Author: Staff Writer

A patient at the StateHospital at Carstairs, Scotland, has won a court ruling that a ban on his smoking at the facility was unlawful and was a breach of his rights, according to a BBC Online story.

The man, who has been detained at the high-security psychiatric hospital for 18 years, challenged the ban, which was introduced in December 2011, at the Court of Session in Edinburgh.

Judge Lord Stewart said the decision to compel the man “to stop smoking was flawed in every possible way”.

He said he wanted to make it clear that he was not endorsing the idea of a human right to smoke, because there was no right to smoke in a legal sense. But he said he was prepared to make a restricted declaration that the policy was unlawful as it affected the patient, and that it was a breach of his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Scotland does not have legislation in place that bans smoking in such hospitals and the judge said that if the legislature would not support a measure it was wrong to enforce it by extra-statutory means. “It may be of course, given the experience at the StateHospital, that the time is now right to try and put the ban on a statutory footing,” he added.

The judge said he had decided it would be wrong to strike down the board’s decision to go smoke-free and that the orders he would make would allow the patient’s case to be reconsidered by the hospital authorities.

The Turkish Football Federation (TFF) has warned the Super League club, Beşiktaş that it will fine coach Slaven Bilic if he again smokes inside a stadium during a soccer game, according to a Hurriyet story.

The TFF told the club Bilic had been found smoking a cigarette inside a stadium despite a no-smoking ban.

It said the coach would be fined if he committed a second offense.

Photographs of Bilic apparently smoking while watching a Galatasaray vs. Gaziantepspor game at the Türk Telekom Arena in Istanbul caused controversy when they were spread on social media last week.

Philip Morris International is due to host a live audio webcast at www.pmi.com/webcasts of the company’s remarks and question-and-answer session by CFO, Jacek Olczak, during the Barclays Capital Back-To-School Consumer Conference on September 4, starting about 10.30 hours Eastern Time.

The webcast, which will be in listen-only mode, will cover the entire PMI session.

An archived copy of the webcast will be available at www.pmi.com/webcasts until 17.00 hours on October 3.

The presentation slides and script will be available at www.pmi.com/presentations.

Holmen Skog, Iggesund Paperboard’s sister company and forest raw material supplier, is burning the forest on the island of Innerstön, one of the group of Baltic islands that lie offshore from the city of Hudiksvall north of Iggesund.

In a press note issued today, Iggesund explained that modern forest management tried to develop felling methods that resembled the effects of natural forest fires, which had served an important ecological function for millennia.

So by burning standing timber in controlled circumstances, Holmen was implementing an important nature conservation measure that would benefit a number of rare species of flora and fauna. Over the next 16 years all the forest on the island, totalling 380 ha, would be burned in stages.

“There’s not enough burned forest at present,” said Magnus Aretorn, who is in charge of caring for the Holmen Skog forests in the Iggesund region and responsible for nature conservation measures. “By having frequent and recurring fires we will create a mosaic of burned timber at various stages of decomposition. This will create an environment that is unique in Sweden and will benefit rare species which depend on the heat from the fires or on various stages of decomposed, dead or burned timber.”

Examples of Swedish species which benefit from these special conditions are the cranesbill plants Geranium bohemicum and Geranium lanuginosum, the lichen Hypocenomyce anthracophila, the black fire beetle Melanophila acuminata and various species of the powderpost beetle Stephanopachys.

For millennia, the forests have burned at irregular intervals, often as a result of lightning, but nowadays these fires are put out far more efficiently than before. The result is that few burned forest environments are created naturally.

Innerstön is surrounded by water and lies in a sheltered setting, making it a safer location than the mainland for a controlled burn.

The island has been divided into eight zones and burns have been scheduled so that by 2028 the entire island will have been burned. By 2030 the controlled burn will start again in the first zone.

“This might seem to be a long-term perspective but in our industry it’s not,” Aretorn said. “The raw material for the quality paperboard Invercote comes from our forests in this region. Here it takes between 80 to 100 years for a pine tree to grow. So to put it bluntly, we who are planting the trees now won’t still be around when the time comes to harvest them.”

Thailand’s Public Health Ministry is planning to file an appeal with the Supreme Administrative Court so that its requirement for bigger graphic health warnings on cigarette packs can be imposed as planned, according to a story in The Nation.

The Administrative Court on Monday suspended the ministry’s plan under which tobacco companies would have had to have increased the size of the warnings on the front and back of packs from 55 percent to 85 percent.

“I will consult with legal experts to find out about the appeal procedure,” the ministry’s permanent secretary, Dr. Narong Sahametapat, was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, Dr. Nopporn Cheanklin, deputy director of the Disease Control Department, said the proposed regulation would not create any burden on the tobacco companies.

But it would prevent young people from becoming addicted to smoking, he added.

Dr. Hathai Chitanont, director of the Thailand Health Promotion Institute, said he backed the ministry’s attempt to control tobacco consumption and to file an appeal with the Supreme Court.

He suggested that the ministry should collect evidence to prove that making the warning graphics bigger on cigarette packs would reduce the number of smokers and prevent nonsmokers from taking up the habit. However, he said he wasn’t aware of any research proving these assumptions.

The use of children as tobacco-farm workers is common in at least some regions of Tanzania, according to a story by Ludovick Kazoka for All-Africa.com.

Kazoka quoted the Urambo District (Tabora Region) senior community development official, Sabala Rukonda, as saying that most tobacco farmers opted for children because they were readily available to satisfy agriculture’s huge “manpower” demand. “These children use dangerous tools, are exposed to pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and carry heavy loads,” he said.

The story does not describe the age of the children working on tobacco farms, but the Sikonge District acting education officer, Ernest Simbamwene, was quoted as saying he was concerned about the poor attendance at most rural primary schools during the farming season. “Many children tend to abscond because they are being used as laborers by tobacco farmers,” he said.

Sikonge District Commissioner Hanifa Selengu said the government had taken note of the bad practice and had introduced committees tasked with tackling the problem at the ward level. Parents or guardians whose children were absent from school were being summoned for questioning before legal procedures were instituted.

But, according to the International Labour Organization, the causes of the worst forms of child labor in Tanzania’s tobacco plantations are linked to poverty. Eighty-four percent of the parents of children working on these farms come from poor and very poor socioeconomic backgrounds.

The full story is at http://allafrica.com/stories/201308270335.html.

The early opening time of one of Vienna’s traditional coffee houses, Café Drechsler, has fallen victim to a tobacco smoking ban, according to a story in the Vienna Times.

Café Drechsler has been forced to introduce a full smoking ban because of the combined effect of its own architecture and the country’s smoking regulations; so it is no longer opening its doors at 3 a.m., but at 8 a.m.

Manager Manfred Stallmajer was quoted as saying that most of the people who visited coffee houses late at night were smokers, and therefore a smoke-free coffee house didn’t work.

“It is a real shame as now this 90-year-old tradition has been forced to come to an end,” he said.

The full story is at http://viennatimes.at/news/Panorama/2013-08-27/29615/Smoking_Law_forces_change_in_Cafe_Drechsler_opening_hours.

The Maharashtra State Food and Drug Administration (MSFDA) commissioner, Mahesh Zagade, has called on his counterparts in India’s other states to consider enforcing bans on the manufacture and sale of gutkha and pan masala, according to a story in the most recent issue of the BBM Bommidala newsletter.

At the same time, Zagade has reportedly written to the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India urging it to convene a meeting of all of the FDAs in the country to ensure “proper implementation of the law on smokeless tobacco products, and to follow the leaf of the [Maharashtra] state and outlaw all processed and packaged [smokeless] tobacco in whatever form.”

The state recently became the first to impose a blanket ban on all chewing tobacco (zarda, khaini, kharra, masheri, mawa, etc.) and scented supari (pan masala and supari mix). It has moved to shut down all manufacturing units within the state and to stop these products entering the state from outside.

About half of Japan’s underage smokers have admitted to having bought tobacco products illegally using a borrowed Taspo card, the age-verification smart card used to purchase cigarettes from vending machines, according to a Yomiuri Shimbun story quoting the results of the research.

The findings were reported by Takashi Oida, the professor at Nihon University who headed up the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry research team.

The Taspo card, which is issued only to adults, was introduced in July 2008 to help prevent underage smoking.

And though the number of underage smokers is on the decline, the team’s survey shows that teenagers often borrow Taspo cards from adults.

The research group distributed a questionnaire on smoking to 140,000 students at 264 middle and high schools, and 100,000 of them in 179 schools responded.

The results showed that 2,851 students, or 2.8 percent, had smoked within the previous month.

Forty-eight percent of respondents said that price hikes had affected their purchase of cigarettes, while 44 percent said the introduction of Taspo cards had made it difficult to purchase tobacco from vending machines.

However, the survey found that 49 percent of the students who had smoked in the previous month had purchased cigarettes using a Taspo card belonging to someone else. Fifty-six percent of those who had used a Taspo had borrowed the card from someone outside their family; 21 percent had borrowed a card from a family member; while 14 percent had used a card that had been left at home.

Altria is due to host at altria.com a webcast of its business presentation to the Barclays Back-To-School Consumer Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on Sept. 3, starting about 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

The webcast, which will be in listen-only mode, will feature a presentation by Executive Vice President and CFO Howard Willard.

Pre-event registration is necessary at altria.com, where an archived copy of the webcast will be made available.