Take a trip back in time while touring the Tobacco Valley Historical Village in Eureka. The village was established in 1971 when the Fewkes general store, Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church and the train depot were relocated from the old town of Rexford before it was flooded by Lake Koocanusa. In addition, the village houses the historic county library, Iowa Flats one-room school house, a hand-hewn log home complete with furnishings, a Great Northern caboose and a fire tower from Mount Roberts. All of the historic buildings and artifacts are from the Tobacco Valley area and date back to the 1880s and 1920s.

To aid in visualizing the life of settlers in the Tobacco Valley, each building is furnished with artifacts common to the area and time periods. See printing presses, photographs, home décor, school desks, books, utensils, Christmas treeing and logging tools among hundreds of other historical relics.

The Fewkes general store now serves as the Historical Village Museum. Become utterly lost in history while wandering the aisles of the store. Among the large collection of archival materials there is an extensive catalog of archived written and photographic resources.

How to get there: From Kalispell, take U.S. Highway 93 north to Eureka. The village is on the west side of the highway as you enter downtown Eureka.

By Lido Vizzutti, flatheadbeacon.com, June 14, 2010

The state could become the first to force retailers to put up graphic tobacco ads that warn customers about the dangers of smoking. Massachusetts could become the first state to force retailers to display — at their registers — graphic ads that warn customers about the effects of smoking, reports the Boston Globe.

Images in the ads would feature “ominously darkened lungs, damaged brains, and diseased teeth could start appearing before the end of the year in more than 9,000 convenience stores, pharmacies and gas stations, if a proposal by the state Department of Public Health is approved as expected,” writes the newspaper.

Also, retailers who refuse to post the signs within 2 feet of tobacco displays and registers could face fines of $100 to $300.

The ads mirror a New York City campaign that began last December. Massachusetts would use $316,000 in federal stimulus money from the CDC, notes the newspaper, “which will allow the state to provide the materials to retailers without charge.”

Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, commented that most retailers “will respond coolly” to another mandate.

“Do you really have to have additional graphic signage and multiple layers of it at each cash register?’’ said Hurst, adding, “If you warn on everything, those warnings become essentially meaningless. They already have signage on alcohol, tobacco, lottery, they have signage on price accuracy.’’

Philip Morris commented that such graphic warnings, if established, should be under the authority of the federal government, which has expanded authority to the FDA for the manufacture, distribution and retail sales of tobacco products as part of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, notes the newspaper.

The Massachusetts Public Health Council is expected to vote on the graphic posters in August.

ITALIANS are so worried about the state of their economy that they are returning in droves to their favourite vice – cigarettes.

More than two million people have started smoking again since the country’s authorities imposed a UK-style ban in 2005.

The law, which made smoking in all indoor public places illegal, bore results at first, with loyal customers choosing not to place owners of their favourite bars and restaurants at risk of massive fines.

But an initial 12 per cent drop in cigarette sales has been reversed, with the latest shock figures revealing that Italy now boasts a record 13 million smokers.

In 2009 alone, four ex-smokers in every 100 took up the habit again.

Last night experts blamed the recession, claiming that the added stress had caused ex-smokers to relapse, while unemployment and boredom were encouraging the young to take up smoking for the first time.

Pier Giorgio Zuccaro, of the health department’s alcohol, drugs and smoking institute, said: “The increase in the number of ex-smokers returning to the cigarette is partly linked to the economic crisis.”

The pressure of being out of work, the anxiety of finding a new job and the increase in free time were all factors drawing back people who kicked the habit, he added.

Lung specialist Dr Roberto Buffi agreed. “It is much easier for those with freer schedules to take up the little infernal cylinder,” he said.

Italy’s treasury is not even reaping the benefits of higher prices. Customs officials have seen a rise in bootleg cigarettes as their fellow countrymen go in search of a cheaper smoke.

In the first few months of 2009, the number of smokers increased by 3.4 per cent while over-the-counter tobacco sales went down by three per cent.

Official figures show that customs officers seized more than 170 tonnes of illegal tobacco, a 45 per increase over the previous year.

Most of the contraband comes from Eastern Europe – particularly neighbouring Slovenia – and the biggest busts have happened in border towns and ports like Genoa, Trieste and Naples.

Unlike the UK, there are more male smokers in Italy than female ones – 7.1 million, compared with 5.9 million women.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Argentine singer Sandro, whose gyrating pelvis and romantic ballads brought comparisons to Elvis Presley and made him the first Latin American to sing in Madison Square Garden, died Monday of complications from heart and lung transplant surgery. He was 64.

Sandro, who recorded 52 albums, acted in 16 movies and was awarded a Latin Grammy for career achievement in 2005, suffered from chronic lung disease that led to the Nov. 20 surgery. He died at the Italian Hospital in the Argentine city of Mendoza, said Dr. Claudio Burgos.

Born Roberto Sanchez in 1945 in Buenos Aires, he was the author of hits such as “Asi” (“Like That”) and “Dame Fuego” (“Give Me Fire”), and his rock and pop tunes won him fame across Latin America. In the 1970s he became the first Latin American singer to play New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Last year, in one of his final interviews, the singer blamed his smoking habit for his long illness.

“I am debilitated because I cannot move. My life is my bed, my spot in the dining room where I read the newspaper, and from there I do not move,” Sandro told Mitre radio of Buenos Aires. “I am to blame for the condition that I am in. I deserve it; I sought it out. I picked up this damn cigarette.”

As a youth, Roberto Sanchez began playing guitar along with Enrique Irigoytia, another boy from his neighborhood. The two formed several rock bands that sang Spanish versions of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Paul Anka hits.

But it wasn’t until he was lead guitarist for the band Los de Fuego that his fame took off.

During one performance, the lead singer lost his voice and another performer broke his guitar strings. Sanchez relinquished his guitar, took over singing duties and threw himself into dancing to the rock rhythm. The crowd went wild.

Sanchez became the group’s front man and adopted the moniker Sandro — a name his mother had wanted to give him at birth, but the Civil Registry refused.

Sandro y Los de Fuego made their TV debut in 1964 on “Circular Saturdays,” one of the nation’s most popular shows.

Sandro’s sensual, irreverent style, gyrating hips and black leather jacket sent young female fans into a frenzy; his “babes,” as they were known, would scream wildly, pull their hair and throw their undergarments onstage.

He soon earned the reputation as Argentina’s Elvis Presley.

The band recorded two albums before Sandro went solo, turning to a more melodic repertoire and entering the “romantic” genre with classics such as “Quiero Llenarme de Ti” (“I Want to Fill Myself With You”). In 1969, he made his silver screen debut in a movie with the same title.

A later film, “La Vida Continua” (“Life Goes On”), was a hit not only in Argentina but in much of Latin America.

In 1982, Sandro signed with a Puerto Rican TV channel to star in the telenovela “Fue sin querer” (“I Didn’t Mean to Do It”), which was popular among U.S. Latinos.

By 2001, he was forced to play a series of shows with the assistance of a tube attached to a microphone, to combat the effects of pulmonary emphysema.

Last year he went on a waiting list for a lung and heart transplant, which doctors said was the only way to save him from a disease that had already destroyed his vocal cords and restricted his movements.

He is survived by his wife, Olga Garaventa, whom he married in 2007. He had no children.

LONDON —People who smoke “skunk”-a potent form of cannabis-are almost seven times more likely to develop psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia than those who smoke “hash” or cannabis resin, according to research.
Scientists from King’s College London’s institute of psychiatry said their study was the first to look specifically at skunk, rather than normal cannabis, and suggested high levels of tretrahydrocannabinol, or THC, were to blame for the drug’s effect on mental health.

“The risk of psychosis is much greater among people who are frequent cannabis users, especially among those using skunk, rather than among occasional users of traditional hash,” said Marta di Forti, the psychiatrist who led the study.

Di Forti and colleagues, whose work was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry on Tuesday, studied 280 patients who had experienced a first psychotic episode and 174 healthy people from the area of London where the research was conducted.

They found that those who had been diagnosed with psychosis serious enough to last a week and warrant admission to hospital were twice as likely to have used cannabis for longer than five years and more than six times more likely to use it every day.

And among all those who had used cannabis-from both the healthy group and the psychotic group-those with psychosis were almost seven times more likely to use skunk, a finding the researchers described as “striking.”

The potential dangers of cannabis sparked a row between British politicians and scientists last month after the government sacked its chief drugs adviser for arguing that cannabis was no more harmful than alcohol.

Previous studies have suggested smoking cannabis can double the risk of developing psychosis, Di Forti said, but hers is the first to look at skunk-a drug she said was now taking over from cannabis resin in the illegal drug trade in many countries.

The two main constituents of cannabis are THC-the psychoactive ingredient, which can produce psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia-and cannabidiol.

The researchers said cannabidiol appeared to have anti-psychotic properties and could be counteracting the THC.

Skunk traded illegally in southeast London, where the study was carried out, has around 12 to 18 percent THC and 1.5 percent cannabidiol, while regular cannabis resin has an average THC of around 3.4 percent and an equal amount of cannabidiol.

“It seems that with hash the equal amounts of THC and cannabidiol may be reducing the effect, but with skunk that balance is not there,” Di Forti told Reuters after a briefing.

“Unfortunately skunk is displacing traditional cannabis preparations in many countries,” she said, adding that while skunk had been more expensive than hash in the past, it was now selling for a similar price-under $8.25 a gram.

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

A Swiss antismoking campaign group is concerned that weak legislation in the country is being exploited by Imperial Tobacco to sponsor a tennis tournament and promote its brand of cigarettes and other products. The company is the fourth largest tobacco company in the world.

Switzerland is a sanctuary for the tobacco industry, said Pascal Diethelm, director of the antismoking group OxyRomandie, ahead of the Davidoff Swiss indoor tournament, which starts on 31 October as part of the Association of Tennis Professionals World Tour 500. The tournament, which is one of the last tobacco sponsored tennis events in the world, is being used by the company to intensively advertise its Davidoff brand, on court hoardings and the uniforms of line judges and ball girls and boys, said Mr Diethelm.

The last time the tournament was held in Basel in 2008, the “players drowned in an advertising soup for Davidoff,” he said.

He added, “At the end of the match the young ball boys and ball girls received a medal from Roger Federer in recognition of having served the cause of Davidoff so well. Each medal bore the Davidoff logo in order to make sure that these potential future smokers will know which cigarette brand to choose when they start smoking.”

OxyRomandie is appealing to the federal tribunal, Switzerland’s supreme court, against a ruling from the Independent Complaints Authority for Radio and Television that Swiss television is allowed to show the tournament even though Swiss law bans tobacco advertising on television.

After pressure from a similar tobacco control group in France, the French based television sports channel Eurosport, which was the official international media partner of the tournament, has refused to broadcast it. Even so, the tournament is expected to be broadcast in 70 or 80 countries and to attract one billion people worldwide because the organisers have replaced Eurosport with the German sports channel DSF.

Unesco has also reacted after the tournament’s organisers sent a press release that announced the charity as its beneficiary of corporate donations made on the basis of the number of aces served during the round of qualifying matches on 1 November. Unesco said that it was not consulted about its participation and was not in a position to accept funds raised from an event related to the tobacco industry. It has asked to have its name withdrawn from all communications. Unesco is part of the United Nations Ad Hoc Interagency Task Force on Tobacco Control, which was established in 1999 to intensify support for tobacco control worldwide.

The World Health Organization’s framework convention on tobacco control, which came into force in February 2005, has been ratified by 166 member countries of the United Nations. Notable exceptions include Switzerland and the Czech Republic. The treaty demands that countries take measures to reduce the demand for tobacco, including putting limits on advertising, promotion, and sponsorship.

Mr Diethelm described prospects for a change in the law on tobacco advertising in Switzerland as “quite bleak.”

“We are campaigning for ratification [of the WHO framework], which is a medium term objective,” but this will not happen before 2013 at the earliest, he said. “The Swiss system of direct democracy is such that Switzerland will have to first adopt legislation compatible with WHO’s convention before being able to ratify, otherwise citizens or other groups might challenge the constitutionality of the ratification, for example, by launching a national referendum. A defeat in a referendum could have severe consequences because it could freeze tobacco control for at least 15 years. This would also create a situation where the tobacco multinationals would not miss exploiting, in their enterprise of making Switzerland a sanctuary from which they plan and launch their worldwide operations.”

By Zosia Kmietowicz, Bmj

AS this year’s Tak Nak anti-smoking campaign enters the final laps, it culminates in showing not just the physical effects of smoking on the smokers but also the emotional toll on both the smokers and their families.

Spencer Azizul Sdn Bhd, the advertising agency tasked with developing the Health Ministry campaign, began the year with graphic ads depicting diseases of smokers.

It has put in more ammunition since July. Spencer Azizul has introduced statistics into the Tak Nak print ads to better convince sceptics and has launched a three-minute TV commercial – the longest TV spot it has ever done.

Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai told the agency that he wanted the commercial to show not only what smoking did to the smoker but also the effects of smoking on his family and others around him.

“The smoker (with disease) is not the only one who is suffering. That is the kind of message we wanted to send out,” Spencer Azizul general manager Mohammed Iqbal tells StarBizWeek.

Acclaimed movie director Kabir Bhatia (Cinta, Sepi and Setem) was identified and tapped to direct the commercial, which plays like a mini-movie covering the lives of different people affected adversely by smoking.

Art director Alvin Liew says: “Kabir Bhatia is well-known for being able to bring out emotions from the actors. If you look at his movies, you’d think he is the most capable person to bring that out. If we had gotten a commercial director instead, it would’ve been just another (visually pretty) TV commercial.”

The TV spot, which strives for realism, captures a scene at a hospital as a nurse makes her rounds and witnesses smokers of various races suffering from mouth cancer, lung cancer and gangrene. Through her eyes, one sees how the smokers’ illnesses are not only affecting themselves but also their family members.

A man with lung cancer apologises to his pregnant wife, knowing that he will not be there with her to see their baby grow up. A woman with mouth cancer struggles to communicate with her young son, who is scared of her due to her badly-deformed mouth and who cannot understand what she is trying to say.

The commercial ends with the nurse walking out of the hospital and seeing her young son putting into his shirt pocket a box of cigarettes that he has just found. She tells him: “Don’t break my heart.”

The boy crumples and throws away the box. The last frame says “Smoking destroys lives”.

The commercial, which made its debut on Aug 28, will finish its run next week.

According to Iqbal, there would be no shorter version because “we feel that we have a story to tell, so we’d tell it in the nicest manner possible.”

Initially, Spencer Azizul had planned to do three one-minute commercials on lung cancer, gangrene and mouth cancer. But it then decided it would be a waste of money to do three different commercials.

“Secondly, how would we buy airtime? When do I run the gangrene commercial and when do I run the other commercials? You (the viewer) may be able to watch the gangrene ad, for example, but you may forget the lung cancer ad. So we decided to do a commercial that has all three diseases together.”

Due to its length and budget constraint, the ad cannot be shown frequently, so the agency had to be very selective in the programmes chosen and the periods to air the commercial. It is mostly run during prime time.

Senior copywriter Juliet Tan says now that the ad showcases how families suffer, hopefully the family members of smokers would urge the smokers to stop. “If they get sick, the family members will have to take care of them.”

Spencer Azizul has also put this commercial on YouTube, and it has received some 47,000 views so far, with about 30,000 from Malaysia. Some people put it on Facebook and it has spread on the Net.

“You have to talk to the young generation in a language that they understand. They’re not the Buletin Utama and Drama Minggu Ini viewers. They’re more on YouTube, Friendster and Facebook,” Iqbal explains.

Besides the TV commercial, the Tak Nak campaign also has a print ad showing the positive effects from stopping smoking.

Iqbal says the last phase of the campaign in November-December will involve a nationwide research with a sample of more than 2,000.

“Once we get the research figures, we’ll see how the whole campaign fared. There had been research after phase one too, and based on the results, we changed the campaign,” he adds.

Account manager Liew Mun Tip says the agency included statistics in the recent Tak Nak ads because people had said, “Is this picture of diseases (in the previous ads) real?” “The statistics prove a point and make the ad campaign more believable,” she says.

The agency also uses radio. It is running a quit-smoking campaign challenge on Hitz.FM.

Hitz.FM asked listeners to participate in a 21-day challenge of abstaining from smoking. The five selected listeners stand a chance to win prizes like a Nintendo Wii, a breathalyser and three-month supply of nicotine gum.

Spencer Azizul only has the Tak Nak contract for a year, and it hopes the campaign will continue in the present form even if it is not reappointed as the Tak Nak agency next year.

Executive director Michael Tang says: “I always feel that for any Government campaign, it should be sustained – not just run for a year and then change to the next campaign without continuity. Sustaining a campaign is like building a brand; it takes years for any campaign to be successful.

“For us to be effective in the long term, we must be able to sustain this campaign until the next generation who lights up knows the side effects.”


By M. HAFIDZ MAHPAR

The success of Japan Tobacco’s Smoking Manners for Adults campaign is debatable, though the Tokyo Subway authority’s series of monthly Subway Manners posters proves imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. For JT, however, everything must come to an end – much like lit cigarettes – so let’s enjoy ads 61 through 73!

It only takes fingers to throw it away. It takes the whole body to clean it up

This ad reminds me of “Watching The Detectives” by Elvis Costello… “It only took my little finger to blow you away”. Elvis, if you’re reading this, I suggest you have your agent contact Japan Tobacco right away. You just might be This Year’s Model.

Most of the things dropped around the plants weren’t flower petals

This is serious stuff in a country that reveres Cherry Blossom Viewing to the point where TV newscasters chart the annual progress of the cherry blossom “front” as it sweeps northward every spring. On the other hand, anyone surveying a park the morning after the average Hanami (cherry blossom viewing party) will see much more than flower petals carpeting the ground.

Soaking in the rain, a cigarette butt grows, and grows

Almost Haiku-esque, this ad is exquisite in its graphic and textual harmony. An additional cool feature is the way the upper border of the frame condenses into raindrops that fall upon the discarded cigarette butt. You almost WANT to see this process in action… er, wait a minute!