Category: News This Week

New Jersey residents have displayed skepticism over the likely effect of proposed legislation that would raise from 19 to 21 the minimum age at which a person could legally buy tobacco products, according to a story by Don E. Woods for the South Jersey Times.

Woods quoted two residents. One aged 25, who said he started smoking when he was 15, conceded that the measure might help, but said it would not end the problem. The other, aged 22, who said he started at 17, believed that young people would smoke regardless.

The idea of raising the minimum age has come from Senator Richard J. Codey, who, while he was governor in 2006, signed legislation that raised the legal smoking age from 18 to 19 years.

“Research shows that a large majority of casual smokers become addicted between the ages of 18 and 21,” Codey said in a press release.

“If we limit access to tobacco products during those formative years, it will buy them time that could save their lives. They can make more mature decisions about smoking with a better understanding of all the potential consequences for themselves and others around them.”

It was difficult for Vietnam to enforce tobacco control laws because the people who passed those laws also broke them, according to a story in Vietnam Net.

At a meeting of the National Assembly’s Committee on Social Affairs, deputy Cuong described smoking in public places as a chronic disease that was never cured. “At the meetings of the National Assembly (NA), just during the break, the hallway was filled with cigarette smoke,” said Cuong. “It looked terrible.”

In the offices of the NA committees, he added, deputies closed the doors, turned on the air-conditioners and smoked.

Cuong said the implementation of the law had to begin with Congress because this was the law-making agency. After the NA had done so, the government and the agencies of the ministry of justice had to implement the law strictly, he added.

Campaigners are calling for more legislation to cut the number of adult smokers in Wales because Welsh Health Survey figures have revealed a fall of only one per cent in six years, according to a BBC Online story.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) said the Welsh government had to take ‘bold action’ in light of the figures.

The figures showed that 23 per cent of people were still smoking despite a 2007 ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces.

“The Welsh government needs to look at banning smoking in cars and around children,” said Elen de Lacy, chief executive of ASH in Wales.

“We need to be thinking about packaging to stop young people being attracted to smoking.”

The call for the government to be “thinking about packaging” is probably a reaction to the fact that standardized tobacco packaging was not included in the list of legislation being brought forward during the current session of the UK parliament.

One way to circumvent this ‘omission’ might be to encourage the implementation of standardized tobacco packaging in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and later to say that having England as the only part of the UK without such packaging was creating problems.

Selling Zimbabwe’s Burley crop for reasonable farmer prices is proving to be an uphill battle, according to a Zimbabwe Standard story.

Statistics from the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) showed that 55,499 kg had been sold by Friday, up 83 per cent on last year’s figures.

The value of the Burley sold by Friday amounted to US$82,201, a figure that was increased from the US$22,165 realised by the same stage of the 2012 sales.

On Friday, the highest price was US$2.50 per kg and the lowest price was US$0.50 per kg.

Some analysts fear that low prices are a deterrent to the growing of the crop but the TIMB CEO, Andrew Matibiri, said prices would firm during the course of the season.

“The majority of the crop is of low quality,” he said. “We expect that when farmers start reaping higher up, the prices will also rise,” he added.

This year, the TIMB projects an output of 300,000 kg, compared with last year’s 60,000 kg.

At its peak in 1998, Burley tobacco production reached 16 million kg.

The Italian union of tobacco operators has lodged an appeal with the regional court of Lazio in an attempt to block the sale of electronic cigarettes, according to a story by Marco Tistarelli for the Epoch Times.

The Times said the appeal was the latest in a series of steps taken by the ‘tobacco industry’, which believed the spread of electronic cigarettes was hammering a business already squeezed by the illicit trade.

‘It’s unfair competition,’ said Enzo Perrotta, president of the union of tobacco operators, in a press release.

Perrotta said electronic cigarettes should be subjected to taxation in the same way that traditional cigarettes were.

And he said their distribution should be regulated.

There are now more than 1,000 stores selling electronic cigarettes and nearly 400,000 electronic cigarette consumers in Italy, according to Anafe, the association that represents the country’s vaping industry.

A recent Doxa survey showed that out of 10.8 million tobacco users, 20 per cent were using or intended to use electronic cigarettes.

The turnover for electronic cigarettes reached €90 million last year, up 25 per cent on the previous year’s turnover, according to the Italian market researcher.

Electronic cigarettes are already being subjected to increased regulation with a national ban on sales to minors and at least one public places vaping ban.

The presidents of five Spanish regions with financial interests in tobacco are joining with tobacco manufacturers, traders and the hospitality sector in opposing proposed revisions to the European Commission’s Tobacco Products Directive, according to a blog at TobaccoRelated.org.

Altadis is said to have launched the campaign that is now being headed by the ‘Table of Tobacco’.

The blog said the campaign had been focused mainly on the finance commissions of the regional parliaments, with the result that the presidents of five Spanish regions – Cantabria, Canary Islands, Extremadura, La Rioja, and Navarra – were now campaigning against the directive.

These regions were opposing the directive because of varied economic interests. Cantabria, for instance, hosted the biggest Altadis factory in Spain while Extremadura was the main tobacco growing region in the country.

Tobacco smoking has been restricted at agricultural shows in the Australian state of Tasmania as part of the state governments attempt’s to denormalize smoking, according to a story by Ben McKay for The Examiner.

Under new rulings from the director of public health, smoking will be banned in most areas, though show organizers will be allowed to designate either two or four smoking zones, depending on the size of their shows.

Smoking has been restricted previously at Tasmanian music and food festivals, carols by candlelight and many markets.

“We want Tasmanian children to grow up in a place where it is unusual for them to see someone smoking; this both protects them from the harms of second-hand smoke and reduces the likelihood they will take up smoking in the future,” said Health Minister, Michelle O’Byrne.

Tobacco smoking restrictions are going to be expanded and enforced in the PalaceMuseum of the Forbidden City, Beijing, according a story by Xie Wenting for the Global Times.

In the past, smoking was banned only in areas open to tourists while staff could smoke in their offices.

But in the future, both employees and visitors will be liable to fines if they are found to be smoking.

Although Beijing instituted a ban on smoking in historic sites in 2008 and banned smoking in all public places in 2011, neither ban is well-enforced, said Yang Jie, of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Zeng Yizhi, of the International Committee of Monuments and Sites in China, said it was necessary to ban smoking in the entire complex because the museum had many wooden structures and precious cultural relics, including silk and papers, all of which were at risk of fire.

Changes in the marketplace have forced the public health community to wrestle with the idea that some tobacco products may pose less of a health risk than others do, according to an Associated Press story quoting the new head of the US Food and Drug Administration’s tobacco control efforts, Mitch Zeller.

Speaking at the 98th Annual Meeting and All-industry Conference of the Tobacco Merchants Association in Williamsburg, Virginia, Zeller, who took over as director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products in March, told attendees the agency was making progress on a backlog of more than 3,500 new product applications.

He set out how the FDA planned to address the issue of menthol cigarettes and how it planned to regulate other tobacco products, including cigars and electronic cigarettes.