Marlboro, Camel, Parliament, American Spirit. All these recognizable cigarette brands can currently be purchased from the Hawk Shop in the Kansas Union. Today, the Board of Regents will consider banning the sale of tobacco products on university campuses.

Although all students have the right to choose whether to smoke, the University should not be profiting from a product that is damaging to the students it is here to serve. The Regents should vote in favor of banning tobacco sales from university campuses.

Removing cigarettes from campus will not take away the right to choose whether to smoke. It will simply show that the University does not profit from a choice that is a health risk to students.

The money from the Hawk Shop goes directly back into the Union, which is an affiliate of the University. Although it is separate, some of the Union’s profits are used for student activities and go back to the University for programs such as new student orientation.

In a Kansan editorial from February 2009, David Mucci, director of KU Memorial Unions, said the profits from tobacco sales did not represent a substantial sum.

“We’re not afraid to lose the money,” said Mucci.

Losing this small amount would not hurt the University financially which lends even greater support for the ban.

In an obvious paradox, not only can students buy cigarettes on campus, they can also receive assistance to quit smoking through a Student Health Services’ program called Kan-U-Quit at Watkins Health Center. The University has recognized the problem but is still selling the product causing it.

As a leader in education and progress, the University should not benefit from or support a product that is ultimately a heath risk for students. Having tobacco products behind the counter is condoning and enabling the habit. Though the choice to smoke remains in the hands of the student, the Regents will be making the right decision in removing Kansas universities from association with tobacco sales.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has been known to use his cell phone a lot. He used to tweet the birth of his child but now Newsom says he wants cell phones to carry a warning label.

The former governor hopeful says he is endorsing a proposal to make San Francisco the first city in the country to require radiation labels for cell phones.

If passed, stores would have to post radiation levels next to each phone in a font at least as large as the price and they would have to inform customers about what the levels actually mean, which could prove to be a tricky requirement depending on who you believe.

A study released last week by the Danish Cancer Society found that over 30 years there is no “clear change in the long term trends in incidence of brain tumors.”

Still there are some scientists (and many of them are very active in San Francisco) who say that cell phones are slow killers.

Studies to find out just how much radiation your cell phone gives out are readily available on the web, just in case you’re curious.

LONDON – Auction houses are banking on a recovery at next week’s series of big Russian art sales in London, at which they expect to show that the market dominated by new money is through the worst of the recession.

With most at stake are Sotheby’s and Russian specialist MacDougall’s, who together offer works worth between 27 and 39 million pounds ($45-64 million). Christie’s the world’s largest auction house, has pre-sale estimates of 6.5-9.3 million pounds.

The figures are sharply down on a year ago, reflecting how financial turmoil and falling stock and property values have hit super-wealthy collectors from Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and deterred owners from selling their best pieces.

Sotheby’s, for example, expected its 2008 winter sales to fetch between 29 and 41 million pounds. The actual result was 25 million, marking a significant drop in values which had soared during the previous five years or so.

This year Sotheby’s estimates have halved to 15-21 million pounds, reflecting a more selective pool of buyers and limited supply, as sellers hold out for a return to the heady days of 2007 and early 2008.

“There are less lots on offer,” Jo Vickery, Sotheby’s senior director, told Reuters. “We’ve been much more selective in the current economic climate, looking particularly for works with a very good provenance.

“There is considerable demand out there but at the moment, supply is less.”

William MacDougall, director of MacDougall Arts Ltd., said he expected prices to continue to recover from recent falls.

“The general theme since April last year is that sellers are reluctant to sell at these levels, unlike, say, holders of equities who have been forced into doing so.

“But the results in October in New York were very good and so we’re expecting a continued healthy market next week.”

TOP LOT SEREBRIAKOVA’S “NUDE”

He said over 90 percent of buyers were born in the former Soviet Union, and, although London has become the global capital for Russian art, the majority of them were based elsewhere.

His company is selling art valued at 12.4-17.6 million pounds. MacDougall’s also boasts the most valuable single lot of “Russian Week” in London, with an oil painting of a nude female by Russian artist Zinaida Serebriakova expected to fetch 1.0-1.5 million pounds.

Close behind is Sotheby’s and another work by a leading 20th century female artist, Alexandra Exter, whose brightly-colored “Venice” is estimated at 0.9-1.2 million pounds.

The auction house is also offering a large collection of Faberge cigarette cases and cufflinks that had been hidden in a pair of pillowcases in a Swedish foreign office safe for over 90 years until their recent discovery.

The objects belonged to Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna and her husband Grand Duke Vladimir, brother of Czar Alexander III.

The sale is expected to raise around one million pounds, and a handful of the bejeweled cigarette cases still contain matches and period cigarettes. Estimates range from 80 pounds to up to 90,000 pounds.

The week of Russian sales kicks off with Sotheby’s and Bonhams holding their main auctions on Monday and wind up at MacDougall’s on Thursday.

As it is known cigarettes smoking were banned in public places but hookahs were not affected by this new legislation. Andy Brunette, the Dreas Hookah Lounge manager explained that a hookah is a tobacco-smoking machine with a glass base filled with water or juice, with an attached metal stem, a hose and a ceramic bowl.

A burning charcoal rests on foil covering the bowl, which is filled with strip-leaf tobacco combined with molasses. This acts as a heating element to vaporize, not burn, the tobacco known as shisha, remitting the natural nicotine and the sugar from molasses.
Brunette added that it isn’t the same tobacco found in cigarettes or cigars. The tobacco used for hookahs has a lower nicotine concentration, and contains no chemical additives and usually comes in fruit flavors such as strawberry or papaya.
Even the vapor emitted by hookahs is first filtered through the base’s water before going through an inhaling hose. Thanks to water filtration the hookahs smoke become very smooth.
However it still has health risks, because it is a tobacco product also which can harm the people’s health. According to a lot of studies, hookahs could lead to increased risks of gum disease and other health problems.
In general, the use of hookahs dates to the 16th century for the first time in India. It has then gained fame in the Middle East and is gaining admirers in North America.
The Hookah label tends to relate to Middle Eastern culture. For example, the hookah itself should not be higher than eye level.
Another rule is to only use the right hand to hold the hose because the left hand is considered unclean, Mr. Brunette explained. Another rule of smoking hookahs is the following: when finished with one’s turn, it is recommended to set the hose down on the table and allow the next smoker to pick it up rather than directly passing it off.
Smokers won’t have to worry about loading the hookah either, a somewhat complicated process for a beginner.
Brunette confessed that he first tried hookah years ago at a friend’s lounge in Sheboygan, Wis. “I just fell in love with it basically. It was a very sweet taste,” he said.
In this way he has became an expert of sorts, smoking a hookah one or two times each day. But the decision to open his lounge has been a two-year process.

NEW YORK -R.J. Reynolds is raising prices on Camel, Kool and other cigarette brands, joining competitor Philip Morris USA in continuing to boost prices to offset volume declines.

R.J. Reynolds is a unit of Reynolds American (RAI). The company is raising wholesale prices on brands such as Camel, Kool, Winston, Salem, Pall Mall and Doral by six cents a pack. Prices on some other brands such as Capri and Lucky Strike will go up by eight cents a pack.

Earlier this week, Altria Group Inc.’s (MO) Philip Morris USA unit announced price hikes on Marlboro and other cigarettes. For years, cigarette makers in the U.S. have faced falling volumes, hurt by smoking bans and higher taxes. They have sought to shore up profits by steadily hiking prices.

-By Anjali Cordeiro, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2200; anjali.cordeiro@dowjones.com

PHOENIX – The Food & Drug Administration overstepped its authority to regulate flavored cigarettes by banning the flavored rolling papers that are sold separately, a tobacco retailer claims in a federal lawsuit.

BBK Tobacco & Foods, a distributor and seller of flavored papers, says the FDA is trying to “expand its authority to regulate cigarettes containing ‘characterizing flavors’ under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.”
The Act, signed on June 22, provides that “a cigarette or any of its component parts … shall not contain, as a constituent or additive, an artificial or natural flavor,” but allegedly made no mention of flavored papers that are sold separately.
According to BBK Tobacco, the Act’s definition of cigarette includes products that contain tobacco. Flavored paper sold separately does not include tobacco, BBK Tobacco argues, and therefore should not be included in the Act.
The company says its sales of flavored papers comprise a “significant portion” of annual profits, and the Act has had a “devastating impact” on its business.
It seeks an order declaring that U.S. agencies “have no authority to regulate flavored papers sold separately under the Act,” plus an injunction blocking the government from banning the papers.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg and DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are also named as defendants.
BBK Tobacco is represented by Joel Sannes of Lake & Cobb in Tempe, Ariz.

By JAMIE ROSS

Just in case anyone wants to get sue-happy, let me preface this installment by saying that I am not a doctor, nor do I even play one on TV, but one of the biggest trends in gadgets is the electronic cigarette. We reported on these once before, but early estimates show that these will be one of the big must-have gadgets for Christmas 2009.

The electronic cigarette, just for reminders’ sake, offers a new way to get access to nicotine by, instead of setting fire to nicotine-containing goods and inhaling the smoke, by putting nicotine directly into the electronic cigarette, vaporizing it, and allowing it to deliver nicotine in slow bursts throughout the day.

Whether or not these things might help you quit smoking is undetermined, but it sure does look like to the layman that even if they didn’t help, there’d still be every reason to believe that these might be more healthy. And in smoking, every little edge helps.

The Liberal Democrats are trying to reintroduce an improvement to the health bill, calling for the government to cutting cigarette pack designs.

For example in Australia, the government’s Preventative Health Task Force has counseled it to remove advancements of tobacco products through design of packaging as part of a complete strategy to reduce tobacco deaths.

Meantime, a recent research from the University of Nottingham showed the tobacco branding and packaging deceptive signals to young people and adult smokers.

Participants in the Nottingham study were shown pairs of cigarette packs and asked to compare them on five measures: taste, tar delivery, health risk, attractiveness, and either relief of quitting or which they would choose if trying smoking.

At the end of the investigation was found that adults and children were significantly more likely to regards packs with the terms ‘light’, ’smooth’, ’silver’ and ‘gold’ as lower tar, lower health risk and either easier to quit or their choice of pack if trying smoking.

But more than half of adults and youth reported that brands labeled as ’smooth’ were less harmful than the ‘regular’ variety. The color of packs was also associated with perceptions of risk and brand appeal.

The research discovered that those smoking products which bear the word ’smooth’ or have a light colored branding can trick people into thinking that the products are less injurious to their health.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Ash, an anti-smoking group, said: “This research shows that the only sure way of putting an end to this misleading marketing is to require all tobacco products to be sold in plain packaging.”

Researchers think that the change of cigarette packaging design would remove false beliefs about different brands and announce the message that all cigarettes are dangerous.

“This matter has been discussed by parliament and there is now a perfect chance to involve a requirement for plain packaging of tobacco products to be included in the health bill,” added Ms. Arnott.

According to previous studies, since 2002 it has been illegal for manufacturers to use trademarks, text or any sign to suggest that one tobacco product is less harmful than another. But investigators said that Tobacco Companies have now protected to using color and affable words to accomplish the same goal.

A principal characteristic of tobacco trade strategy has been to promote the sensation that some cigarettes are less hazardous than others, so that smokers worried about their health are supported to switch brands rather than quit, reported investigators.

As it is known these tactics are giving consumers a false sensation of reinsurance that simply does not exist.

Nigeria lawmakers began debating over a landmark comprehensive tobacco control bill in an attempt to overcome the dramatic smoking rates across the country. The bill is strongly supported by local and international public health agencies and anti-smoking advocates.

The government collaborated with public health agencies to introduce an educational program for schools and universities across Nigeria, trying to educate teenagers about the risks related to the use of tobacco.

Associated Press reporters visited the Shepherd Secondary School in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city and ex-capital, in order to hear an anti-smoking lecture and make a non-smoking pledge together with the students.

“If I want my life to be changed I swear I will never smoke, as I am the future of the country, and I want our country to be smoke-free,” Shepherd Secondary School students repeated after the lecturer.

Almost 25 percent of local minors puff occasionally, with several barely reaching 10, and the number of adult smokers is even more staggering in the country.

Dikembe Obikwelu, a 16-year-old ex-smoker and Shepherd student, told AP that he was smoking for 4 years before quitting, when he took part in the campaign.

The student said that he wasn’t aware about all the dangers and negative consequences of tobacco to his health and safety of people that surround him.

The most popular tobacco products in Nigeria are smokeless tobacco items and unpacked individual cigarettes that could be bought for an average of 7 cents per stick. Experts have been concerned that smoking rates in the most populous African country could keep increasing.

Therefore, the Nigerian lawmakers didn’t hesitate to take actions. They introduced a universal tobacco regulation bill that would ban smoking, hike taxes and restrict advertisements. If approved, the bill would become a landmark tobacco regulation act in the history of the country.

Olorunnimbe Mamora, Senator who introduced the bill said that he had sworn on the Constitution to protect the Nigerian people, and would apply every possible effort to defend the welfare of Nigerians, as it has been his primary duty.

Looking at the example of developed nations, the Nigerian legislators, who used to make large concessions to tobacco industry, have stopped supporting cigarette companies and filed a lawsuit against the tobacco industry, asking $45 billion in damages for luring teenagers into smoking.

Senator Mamora named the tobacco companies as the “vendors of death and pain.”

However, not everybody is so happy about the possible tobacco outlawing in the country. A coalition of tobacco growers issued an emotional query to the government when the public hearing of the tobacco bill was held. The growers urged lawmakers to think about the consequences of tobacco cracking down to the farmers.

The group leader Okeke Abiola said that tobacco ban would immediately hit 300,000 poor farmers, who have no other job but growing tobacco, so a tobacco restriction would result in loosing the source of money for many families.

Nigeria would be just the sixth country in Africa to implement any tobacco control measures. Smoking is also banned in Zambia, Niger, Mozambique, South Africa, and Uganda.

According to the magazines that have reported that this is what Kate Moss told her dear friend Lily Allen, yes, and, as I’ve always said, if you can’t trust a celebrity magazine, you can’t trust anything.

But even leaving that aside, is this really what models eat? Well, probably. Most of them. Some of the time. Models are thin. Most will be genetically predisposed to this body type but, even then, most of them have to struggle with the increasingly ridiculous standards of what constitutes as acceptably thin in the eyes of Karl Lagerfeld. But hey, guess what? If you don’t eat, you die. And even if you don’t eat for a short time, you won’t have any energy, not even to walk up and down a catwalk. And most importantly of all, if you follow that model diet, your skin is going to look like hell. Seriously – like hell. There may even be spots of flame jumping up and down between your ravaged, oil-deprived creases when you have one fag too many, and no amount of Botox can disguise that.

That great philosopher of our time Jerry Hall once wisely said that, at a certain point, a woman needs to choose between her face and her ass. (Just for clarity, Jerry is, of course, American so she was referring to her bottom as opposed to her donkey. Just making sure everyone is on board here.) This means, you can either not eat very much and have a shrivelled face and a bony bottom. Or you can eat more and have a fuller face and a pleasingly rounded bottom. It’s a tricky choice, I’ll give you that. And I’ll leave you with one final thought: no one ever lay on their deathbed and thought, “Damn, what a waste of a life. If only I’d been a size zero.” Believe.

I recently saw a watch advert featuring Zara-flipping-Phillips. Are you kidding me?!

James, Manchester

No, James, I am not. Zara Phillips is the perfect embodiment of “competitive spirit meet[ing] grace and beauty” that this watch-whose-name-we-shall-not-mention (WWNWSNM) represents. She is a modern woman and modern women need to know what time it is in order to be super modern and – and – and . . .

I’m sorry, I can’t keep this up any more. I tried, Your Maj, I honestly tried. If that axe must fall on my neck now, then fall it must. Zara Phillips is indeed advertising a daft watch. Now, as royals go, Zara is not bad. She does, for example, do things, even if those things are horse jumping but, hey, she’s a royal, I don’t think many people expected her to grow up and find a cure for cancer. In fact, I’m not disgusted with the WWNWSNM for asking her to be in their advert; I’m disgusted with her for accepting.

You know, I can understand appearing in an advert if, say, you are a struggling actor and you are down to a mere £27 in your bank account and the landlord is threatening to throw you out of your flat and your agent is no longer answering your calls and you just found out that you are pregnant. Then, fair enough, put on your brightest smile and pose for that Specsavers poster.

If, however, you are a multimillionaire actor or member of the royal family, then no. No, no, no and a thousand times no. Advertising is about lying. And it is about selling lies to your fellow human beings. I accept it as a necessary part of most businesses – newspapers, come to think of it – but anyone who appears in them, lounging in an armchair and sipping on some crappy coffee (oh, McNulty, what would Bunk say?) when they are not on the breadline, or even in the same universe as the breadline, then these people need to take a very long and hard look at their pathetic little lives.

One of the interesting upshots to celebrities taking over the fashion world – like lots and lots of shorter-than-you-think Godzillas taking over Tokyo – is seeing which celebrities are just celebrities, and which ones are the real attention-seeking, money-grabbing lame-os. You may or may not be surprised to know that Sienna Miller, for example, advertises various fashion labels. Endless men who either have been or would like to be James Bond advertise watches. These people all have gabajillions of pounds in the bank. Did they really need that extra £300,000 to pose like a prat with a watch? You can get depressed about this, or you can see it as a wheat-from-chaff exercise and know who you should push forward to the precipice when the apocalypse approaches


© Guardian

New Zealand researchers are clashing with US health officials over a new anti-smoking aid, after a world-first trial was run by Auckland University.

The US Food and Drug Administration wants the electronic cigarette banned, but experts here say it does more good than harm.

It looks like the real thing, puffs out a mist that looks like smoke and most importantly, it provides the nicotine kick that smokers crave – but the e-cigarette has one big difference.

“They’re not going to die from an e-cigarette,” says Dr Murray Laugesen. “But they could die tomorrow from a heart attack due to their smoking.”

The FDA, which regulates medical products in the US, isn’t so sure. It says its tests found cancer-causing chemicals in e-cigarettes and wants them banned from sale until more studies are done.

“What’s remarkable actually is the lack of evidence that these products are any better than standard smoking cessation treatments, and secondly the inadequate testing for their toxins,” says Dr Michael Thun, American Cancer Society.

Auckland University has run the first ever trial of the e-cigarettes. It looked at withdrawal symptoms after using one compared to a nicotine inhaler and a regular cigarette.

Researchers can’t reveal the results until they are published in a medical journal, but they told 3 News the FDA is getting unnecessarily alarmed over one ingredient – propalene glycol. It is a chemical used in antifreeze, and can be seen drifting across the stage at rock concerts – but there is no evidence it is harmful.

But that’s not all.

“The carcinogens that we have found have been in very, very small quantity, just above the level of detection,” says Dr Laugesen.

In contrast, every time you take a drag on a cigarette you breathe in 4000 toxins.

At this stage, New Zealanders have to go online and import e-cigarettes, but Dr Laugesen would like to see them more readily available here and says he would not hesitate to recommend e-cigarettes to anyone wanting to quit.

3 News

Some of the newer smokeless products that tobacco companies are betting on may not be as good at helping smokers quit as the industry hopes, a new federally funded study by Virginia Commonwealth University shows.

And that means they may not be the kind of reduced-harm product that is the industry’s latest hope, now that tobacco is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Winning FDA designation as a “potential reduced-exposure product” could be worth billions of dollars, and a key element of that could be whether an item keeps smokers from lighting up.

But the tobacco and drug industries’ hottest contenders — snus, a traditional Swedish oral tobacco, as well as powdered tobacco tablets and nicotine lozenges — don’t ease smokers’ cravings for nicotine as well as cigarettes do, according the study by VCU researchers Caroline O. Cobb, Michael F. Weaver and Thomas Eissenberg.

Their report in the medical journal Tobacco Control is the first published study of how the smokeless products — into which the tobacco industry is investing billions of dollars — deliver nicotine and ease symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. Because the products are so new in the U.S., the researchers have not had enough time to look at whether they helped people quit or caused cancer or other disease.

“If you switch to these thinking you’re going to use them to replace cigarettes and they don’t deliver you the nicotine you’ve been getting and the withdrawal still makes you feel bad, what are you going to do? You’re going to go and grab a cigarette,” Eissenberg said.

And that means they will not be effective in reducing harm to smokers, he said.

That snus delivers less nicotine is no surprise to Swedish Match, the Stockholm-based tobacco giant that bases its U.S. operations in Chesterfield County. Swedish Match supports federal regulation of tobacco, hoping that snus will be recognized as a reduced-harm product.

“If you are a smoker, there is nothing that compares with a cigarette. . . . It has been designed to be the best nicotine delivery device,” said Lars-Erik Rutqvist, vice president of scientific affairs.

“Snus is not as good delivering nicotine, but it is good enough to have helped hundreds of thousands of people quit smoking,” he said.

. . .

Snus is a moist powdered tobacco, cured in air and pasteurized. Unlike snuff, users do not need to spit. The VCU study found snus delivers less nicotine than cigarettes — about one-third to one-seventh as much.

Powdered tobacco tablets marketed by Petersburg-based Star Tobacco deliver about one-sixth the nicotine that a cigarette does, while one of the largest-selling nicotine lozenges delivers a bit less than one-fourth the nicotine.

The smokers studied reported sharp drops in their craving for another cigarette after smoking. Their craving after smoking was roughly half the intensity of what they felt after using snus, tablets or lozenges, as measured by the researchers’ numerical scoring system.

When researchers asked whether the various products were pleasant, the smokeless items’ scores were roughly half those of cigarettes.

The researchers asked the study’s 28 participants to respond to 10 questions designed to measure their intention to smoke and their anticipation of relief having a cigarette. The participants used a sliding scale on a computer screen to respond to 35 more questions about how they were feeling.

Rutqvist said Sweden’s experience is that snus can help smokers quit.

Only about 11 percent of Swedish men smoke, while 19 percent use snus, according to Swedish National Institute of Public Health statistics. That compares with smoking rates ranging between 25 to 30 percent in most of the European Union and the United States.

“Without snus, based on European prevalence numbers, we’d have another 1.5 million smokers,” Rutqvist said, in a telephone interview from his Stockholm office.

Some American tobacco-control advocates say Sweden’s experience isn’t comparable because there is a long tradition of snus use in Sweden, dating back more than a century, as opposed to the limited introduction of snus here in the past few years. An entire generation of Swedes came to prefer snus during World War II, when cigarettes were hard to get, which affects the smoking-prevalence rates, they say.

. . .

Eissenberg and his colleagues have been studying the effects of what tobacco industry officials and tobacco-control experts alike call PREPs, for Potential Reduced Exposure Products, under a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Such products will be a focus of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under its new authority enacted last month to regulate tobacco.

They are already a focus of industry attention — in addition to Swedish Match’s efforts to introduce Americans to snus, Philip Morris USA is test-marketing snus in Dallas, Indianapolis and Arizona. In January, Philip Morris’s parent company, Henrico County-based Altria Group, bought UST Inc., the nation’s biggest snuff-producer, for $10.4 billion. Reynolds America Inc. is also marketing snus.

Altria spokesman Bill Phelps declined to comment on the study.

“However, we believe that scientific study of potentially reduced-harm products is an important area of scientific inquiry,” he said. “With the recently signed legislation giving the Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco products, there is now a regulatory structure to evaluate potential reduced-harm products.”

“Altria believes innovation in developing reduced-harm products is crucial to the success of the new law,” he added.


© Timesdispatch