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

Susan Albano took her first drag at 15 in a Brooklyn school yard. By her early 20s, she was addicted.

The 51-year-old Prince’s Bay woman — who sometimes plans her day around where and when she can smoke, which even she admits is absurd — has tried to kick her pack-a-day habit “a million different ways” ever since.

Hypnosis and acupuncture failed. She was allergic to the adhesive in nicotine patches, and Chantix — a smoking-cessation medicine — made her sick. Cold turkey didn’t work either.

Last week, Mrs. Albano took her first puff on an electronic cigarette — simply known as an e-cigarette.

The battery-powered, tobacco-free, nicotine-delivery device looks like the real thing, right down to the odorless vapor mist. And while e-cigarettes are being criticized by anti-smoking groups and monitored by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), they are embraced by large numbers trying to quit or avoid bans on lighting up in public.

“My sister got it first, and me and Mom are trying it now,” Mrs. Albano said after purchasing a starter kit in the Staten Island Mall at the Smoke Anywhere Kiosk, a cart decorated with gold ribbons to match the product packaging, glossy boutique-style shopping bags and glamour shots of e-cigarette users who might make the Marlboro Man jealous.

“My sister had some spots the doctors thought could have been lung cancer. We just got the good news that it’s not. She had a kidney removed due to cancer and we thought it was spreading. It was kind of a wake-up call to all of us.”

Starter kits, which typically include the battery-powered cigarette, replaceable cartridges and chargers, range in price from $70 to $150 at mall kiosks or online retailers.

When the user inhales, a heating element is activated, vaporizing the nicotine solution, which comes in a variety of strengths and flavors.

The tip glows red, imitating a real cigarette, but without the odor or secondhand and tar-filled smoke. E-cigarettes can be used in airports, shopping malls, restaurants and movie theaters –or anywhere a cigarette can’t.

“We think this is a reliable and safe alternative to smoking,” said Matt Salmon, president of the Electronic Cigarette Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group representing an industry on track to make $100 million this year.

“It gives smokers the nicotine they crave, but without all the known carcinogens found in combustible cigarettes.”

TOO MANY UNKNOWNS?
But some see e-cigarettes as nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

The American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids have joined Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) in calling on the FDA to remove them from the market until they can be tested.

Critics also charge children may be attracted by the e-cigarette’s novelty, accessibility and its chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, cherry or mint flavorings.

“These devices haven’t been examined by any government agency,” said Alberta Brescia, regional vice president of the Staten Island American Cancer Society. “We don’t know how the ingredients are affecting the body.

“Many smokers who use [e-cigarettes] also continue to smoke cigarettes, and they are under the false impression that because they are smoking fewer cigarettes, it’s OK to keep smoking.”

The FDA has banned several shipments of e-cigarettes from coming into the country — mostly from China, where they have been manufactured for the last five years — saying the product is a drug-delivery device requiring agency approval before being legally marketed and sold in the United States.

There is also no scientific data documenting the safety of e-cigarettes, a spokeswoman for the agency said.

But Salmon said his group’s members sell e-cigarettes strictly as an alternative that allows smokers to get their nicotine in a way that is more palatable, not as smoking-cessation products that need federal regulation. They also do not sell to minors, though many non-members play by their own rules.

NOT TAKING CREDIT
“There are a lot of anecdotes out there about people kicking the habit, but those aren’t claims we’re making,” said Salmon, a non-smoker who as an Arizona congressman pushed through a state law that was among the nation’s first public-smoking bans.

Some companies have taken the FDA to court, arguing the agency has no jurisdiction over e-cigarettes because they are not designed to help people quit.

“You’ve got special interests out there that see us as a threat or maybe even a displacing technology and they’re trying to do everything they can to gear up the FDA and the powers that be here in Washington to protect them,” said Salmon, noting his association is not involved in any of the pending litigation.

“Withholding the e-cigarette from the market is like telling someone who chooses to smoke that his or her only legal option is to smoke tobacco,” he said. “My feeling is government should try to help people have an alternative, not take them away.”

For Mrs. Albano, an executive assistant to the CEO of Thomson Reuters in Manhattan, there is only one reason to power up her e-smoke.

“I think the concept is just perfect for people who want to quit — and I want to quit.”
© Silive

Electronic cigarettes, all the rage overseas, have made it to the Wiregrass.

Vaporized cigarettes from China are now distributed by a company in Ozark. Save A Smoker was founded four months ago by three smokers, two of whom have stopped smoking and completely converted to vaping.

Vaping is the new smoking, without the toxins, carcinogens and chemicals produced when tobacco burns. It does emit a smoke, or vapor, which according to company co-founder Eric Slaick, does not have any harmful effects and is not considered second-hand smoke.

“I was introduced to this product while visiting my brother in Fort Lauderdale. I started doing the research and found it is extremely popular in places like the U.K.,” Slaick said. “Once I started using it, I fell in love with it.”

Both Slaick and his brother, Jason Slaick, have quit smoking by switching to the MaxxVapor Mini. Their partner, Eric Slaick’s brother-in-law, Shannon Thompson, has not given up cigarettes altogether, but has cut back from a pack-and-a-half to four or five cigarettes a day.

The electronic cigarette consists of three parts, which attach. There is a battery, which powers the cigarette, a center vaporizer or heating element, and a cartridge on the end filled with liquid. When puffed, the end lights up blue, but there is no flame and no fire.

The liquid contains nicotine, flavoring, and propylene glycol that produces a vapor mist that looks like smoke and has been deemed safe for use in food, cosmetics and medicines.

The MaxxVapor comes in a variety of colors, including black, brown, white, red, pink, purple and blue. Vapor users can choose their strength of nicotine — high, medium, low or none. Flavors include vanilla, cherry, chocolate, banana, coffee, tobacco, and menthol.

Vapors aren’t licensed as smoking cessation devices by the Food and Drug Administration, but are considered smoking alternatives to a product associated with lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema.

“The main problem with smoking is not the nicotine, which is addictive, but it is the 4,000-plus chemicals that result from burning tobacco,” Slaick said.

Cigarettes are also expensive. A 62-cent increase in federal taxes, approved by Congress in February, raised the federal tax to $1.01 per pack on April 1.

Locally, a carton containing 10 packs sells for around $36. Purchased individually, a pack of cigarettes costs around $4.50.

“Electronic cigarettes are far less expensive than tobacco,” Slaick said. “A pack-per-day smoker will easily see savings the first month. The cost is $120 to $150 monthly for cigarettes versus $40 to $60 per month using electronic cigarettes.”

The starter kit retails for $69.95 and comes with 10 vapor cartridges, and comes with a 14-day money back guarantee. Replacement cartridges are $1 each and are equivalent to a half a pack of cigarettes. The refill liquid is $10 and is equivalent to a carton of cigarettes.

“The savings, plus being able to smoke anywhere with no smoke, no carcinogens, no tar, no odor, no flame, and no ashes, have made this popular,” he said. “People are amazed at how much it tastes and feels like smoking.”

The World Health Organization has named tobacco one of the greatest public health threats of the 21st century. Nearly 50 million Americans smoke cigarettes.

© Dothaneagle

Shelly Kiser of the American Lung Association in Ohio was all set to give a presentation on Camel Orbs — a dissolvable tobacco product slightly bigger than an Altoid mint — to the Ohio School Nurses Association. All she needed was a prop.

So Kiser, director of advocacy for her organization and no great fan of Camel Orbs, headed into a Columbus gas station earlier this year and asked for a container of Orbs.

They gave it to her for free.

For smokers long confined to standing outside in crummy weather to get their nicotine fix, Camel Orbs is an alternative that keeps users out of the elements.

For Sen. Sherrod Brown and public health advocates, it’s yet another diabolical strategy to get kids hooked on smoking.

Brown, D-Ohio, this week successfully added a measure calling for a quick Federal Drug Administration study of Orbs and other dissolvable tobacco products to a larger bill that would, for the first time, put tobacco products under FDA regulatory authority. The bill, with the amendment, passed the committee last week and now awaits full U.S. Senate approval. It passed the House in April.

Brown compares Orbs to candy, and said the fact that the products can be passed off as breath mints is another way to lure kids into becoming tobacco addicts at a young age.

“It is criminal to me that they market to children the way they do,” he said.

But David Howard, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds, said the product, like all tobacco products, is legal only for adults over the age of 18. The product is currently not available in the Dayton area.

R.J. Reynolds introduced Orbs in Columbus, Indianapolis and Portland, Ore., earlier this year, and the company said early feedback has been positive. Orbs, he said, “meet the societal expectation of no second-hand smoke, no spitting, and in the case of dissolvables, no litter.”

He said they’re hardly candy. They are made of finely milled tobacco, and designed for adults.

“The bottom line is these are tobacco products,” he said. “They are clearly marked as tobacco products, they are marketed as tobacco products and they carry the same warnings as tobacco products.”

He said similar products — Ariva and Stonewall — have been on the market since earlier this decade with little protest.

Still, he said he welcomes Brown’s amendment and any study of their product.

Bill Godshall of a group called SmokeFree Pennsylvania counts himself as one of the defenders of Orbs. He compares the products to Nicorette or Commit Lozenges and cites studies indicating they are safer than cigarettes.

“What this comes down to is people fighting for the same market,” he said.

But Brown cites studies indicating a single Orb has between 60 and 300 times the amount of tobacco contained in a single cigarette. And Greg Connolly, a professor of the practice of public health at Harvard University, calls Orb products “nicotine on training wheels.”

R.J. Reynolds, Connolly said, “is just trying to expand the options for nicotine delivery products for the American public.”

Smoking a cigarette for the first time, can be a deeply uncomfortable experience for a teenager, Connolly said. There’s the smoke, for one thing, as well as the coughing and the taste. By turning it into a mint-like product — in mint and cinnamon flavors — they’ve made nicotine addiction a more pleasurable experience, he said.

Connolly said Brown’s amendment would allow the FDA to begin the studies necessary to take Orbs off the market. And unless the FDA starts regulating tobacco, he warns, the tobacco industry will continue to get more sophisticated in how it delivers nicotine. If that doesn’t happen, he said, “the tobacco companies own the future.”

Kiser said despite the fact that the products are only legal for adults, school nurses have reported finding packages of Orbs in the trash.

To her, they’re dangerous because they can be consumed in front of parents and teachers without the adults knowing what’s going on.

“Unless a parent knows the exact shape of it, they wouldn’t suspect anything,” she said.
Source: Ohio-share.coxnewsweb

Oregon’s junior senator is taking a stand against “tobacco candy” – smokeless, dissolvable tobacco. RJ Reynolds is test-marketing “Camel Orbs” in candy tobaccoPortland, as well as Indianapolis, Ind., and Columbus, Ohio. The Orbs come in two flavors: “mellow” (similar to cinnamon or caramel) and “fresh” (mint). RJ Reynolds plans to introduce “Sticks” and “Strips” later this year.
Merkley and fellow Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio carried the amendment. The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions approved the amendment Tuesday as part of the landmark legislation to allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco.

According to a news release from Merkley’s office, the Indiana Poison Control Center estimates dissolvable tobacco products such as the Camel Orbs contain between 60-300 percent of the nicotine in one cigarette.

The Merkley-Brown amendment would require the new Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee to immediately study the public health effects of tobacco candy and report to the FDA on its findings in less than two years. The committee will provide the FDA with all the information it needs about the public health impact of these tobacco candy products, particularly the risks to children, so it can make sure tobacco companies aren’t able to use them to hook a new generation of kids on deadly products.

The nation’s top cigarette maker is moving quickly to strengthen its business in tobacco products such as snuff and cigars as cigarette volumes erode, the top executive for Altria Group Inc. told shareholders yesterday.

“Since the shareholder meeting in May of last year, Altria has continued to transform itself as adult tobacco consumer preferences have evolved,” said Michael E. Szymanczyk, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer.

Altria, the parent company of cigarette maker Philip Morris USA, wants to “efficiently and moderately” grow its income and market share in cigarettes, focusing on its top brand Marlboro, while also propelling its new business in smokeless tobacco, Szymanczyk said.

About 175 shareholders attended Altria’s annual meeting at the Greater Richmond Convention Center. Shareholders re-elected nine directors to the company’s board and rejected six stockholder proposals that the company’s leadership opposed, including one on executive pay and another on removing nicotine from tobacco products.

In January, Altria added smokeless tobacco to its portfolio by acquiring UST Inc., the top U.S. maker of moist snuff, for $10.4 billion.

The deal gives Altria “immediate scale” in the moist smokeless category, which has seen volume growth of about 7 percent per year, Szymanczyk said. In contrast, Philip Morris’ cigarette volumes declined about 3.2 percent in 2008, even as Marlboro gained market share and Philip Morris saw its revenue rise 1.5 percent to $18.8 billion.

The cost of smoking rose again in the spring, as cigarette companies bumped prices in advance of an April 1 increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes from 39 cents to $1.01 per pack. In the smokeless category, however, Altria has reduced prices in an effort to build market share.

As cigarette volume declines, the company is consolidating its cigarette-related operations, and it is combining sales forces and administrative functions for its cigar, smokeless tobacco and cigarette businesses to save about $1.5 billion by 2011. “Because of these efforts, a number of employees have separated from our companies over the last year,” Szymanczyk said, without specifying the number. “I want to thank them for their service to Altria and their commitment to the company’s success.”

Szymanczyk said the company continues to support legislation in Congress to allow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, but he faced criticism from several anti-tobacco activists at the meeting. They proposed four resolutions for a shareholders vote, including one to have the company make any future products “non-addictive” by reducing nicotine content.

“This company refuses to make non-addictive products because then kids and adults would quit smoking,” said Anne Morrow Donley, a tobacco-control activist from Richmond who spoke in favor of the proposal during the meeting. She said the FDA legislation before Congress would not permit the agency to mandate the removal of nicotine from tobacco products.

The proposal failed, with 96 percent of the votes cast opposing it. The five other stockholder proposals also failed, including one to give shareholders more say on executive pay by allowing them to vote at each annual meeting on an advisory resolution on the compensation of top executives. That one was narrowly defeated, with about 53 percent of votes cast opposed.

Source: Timesdispatch