Jim Hatfield has smoked since he was 10 years old and doesn’t have quitting on his list of New Year’s resolutions. But he knows he will stop smoking one of these days. “Yeah, I will,” Hatfield, 65, of Clayton, N.M., said as he finished a Liggett Select cigarette in the Westgate Mall parking lot Thursday afternoon. “When they put me in the ground, I’ll definitely have to quit.” About 30 percent of cancer deaths in the U.S. are caused by smoking, Texas Oncology physician Phillip Periman said, and the risks of smoking are by no means limited to lung cancer. Hatfield’s wife and fel ... Jump to full article >>

If women didn’t already have enough reasons to quit smoking before pregnancy, here’s a big one: Smoking during pregnancy may set their child up for blood vessel damage, a new study shows. Dutch scientists enrolled more than 250 children. When the children were 4 weeks old, their body dimensions and lung function were measured. At the same time, their parents completed questionnaires about such factors as smoking during pregnancy. When the children were 5, the researchers used ultrasound to measure the thickness and flexibility of their carotid arteries, large blood vessels in the n ... Jump to full article >>

The cigarette industry is not dying. It continues to reap unimaginable profits. It’s still winning lawsuits. And cigarettes still kill millions every year. So says Stanford’s Robert Proctor, author of the new bombshell study, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, a book the tobacco industry tried to stop with subpoenas and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Proctor, the first historian to testify in court against the tobacco industry (in 1998), warns that the worst of the health catastrophe is still ahead of us: Thanks to th ... Jump to full article >>

Then Schwaber, a 29-year-old emergency medical technician from Lexington who smoked as much as three packs a day, tried electronic cigarettes. The battery-operated vaporizers, often shaped like a cigarette, use flavored liquids to deliver a dose of nicotine with each draw. She hasn’t smoked for more than two years. Instead Schwaber puffs on “vape’’ that tastes like biscotti or peach. She no longer needs the asthma inhaler she once used regularly. She has no taste for tobacco. And she figures she has cut her daily nicotine intake to about one-fifth of what it was, with plans to wean her ... Jump to full article >>

GUNTUR: The Centre is considering to bring the crops that are being managed by independent boards such as tobacco , tea and rubber under insurance cover. It is learnt that the commerce ministry has asked for detailed reports from the chiefs of the boards with observations of the stakeholders of the crops. After a meeting in Delhi, senior officials of the commerce ministry asked the Tobacco Board to initiate discussions with the growers to implement the scheme. With Parliament in session , Tobacco Board chairman G Kamalavardhan Rao deputed its executive director K Subbarao for the high-level me ... Jump to full article >>

BOISE – In just under a month, the Idaho Legislature begins its 2012 session, and already proposed issues are sparking discussion.   One of those is whether the state should raise its tobacco tax.  A coalition of Idaho health groups wants a pack of cigarettes taxed an extra $1.25. Will this year be different? This is one of the issues that had the democrats calling for a longer session, even stalling as the session drew to a close.  They wanted hearings on the proposed increase, but a bill never made it to the floor. “We were hoping we would gain success with the tobacco tax in ... Jump to full article >>