists have won bans on smoking at beaches from California to New Jersey. Lawmakers acted partly out of concern about secondhand smoke and partly to reduce the amount of cigarette butts discarded at parks and other places. In July, San Francisco added a 20-cent fee to each pack of cigarettes to cover the cost of collecting spent smokes.

Novotny and his collaborators in the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project want more controls on what they call the most littered object on Earth. Trillions of cigarettes are smoked worldwide each year, and more than 1 million butts are collected annually during coastal cleanups in the United States, according to the project.

Novotny wondered about the butts’ effects on waterways. He turned to Rick Gersberg, a professor of public health at SDSU who specializes in water pollution.

Gersberg, a former smoker, was intrigued enough to review the scientific literature and determine that there were no published studies addressing cigarette butts and fish.

It’s different “if I pour a little vial of carcinogenic chemicals on the street — just a tiny amount,” Gersberg said. “(But if) hundreds of thousands of people were doing so many times a day, wouldn’t someone worry about it? Probably so.”

Gersberg helped design an experiment in which he let smoked filters soak in containers of water for 24 hours. Then he put fish in the polluted water and monitored them for five days, part of what he called a standard hazard assessment.

Half the fish died in both salt and fresh water, Gersberg said.

The bigger question is whether cigarettes have a similar effect in the real world — something that hasn’t been evaluated.

“We’d like to look at the chemicals that are actually causing the toxicity and if they are accumulating in marine life,” Gersberg said.

The $110,000 study on cigarette butts included policy analysis and biological research. It was funded by the California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program, a University of California effort to reduce the health and economic costs of tobacco use.

At UC San Francisco’s tobacco-control center, Richard Barnes has offered ideas for reducing cigarette butt litter such as levying new taxes on tobacco products to pay for litter collection, strengthening penalties for cigarette litter and suing tobacco companies to recover cleanup costs.

The nonprofit Surfrider Foundation is trying a different approach. On Saturday, the group’s San Diego County chapter will hold its sixth annual “Hold Onto Your Butt” awareness program. The event will include demonstrations and giveaways at three beach communities in the region.

The SDSU research gives Surfrider more ammunition. “We have thought for a while that toxic chemicals leach from discarded butts when submerged in water, so it’s good in some ways to see confirmation,” said Bill Hickman from the group’s local chapter.

By Mike Lee
November 9, 2009

Graphic images highlighting the dangers of smoking will soon be displayed on all tobacco products sold in Malta, director general of public health Ray Busuttil revealed on Tuesday.
A legal notice announcing the new regulations on tobacco packaging is expected to be issued by the end of this month, Dr Busuttil said at a press conference on EU anti-smoking campaign Help.

Health Promotion Department director Charmaine Gauci said that statistics showed that although the prevalence of smoking in Malta has been decreasing in recent years, the reverse was true among schoolchildren.

Dr Gauci noted that the smoking did not only adversely affect the lungs, but also presented numerous other problems. These include a greater susceptibility to infection, including, among others, to the pandemic H1N1 flu, she pointed out.

Stephen D’Alessandro, explaining the Help campaign, noted that addressing smoking among the young was a prime concern. Since peer pressure might pressure young people to smoke, the campaign has to address the perception that smoking is desirable, he said.

The second Help campaign, launched last May, follows the footsteps of the first campaign, which ran from 2005 to 2008, in targeting the young, illustrating the absurdity of smoking through humorous TV spots while leading them to the campaign website, www.help-eu.com, where serious advice is provided.

Its message aims to address 3 main objectives: prevention, cessation and passive smoking.

This time round, the campaign aims to be more interactive, inviting people to submit their own video tips on its website. In addition, young people have not only been the primary target of the campaign, but they have also participated in the strategy and development of the campaign.

20 October 2009 Di-ve

NEW YORK, NY, – On February this year, the FDA got sued by two of the most popular E-cigarette companies in the US- Njoy & Smoking everywhere. They sued for seizing and sending back product stocks shipped from China.
FDA didn’t want the products enter the. WHY?!
FDA, like other federal offices is not driven only by the public’s benefits, there are many other factors than that. Their excuse was the fact the Electronic cigarette is still under inquiry,
by this fact alone- IT’S ILLEGAL for the FDA to stop and seize shipments in the US border but yet- It’s in their power to do so as ridiculous as it is. That was the sue case.

The FDA have completed these days a preliminary test on 19 kinds of E-cigarette cartridges of Njoy & Smoking everywhere (rings a bell…)
They have found ONLY 1 CARTRIDGE that contains Diethylene glycol “in very low levels”.
Same Diethylene glycol is found in tobacco cigarette in high levels, It’s A humectants mixed in the tobacco to keep it moist.
Watch Dr. Sanjai Gupta, Chief medical correspondent on CNN interview:here!

Doctors & Health researchers VS. FDA.
A list of honorable Doctors and researchers have challenged the FDA to provide the full quantitative data of the study upon which the FDA has based the warning Against the Electronic cigarette. The doctors (listed below) has the justified suspicion that the FDA is trying to present the Electronic as a drug and legalize it & by that- to eliminate maybe the only chance of the tobacco smokers for a rehabilitation.
Doctors and researchers of the Group:
Dr. Michael Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health,
Dr. Joel Nitzkin of the AAPHP Tobacco Control Task Force,
Dr. Brad Rodu, Endowed Chair, Tobacco Harm Reduction Research University of Louisville

In a July 22 news release, FDA published in their Electronic cigarette test report- of a detectable presence of an ingredient which is defined as a “toxic chemical” in a “very small amount”.
What the FDA forgets to mention in this test report is that the same “toxic chemical” called nitrosamines is found also in other tobacco cigarettes replacements as NicoDerm & Nicorette chewing gum, both are products approved to be used by the same FDA. I’ll tell you a little secret- Same nitrosamines are found also in beer and in bacon, we’ve checked it- those are also totally legal and you don’t even need a prescription to get them.
The complete results of this study haven’t been made public so now some more groups such as the American Lung Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics Tobacco Consortium & the Institute for Global Health, can support this warning without getting their hands dirty with an biased and bribed statements as it really is.
Funny thing is these two of these three Groups (Lung Association & American Academy of Pediatrics Tobacco) mentioned above are getting sponsored by…. dam right! – the tobacco companies.
Starting to get the full picture?!

“It is absurd to take the electronic cigarettes out of the market when the tobacco ones have been shown to be killing millions every year”
Dr. Michael Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health

“The FDA’s laboratory findings actually indicate that electronic cigarettes are much, much safer than conventional cigarettes,” says Dr. Siegel
It appears that the FDA and the anti smoking groups have failed to ask THE RIGHT QUESTION
Instead of asking IF the Electronic cigarette is safe or not- they should be asking if electronic cigarette are 100 times safer then the tobacco cigarettes- and the answer to this question, by the FDA’s test itself is definitely YES!

The sales pitch for electronic or smokeless cigarettes is crystal clear. The so-called “harmless” cigarettes are supposed to let you smoke where you aren’t supposed to.

But is the hard sell at one New Jersey mall putting non smokers at risk?

It looks like a cigarette but it’s not. An undercover video obtained by CBS 2 HD shows a demonstration of an electronic cigarette inside a local mall.

CBS 2 HD first told you about so called “e” cigarettes back in March — smokeless cigarettes sold online and in stores. The devices give off a vapor product instead of smoke and are marketed to help smokers kick the habit.

But now a company called Smoking Everywhere is showing off their products inside a Bergen County mall, and officials there want to put a stop to it.

“It has no approval from federal government, is easily accessible to young people and quite frankly we believe it is a way around the smoking ban not only in Bergen County but across the state of New Jersey and the country,” Freeholder Vernon Walton said.

The Bergen County freeholder board and Borough of Paramus are drafting one of the nation’s first bans on indoor use of e-cigarettes. In March of 2009 the Food & Drug Administration did some random sampling, which found some shocking results.

“They found e-cigarettes contain proprelyne glycol which is basically the chemical used to make the smoke in this product,” said Albert J. Ferrara of the New Jersey Health Department. “We don’t know how serious that could be, but, again, it is an ingredient used in antifreeze in our cars and that doesn’t sound healthy to any of us.”

And their concerns aren’t just for smokers but everyone around them.

“Second hand smoke is found to be very harmful in conventional tobacco smoke,” Ferrara said. “Now we may be opening another avenue in regards to electronic cigarettes.

“The FDA needs to do some studying on this and decide once and for all what kind of risks there are involved with this.”

CBS 2 HD reached out to the corporate headquarters of Smoking Everywhere but did not receive a callback.

The Board of Freeholders will consider their legislation next week and the Borough of Paramus later in October.

Liquorice, sugars and even cocoa are being added to cigarettes to help smokers inhale a “lethal cocktail”, tobacco control experts say.

Bill King, from the VicHealth Centre for Tobacco Control, who has conducted extensive research into the make-up of cigarettes, said tobacco manufacturers added substances including sugars, cocoa and liquorice that made cigarettes more attractive and addictive.

“These additives make cigarettes more attractive to smokers, and that’s what’s wrong with them,” Mr King said. “They lull smokers into a false sense of security.

“They’re tricked into believing that a less harsh taste makes the cigarette less harmful for them. These additives ultimately help smokers swallow a lethal cocktail.”

Mr King helped the Cancer Council WA launch a new television advertisement today which shows a number of different smoking-related health conditions and is set to the well-known song “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies.

Make Smoking History campaign manager Susan Stewart said smokers needed to know that while the true flavour of tobacco could be masked with additives, the damage caused by smoking could not be hidden.

“In fact, many smokers are fascinated, unaware or shocked to discover cigarettes are made up of such ingredients,” said Ms Stewart.

Almost 300,000 WA adults still smoke and around 1200 Western Australians lose their lives to smoking every year. The new ad campaign aims to get smokers to quit before it’s too late.

Smokers can call the Quitline on 13 78 48 to talk to someone confidentially about quitting or enquire about the Cancer Council’s Fresh Start quit smoking course. Smokers can also talk to their local GP or pharmacist.

Make Smoking History is an initiative of the Cancer Council WA and is proudly supported by the Department of Health and Healthway.

Would a gruesome picture of a cancer-ravaged mouth with rotting teeth make you think twice about buying a pack of cigarettes?

That’s the goal of new federal regulations expected to go into effect within three years. The rules will require tobacco companies to cover at least half of the front and back of packages with graphic – and possibly gruesome -images illustrating the dangers of smoking.

If U.S. regulations are modeled after those already in place in Canada and other countries, the warnings will be shocking: blackened lungs, gangrenous feet, bleeding brains and people breathing through tracheotomies.

Though hard to look at, the more graphic the image, the more effective in discouraging smoking, said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and director of the university’s Center for Tobacco Control, Research and Education.

“The graphic warnings really work,” Glantz said. “They substantially increase the likelihood someone will quit smoking. They substantially decrease the chances a kid will smoke. And they really screw up the ability of the tobacco industry to use the packaging as a marketing tool.”

Over the last decade, countries as varied as Canada, Australia, Chile, Brazil, Iran and Singapore, among others, have adopted graphic warnings on tobacco products. Some are downright disturbing: in Brazil, cigarette packages come with pictures of dead babies and a gangrened foot with blackened toes.

In the United States, the authority to force packaging changes was granted on June 22, when President Barack Obama, who has struggled with cigarette addiction since he was a teen, signed into law the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. The landmark legislation gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration broad new authority to regulate the marketing of tobacco products.

Under the law, the FDA has two years to issue specifics about the new graphic warnings tobacco products will be required to carry. Tobacco companies then have 18 months to get them onto packages.

Currently, the United States has some of the weakest requirements for cigarette package warnings in the world, said David Hammond, an assistant professor in the department of health studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. The text-only warnings on packages have changed little since 1984.

“Consumers in many Third World countries are getting more and better information about the risks of cigarettes off their packs,” Hammond said.

With much at stake for tobacco companies, there will be much wrangling over the details, Glantz said.

Yet research shows the FDA shouldn’t compromise, Glantz said. The more frightening the image, the greater the anti-smoking effect, he said.

Despite some research that has suggested images that are too stomach-turning may backfire because people eventually ignore them, new research is showing the most graphic images pack the most punch, said Jeremy Kees, an assistant professor of marketing at Villanova University.

In a yet-to-be published study, Kees had 541 adult smokers in the United States and Canada view a mild image of a smoker’s mouth with yellowed teeth; a moderately graphic image of a diseased mouth; and a third photo of a grotesque, disfigured mouth.

The most disturbing photo evoked the most fear, prompting more smokers to say they intended to quit, Kees said.

While the new regulations may also include no-nonsense, text warnings such as “Smoking Makes You Impotent” and “Smoking Kills,” the images will have the broadest reach, Hammond said.

Non-English speakers can understand the picture of a diseased mouth, as can people who are illiterate. Smokers tend to have lower literacy levels, Hammond noted.

And kids will get the message too, potentially stopping them from ever lighting up. “You have 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds who can understand that picture,” Hammond said.

Elsewhere, graphic warnings seem to be helping to drive down smoking rates. In Canada, about 13 percent of the population smokes daily, a 5 percent drop since the graphic warnings were adopted in 2000, Hammond said.

About 21 percent of the U.S. population smokes daily, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While powerful, the gruesome warnings won’t get everyone to quit.

“Nicotine is highly addictive,” Hammond said. “Health warnings are not a magic bullet, but they help move people closer to quitting and provide a constant reminder of why many people want to change.”

© Ajc