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 >>

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Legal Newsline) – Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced a settlement on Wednesday with a tobacco maker for allegedly failing to establish an escrow account for the sale of its cigarettes as required by law. Grand River Enterprises Six Nations LTD deposited $984,185 into a state escrow account, paid penalties and post-judgment interest of $1,052,000 to the state General Revenue Fund and paid attorney fees and costs of $82,000 to DeWine’s office as part of the settlement. “We are glad to have reached this settlement,” DeWine said. “It’s g ... Jump to full article >>

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Smoking on campus at MSU is fairly simple: stay at least twenty-five feet from any building, and you’re free to light up where you please. But after a vote form the University Council banning all tobacco products, that will soon change. The Council unanimously approved the no tobacco initiative. “Tobacco-free MSU just means, MSU property, MSU campus, no tobacco use”, said student body Vice President Joey Steffens. The policy will be drafted over the summer and is expected to be approved this fall. The campus will then spend next school year educating s ... Jump to full article >>

Parents shouldn’t let up in their efforts when it comes to discouraging their kids from smoking, suggests a new study. Researchers, led by E. Melinda Mahabee-Gittens, an emergency medicine physician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, sought to determine if family factors continue to protect adolescents as they grow older and whether these factors affect youths of varying racial/ethnic backgrounds differently. Investigators studied 3,473 pairs of white, black and Hispanic parents and nonsmoking youths who participated in the National Survey of Parents and Youth in No ... Jump to full article >>

A BRAZEN smuggling gang has been caught dealing deadly counterfeit cigarettes – just months after they were exposed on TV. Shocking pictures show crook John Scullion back at Ayr market peddling tobacco after he was named and shamed in a BBC Scotland investigation in January. Cheeky Scullion and his cronies openly sold “illicit whites” – tobacco from China with 30 times more lead than normal cigarettes – at Ayr Sunday market on April 17. The images were taken by former Metropolitan Police officer Bob Fenton during an undercover swoop on tobacco smugglers, who rob t ... Jump to full article >>

The Legislature is considering very important legislation that affects the health of all Alabamians, SB372, a bill that will make all Alabama workplaces smoke-free. My husband was an Air Force pilot who flew the KC-135 throughout his career. He would come home from flights with the stench of tobacco covering him until the U.S. Air Force said enough and made aircraft, and eventually the Air Force, smoke-free. People cannot control the atmosphere of their workplace any more than my husband could control the air in his cockpit. It takes strong leadership to protect non-smokers. Let’s unders ... Jump to full article >>

The new animated children’s movie Rango has a lot of characters smoking. The main character, a chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp, swallows a cigar at one point and breathes fire in the plot that revolves around a lawless outpost in the Wild West. Should this movie be restricted to those 18 and older in Ontario because it shows tobacco products? The Peterborough County-City Health Unit says yes — and endorses more restrictions on movies that depict any type of tobacco imagery including showing a pack of cigarettes on a table — because of studies showing that youth exposed to these movi ... Jump to full article >>

The Government tabled the Dutiable Commodities (Amendment) Bill 2011 at the Legislative Council today to increase tobacco duty by 41.5%, or 50 cents a cigarette, as proposed in Financial Secretary John Tsang’s 2011-12 Budget. The proposal came into immediate effect on February 23, the day of his Budget Speech, under the Public Revenue Protection (Dutiable Commodities) Order 2011. The order gives provisional legal effect to the proposal for four months. The Government said the long-term objective of tobacco-control policy is to curb cigarette consumption and further reduce smoking prevale ... Jump to full article >>

Yesterday MobyLives reported that ads are coming to the cheapest Kindle. A scary prospect to be sure–and probably the first small step in the direction of a fundamental shift– but as Jennifer Schuessler pointed out in an Artsbeat post on the New York Times website yesterday, Amazon’s move is the latest in a long tradition of selling ads in books. Schuessler’s post featured an essay that Paul Collins wrote for the Times Book Review back in 2007, which detailed a bit of the history of advertising in books. As it happens, the modern history of ads in books goes back to the 1960s and 70s ... Jump to full article >>

Idaho House Tax Chairman Dennis Lake said the policy proposal to raise the state tax on cigarettes was never introduced into the legislative session this year because of a lack of support among Republicans on the House Tax Committee. The proposal could have raised about $50 million by hiking state tax on each pack of cigarettes from 57 cents to $1.25, and Lake, R-Blackfoot, said the money raised would have helped the Medicaid program pay for health problems caused by the use of tobacco. Rep. Brian Cronin, D-Boise, said the tobacco tax increase was not given a chance because some legislators ne ... Jump to full article >>

Article Six of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) of the World Health Organization requires that Parties to the treaty consider tax policies and price polices as a part of their overall national health policy and recommends that governments raise tobacco taxes to reduce tobacco consumption as far as possible. The most direct and effective method for reducing tobacco consumption is to increase the price of tobacco products through tax increases. Higher tobacco prices encourage cessation among existing tobacco users, prevent initiation among potential users (non-smoking youth), ... Jump to full article >>