Pharmacies in Concord were notified in late December that the Board of Health officially voted to ban the sale of tobacco products in health care institutions in town beginning Feb. 14. On Dec. 20, the Concord Board of Health voted 5-0 to ban the sale of tobacco products in healthcare institutions and in retail establishments that operate or have pharmacies or drug stores within them, making Concord the 25th town in Massachusetts to adopt the regulation. Out of the three pharmacies in town: Rite Aid, West Concord Pharmacy and CVS, the West Concord Pharmacy is the only pharmacy that currently doesn’t sell tobacco products.

Ray Dinno, co-owner of the West Concord Pharmacy, said the pharmacy decided not to renew its tobacco license about four years ago because selling tobacco went against what the pharmacy is all about.
“We are promoting health and wellness in our pharmacies,” Dinno said. “We sell natural products and we are promoting people to eat well, take their vitamins and be healthy. Selling tobacco goes against what we believe in and we didn’t want to have that.”
Although Dinno didn’t know the exact numbers, he said a “very small” percentage of the pharmacy’s sales actually came from the sale of tobacco products.
“I would say about 99 percent of the people who shop here were happy we stopped selling tobacco,” Dinno said. “There were a few old timers who were coming here for years to buy their cigarettes but they understood why we were doing it.”
Rite Aid’s corporate office declined to comment. CVS’s corporate office did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Products including the patch and nicotine gum will continue to be sold at pharmacies as FDA-approved cessation medicines, according to a press release from the Greater Boston Tobacco-Free Community Partnership.
Other cities and towns that have appointed the proposed regulation include Westford, Southborough, Wellesley and Lancaster.
According to the Greater Boston Tobacco-Free Community Partnership, Boston was the first city in Massachusetts to ban the sale of tobacco in pharmacies three years ago, and today more than 25 percent of the state’s population is covered by such a ban.
Susan Rask, Concord’s public health director, said since the vote, neither she nor the Health Department have heard from anyone in the town or from any pharmacies regarding the ban.
“The pharmacies were well aware,” Rask said. “Three weeks before the public hearing the pharmacies were sent notices and information about the proposed regulation.”
Rask said the pharmacies, both at the corporate and local levels, were invited to submit comments in writing or appear at the actual public hearing, but continued saying none of them took advantage of those opportunities.
“So to say I’m surprised I haven’t heard anything, no not really,” Rask said. “We weren’t doing this to surprise anyone here.”
In Concord, any healthcare institution violating the regulation will be fined $200, and each day any violation exists will be seen as a separate offense, according to the regulation.
Currently 13 companies in Massachusetts have been affected by the ban including 79 CVS drugstores, 37 Rite Aid and Brooks pharmacies, 44 Walgreens, 14 Stop&Shop supermarkets and 57 independent pharmacies in Massachusetts, according to the Massachusetts Municipal Association.

Retailers in the Wisconsin Rapids area were far less likely to sell tobacco to minors in 2011 than during the previous year, according to a group that fights youth smoking. One Wisconsin Rapids business out of 25 sold tobacco to a minor during compliance checks this year, said Dave Wille, central Wisconsin coordinator for Wisconsin Wins, a nonprofit agency that conducted the inspections. A year ago, two of 19 businesses in the city sold tobacco to minors during the checks.

In Nekoosa, Port Edwards and Grand Rapids, Wisconsin Wins checked seven businesses and one sold to a minor. A year ago, four out of 10 businesses checked in those communities sold tobacco to minors.

In all of Wood County, three of 55 businesses the group checked sold tobacco, for a compliance rate of 94.5 percent. Last year, 10 of 51 sold to minors, a compliance rate of 83 percent.

Wisconsin Wins sent teams of minors to stores to order cigarettes products. Adults, including police, supervise the teenagers, Wille said. In Wisconsin, people must be 18 years old to buy tobacco products.

Wille said he is happy with Wood County’s 2011 results and the local trend.

“Rapids showed marked improvement; there was only one sale,” he said. “I think the retailers really are getting the message of keeping tobacco out of the hands of minors, and they’re getting that message to the clerks.”

Wille said the most encouraging number is the estimated 20 percent drop across central Wisconsin in the number of businesses that failed compliance checks since the program began in 2002.

Although he attributed that success to better education, another important factor is technology.

Many new checkout machines require the entry of the birth date from the buyer’s driver’s license.

“The clerk either does it or the ID is scanned. The machine will show ‘no sale’ if the person isn’t old enough to purchase tobacco products,” Wille said.

Such is the case at the four Baltus Bread & Butter shops locations. Company co-owner John Baltus said the new technology alerts employees and has prevented illegal sales.

“But we also train our employees very carefully. This is a serious issue and we want to make sure they understand that,” Baltus said.

First offense for selling tobacco to a minor is a $114 fine and citation, said Lorrie Krokstrom, Marshfield Police Department staff services supervisor. The second offense within one year of the first offense is a $177 fine and citation.

The majority of illegal sales during compliance checks were attributed to sales clerks misreading IDs, Wille said.

Teenagers working with state investigators were able to purchase tobacco at 14.6 percent of the establishments they visited over a year, Attorney General Tom Horne said Wednesday. “Clearly we need to redouble our efforts to get the message to clerks that they must not sell tobacco to kids,” Horne said. Of 1,979 stores visited during fiscal 2011 as part of a program dubbed Counterstrike, 288 sold tobacco to the underage volunteers, he said.

The program is a collaboration of Horne’s office and the Arizona Department of Health Services.

It’s illegal in Arizona to sell tobacco products to those under 18. Store clerks who do so are subject to a fine of up to $300.

“Most of these people knew what they’re doing,” said Bertha Adame, one of three task force volunteers who joined Horne at a news conference. “They weren’t just mom-and-pop shops.”

Adame, who at age 18 is now too old for the task force, said she signed on because she considers smoking a nasty habit that traps people.

“Because I knew it was something that had to be stopped, I thought just by me doing it I would make a difference,” she said.

It was easier for the volunteers to purchase tobacco products in rural areas than metropolitan areas, Horne said, with Apache, Coconino, Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz, Navajo and Pinal garnering failure rates of 25 percent or higher. Maricopa and Pima counties reflect the statewide average.

Horne said the results suggest a need to store employees in rural areas.

“I’m very passionate about making sure at least that if people start smoking they do it as grown-ups and not as kids when they have less discretion and less ability to decide what’s really good for them, he said.

Horne also unveiled a 30-second public service announcement showing store clerks denying tobacco products to minors and warning of the fine clerks could face.

“This is a very important program, and I want to see us do a good job of bringing the failure rate as close to zero as we possibly can,” he said.

Illegal tobacco sales to minors in California have fallen to their lowest level on record in California. The California Department of Public Health released data today that shows tobacco sales to minors at retail outlets happened at a rate of 5.6 percent – the lowest in the survey’s 16-year history. The information comes from a survey the state started conducting in 1995 when it first began monitoring illegal sales of tobacco.

Back then, teens participating in the survey were able to buy tobacco products during 37 percent of tobacco purchase attempts.

Still, there are a few store types with surprising high illegal sales rates. The biggest offender of illegal tobacco sales to youth are non-traditional tobacco retailers such as deli/meat markets (11.6 percent) followed by discount/gift stores (8.3 percent). Traditional tobacco sellers actually had the lowest illegal sales rates with liquor stores (1.3 percent) being the toughest on sales followed by convenience stores with and without gas (5.3 and 4.9 percent respectively) and tobacco shops (6.5 percent).

Tobacco products have changed. Once simply rolled in paper and sold as cigarettes or cigars, tobacco now comes in many styles, packages and flavors. Tobacco products sold in some Summit County stores now resemble tic-tacs, dissolvable strips and chewy sticks. They are brightly packaged, infused with fruity flavors and targeting one specific audience, say representatives of the Summit Prevention Alliance: kids.

And more than 60 percent of Summit County’s underage smokers say they have no problem getting their hands on those products.

“When our own kids in our high school are telling us it’s easy to get tobacco, we need to do something,” Summit County Commissioner Thomas Davidson said.

Surveys of kids show the problem is worse in Summit County and surrounding areas than elsewhere in the state. Summit’s kids, according to the answers given by local youth, smoke more frequently, use smokeless tobacco more often and start using tobacco at a younger age than the state average. The numbers in all of those categories have also increased from 2008 surveys, according to data provided by the Summit Prevention Alliance.

“That’s how addiction really begins,” said Carli Seeba, the tobacco education coordinator for the SPA.

For county officials, the numbers and statistics were discouraging.

“It’s not fun to look at a map of the state and see your county colored in in dark red with the highest percentages of underage smoking,” Davidson said.

But the right action to take to turn around such alarming trends is not immediately clear. Tobacco products are an important source of revenue for many local small businesses and the county doesn’t have a lot of extra funding immediately available to address the problem.

Generally, both the Summit Board of County Commissioners and Sheriff John Minor are committed to increasing compliance checks on tobacco retailers in the short term. But the problem, the commissioners said, may require a more permanent solution.

“I think we need more than spending money on compliance checks,” Commissioner Karn Stiegelmeier said. “(We need) some mechanism in place, some licensure or registration that makes in much easier for us to have some real clout that forces compliance. I don’t know what that is yet.”

She said the county isn’t interested in imposing heavy tobacco licensing fees for retailers, but does need to have a way to take quick, decisive action against anyone who sells tobacco products to individuals under the age of 18.

For now, officials say, the county is moving forward on stepping up compliance checks on tobacco retailers. Even that process will require time and dollars from the Summit County Sheriff’s Office.

“Resources are scarce,” Minor said. “We’re going to look at it, but we haven’t made a decision on when to start (the checks). I can tell you that it’s going to happen. So brace yourself.”

Meanwhile, the Summit Prevention Alliance has ongoing community outreach programs and continues to work at the schools to educate kids on tobacco.

The City Council wants to limit the number of tobacco stores in South Beloit and ban the sale of otherwise legal drug paraphernalia. South Beloit has been somewhat of a hotbed for tobacco stores thanks to the comparatively high cigarette taxes just north of city limits in Wisconsin. The small border town has six tobacco discount stores, which almost exclusively sell smokes and smoking accessories. That doesn’t include gas stations or convenience stores that have tobacco licenses.

Some of the tobacco discount retailers sell glass pipes, bongs and rolling papers used for marijuana and other drugs. Some are selling types of incense that can be easily misused to get high.

While the sale of such items is perfectly legal, city officials want them out of South Beloit.

On July 18, the City Council was prepared to pass a nonbinding ordinance that expressed the city’s opposition to the sale of property commonly used for drugs. The ordinance was put on hold after City Attorney Roxanne Sosnowski said the council may be able to put an outright ban on drug paraphernalia.

“It appears the council would be able to pass an ordinance prohibiting the sale of some of these items,” Sosnowski said. “This would allow our police department to go in and speak with the owners of the retail tobacco shops and have some of these items removed from shelves.”

Sosnowski said she wasn’t sure whether it would be legal to limit the number of tobacco retailers in the city.

“It’s a gray area,” she said. “If it were challenged, we may lose.”

Mayor Mike Duffy said that he’d still like to try to limit the number of those stores in the city.

“It doesn’t sound real hopeful, but we’re going to do what we can,” he said. “We don’t need any more popping up, and I understand they’re businesses and we need tax money, but some businesses are harmful.”

Annual sales tax revenue for South Beloit has dropped each of the past four years. In 2010, the city generated nearly $500,000 less than it did in 2007. So far in 2011, sales tax revenue has been worse than it was in 2010.

Commissioner John LaMendola doesn’t believe limiting tobacco stores will affect local tax revenue.

“It’s not a question of bringing more business in the city, it’s just dividing up the business that’s already here,” he said. “You got so many customers, period. If a guy comes in and opens up another store he’s not bringing more people here — it’s the same people that are buying their cigarettes.”

Sales of tobacco have fetched $345.2 million (R2.4 billion) in Zimbabwe so far this year, with a seasonal average of $2.78 a kilogram. The country’s tobacco statistics are extraordinary with tens of thousands of new growers, most working land seized from white farmers in the past 11 years. New small-scale and larger black growers now make up the vast majority of tobacco producers. Together with the few white farmers who remain on their land and some new younger white growers renting land from Zanu-PF land invaders, they are now pushing production towards two-thirds of the annual output before the land grab began.

In 2004 there were about 4 000 mostly small-scale black tobacco growers and a handful of large-scale black tobacco producers.

In the 2010/11 season, industry insiders say there are about 47 000 registered growers. Among these are a few hundred black growers, also on land seized from white farmers, who are considered large-scale growers planting between 20ha and 50ha and producing world class leaf.

Banks will not lend to most new farmers because they do not have title deeds as security for the loans.

International tobacco merchants advance money to growers and oversee production, often using evicted white growers as trainers.

“We were very good tobacco farmers and it is in our interests for these new farmers to do well,” says one former tobacco farmer who lost his land in central Zimbabwe in 2003. “Our company lends many of these new farmers money. We watch and help supervise that crop from the beginning to the end because if we don’t, and the farmer fails, then we will be out of jobs.

“The rules are changing. We used to insist we only assisted growers on undisputed land. But now the waters are muddied. All of us are asking fewer and fewer questions about who has the title deeds and we are just getting on with ensuring our growers do well.

“We know we will never get our farms back and we are just hoping for compensation… but I want to stay in Zimbabwe, it’s my home, and I am proud of some of the growers.”

He asks that neither he nor his company be identified.

Peter Garaziwa, 55, was a potato farmer in eastern Zimbabwe’s mountains until 2004 when he was given white-owned land in a prime tobacco area, Nyazura, south of his traditional home. This year, he says, he will have produced 32 bales of Virginia tobacco produced on a farm known as Gazala.

He does not know what happened to the white farmer, and nor does he care, but says he uses barns built by the former owner to cure his tobacco. “They are good barns, but we all have to share as there isn’t enough space.”

He is one of several hundred new farmers resident and producing on Gazala. “This is my second year selling as I was studying how to grow it for a year before I started.”

Most leaf grown by the new small-scale tobacco farmers is lower grade tobacco, and 50 percent of the crop is bought by the Chinese Tobacco Company.

Before 2000 Zimbabwe regularly produced more than 220 million kilograms of tobacco a year, most of it grown by white farmers. After land seizures the crop size fell each year until by 2009 Zimbabwe was producing less than a third of what it had regularly produced for 40 years.

Industry insiders said this year Zimbabwe would produce about 135 million kilograms, much of it by new farmers resettled on former white-owned farms.

Farayi Kawadende is the information officer at Boka Tobacco, Zimbabwe’s largest tobacco auction, which has about 4 000 growers on its books. For the first weeks of the selling season it was selling about 6 000 bales a day. “Good grades of tobacco were going at $4 a kilogram but the lower quality is selling for about $0.80, which means hard times for those growers.”

Boka Tobacco chief executive Rudo Boka recently reopened the company’s auction floors, after a decade of difficulties and controversy following the death of her father, a staunch Zanu-PF supporter.

“Many of those selling here are new small-scale farmers and so they have not done this before. First they have to register as growers with the Tobacco Marketing Board.

“Then they have to have file crop estimates and they need to book their tobacco for sale,” she says.

“It is tough at the beginning for them. And it has been hard for us too, but we are now able to pay the farmers on the same day their tobacco is sold.”

Boka says there are social consequences paying out thousands of dollars to peasant farmers coming to Harare to sell their crop. “Many of them have only occasionally been to the city before. So a lot of the wives come too, and not to shop. They come to be sure the money gets home.”

Not all of the new farmers are happy with the prices they received this year. A group of small-scale farmers, resettled since 2000 in Zimbabwe’s top tobacco producing area, Karoi, 200km north of Harare, say they cannot afford to grow tobacco again because of poor prices.

“We didn’t earn enough to plant again,” says one. “We are broke and we can’t borrow money, we are finished,” says another, who prefers not to give his name.

This group of farmers aged between 28 and 45 were “100 percent” behind President Robert Mugabe’s land reform. “Without that we would never have got land, and we don’t have much and only grow about 1ha of tobacco, and that is very, very hard work.”

They are all sitting watching soccer on a large flat screen at the Boka floors. Many of them slept their too, for a few nights before the sale of their bales. These small-scale growers produce their crop with family labour. Traditional larger-scale producers say it will cost them about $9 000 to $11 000 per hectare of tobacco.

“This crop will change and eventually I expect Zimbabwe will be like Brazil and Malawi where tobacco is a small-scale crop,” says a buyer from an international company.

Last season, 120 million kilograms were sold at the close of the auction floors. Some suspect that figure was boosted by South African growers who sneaked bales into the Zimbabwe sales to catch the high opening prices of more than $4 a kilogram. Zimbabwe will probably earn more than $350 million when the floors close in the next month or two. – Peta Thornycroft of the Independent Foreign Service.

Many smokers resent the increased efforts to discourage tobacco use — from graphic warnings to smoking bans to proposals for higher taxes. But if they are honest with themselves, most probably wish they had never picked up the habit. Smoking is expensive and a health threat for smokers and those around them. With all we know today, who would want to start down that road?

Unfortunately, the answer is that nationally more than 10 percent of teens aged 12-17 smoke regularly, according to the Center for Disease Control, and more experiment with tobacco. The numbers are even a little higher for West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky.

Those new smokers are part of the reason that overall smoking rates have hit a stubborn plateau in recent years. In the mid-1960s, about 42 percent of the population smoked, but warning labels, advertising restrictions and a steady drum beat of anti-smoking education had pushed that down to about 20 percent by 2004.

But there it has remained for the past few years, and the rate in our region is closer to 25 percent. That is one of the reasons that the Food and Drug Administration is planning its most aggressive warning program since labels first appeared on cigarette packages in 1984. After September 2012, the top half of cigarette boxes and 20 percent of cigarette advertising must carry graphic photos that show the negative impact of smoking.

The move is controversial and some say overkill, but the hope is that the stronger message will cut consumption among the nation’s 43 million smokers and discourage teens from trying cigarettes.

Meanwhile, there is work to be done with retailers on reducing the sale of cigarettes to teen-agers. There has been improvement there over the last decade, but minors still are able to buy cigarettes at stores about 10 percent of the time, according to a recent study.

The numbers are even higher in West Virginia and Ohio, with sales happening about 12 percent and 13 percent of the time. But Kentucky has made real progress in this area, with the study showing minors were successful in buying cigarettes only about 3 percent of the time.

In addition to other features, the Kentucky program includes the attorney general’s office working directly with convenience stores chains and gas stations on best practices and training clerks. That’s important because convenience stores sell about 85 percent of the cigarettes in the country.

States are more conscious than ever of the high cost of smoking-related illnesses, and tightening up tobacco sales to minors is a good investment in improving the overall health of the population.

Jefferson County Public Health performed 45 tobacco retailer compliance checks this year, in accordance with state law. Only one retailer in Jefferson County was cited for selling tobacco to a minor. “We have been working with retailers and are happy to see that the rate of tobacco sales to kids is dropping,” said Karen Obermeyer of Jefferson County Public Health. “However, any sale of tobacco to someone under 18 is not only illegal, it’s unacceptable in our community.” Both the clerk and the business receive fines when they fail a compliance check.

Clerks who sell tobacco to minors are not doing teens any favors, Obermeyer said. They are aiding what often turns into a lifelong, expensive addiction that can result in illness and premature death.

Fostering a healthy community requires efforts such as compliance checks to ensure that clerks check for ID. “We want to create a healthy environment for our kids. So when we draw a line between our kids and things like tobacco and alcohol, we will have healthier children and a healthier community,” said Anne Dean, Jefferson County Community Network program manager.

Rates of tobacco use by Jefferson County youths are declining, according to the 2010 Healthy Youth Survey. Eighty-six percent of 10th-graders report that they do not smoke cigarettes; this is an improvement from 2004, when only 77 percent of 10th-graders reported they were tobacco free. Current Jefferson County youth tobacco-use rates are statistically similar to Washington state.

There is an increasing trend in the use of chewing tobacco products by Washington youths, from 4.6 percent to 6.2 percent of 10th-graders; 9.5 percent of 10th-grade boys use “chew,” and the rate of use among girls more than doubled to 3.2 percent.

The Healthy Youth Survey is taken anonymously by more than 212,000 students in 235 districts and 1,049 schools statewide. It tracks health behaviors and attitudes among sixth-, eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders.