Category: News This Week

  • RAI to host results conference call

    Reynolds American Inc. is due to host a conference call and webcast following the release of first-quarter 2013 financial results before the market opens on April 23.

    The company’s president and CEO, Daniel M. Delen, its CFO, Thomas R. Adams, and its vice president of investor relations, Morris L. Moore, will speak during the conference call and webcast, which will start at 09.00 hours Eastern Time.

    Registration for the event, which will be available at www.reynoldsamerican.com on a listen-only basis, is now open. A replay of the conference call will be available at the same website.

    The call-in numbers are (877) 390 5533 (toll-free) and (678) 894 3969 (International).

  • Tobacco use a pre-existing medical condition

    D.C. is moving ahead in creating its health exchange—the marketplace for individual and small group insurance plans required under the provisions of President Obama’s health care reform—and the board responsible for it yesterday voted to bar insurers from charging smokers and other tobacco users higher premiums.

    Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers are allowed to charge up to 50 percent more in premiums for people who smoke. The decision stems from the reality that smokers face higher health risks, and many insurers across the country can already charge more for those who light up often—currently 46 states and D.C. allow insurers to charge higher premiums for smokers. Many private employers also charge a penalty, according to a story on the dcist website.

    But various health policy experts—including organizations that have otherwise sided with the use of government power to stamp out smoking—have warned that the higher premiums could negate the broader goal of the law, which is to provide universal health insurance. Additionally, they say, the higher premiums would fall heavily on low-income residents.

    “Tobacco use is a pre-existing medical condition and a central tenet of our health reform efforts is to open the health insurance market to millions of people who have been shut out due to their health,” said Dr. Mohammad Akhter, the chair of the Health Exchange Board and former director of the D.C. Department of Health. “Charging smokers significantly more for health insurance is in direct conflict with our efforts to help people quit smoking.”

    According to the exchange board, one in five D.C. residents uses tobacco, and 30 percent of African American residents—who tend to post lower incomes than white residents—are smokers. Additionally, smoking rates are higher among those with lower educations: according to the CDC, close to half of all smokers in D.C. have less than a high school degree.

    At its meeting on March 27, the board’s Standing Advisory Committee recommended doing away with the penalty. It’s decision was motivated in part by advocacy by the American Cancer Society, which said in a handout: “Charging smokers more for health insurance is an unproven way to address tobacco use when we have decades of success in several thoroughly tested, evidenced based ways to improve public health through raising the price of tobacco products, creating smoke-free venues and implementing tobacco use prevention and cessation programs.” Two of three insurance companies present at the meeting said they would have imposed the penalty.

    Still, the move might fly in the face of what many non-smokers believe is wise. According to an October 2011 poll by Thomson Reuters, 58.5 percent of respondents say that smokers should have to pay more for health insurance. The percentage was obviously higher among non-smokers, but even 32 percent of smokers agreed that they should pay some sort of penalty for their habit.

    California and Connecticut have similarly moved to eliminate the penalty for smokers in health exchanges, while Colorado and Alaska have kept it.

  • Davidoff to roll out new cigar in Vegas

    A new Davidoff of Geneva cigar will roll into Vegas for the annual International Premium Cigar and Pipe Retailers Association’s (IPCPR) annual trade show to be held on July 13–17.

    Swiss cigar maker Oettinger Davidoff Group will launch the new brand, Davidoff Nicaragua, which Davidoff CEO Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard said is the company’s first Nicaraguan puro featuring a decade-old Nicaraguan Havana-seed Rosado wrapper and a blend of tobaccos from the country’s major leaf growing regions.

    Davidoff experts, led by master blender Hendrik “Henke” Kelner, embarked on a worldwide search for tobaccos that would enable them to create a unique cigar. The search landed the team in the tobacco fields of Nicaragua.

    Preparing, curing and ageing this tobacco for 10 years with the unique expertise of Davidoff craftsmen in the Dominican Republic allowed the company time to ‘tame’ the wilder tendencies of Nicaraguan tobacco and deliver a blend with intensity and excitement and all the refined sophistication you would expect from Davidoff.

    The new ‘Davidoff Nicaragua’ line will come in three sizes: Toro (5 ½ inches by 50 ring), Robusto (5 by 50) and Short Corona (3 ¾ by 46), and the blend combines a 10-year old, Havana-seed wrapper with a binder from Jalapa and a filler blend of tobaccos from Estelí, Condega and the volcanic region of Ometepe. ‘Davidoff Nicaragua’ will only be available in limited quantities per year.

    “This is a major step, for us to expand to a new territory” says Davidoff CEO Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard. “I wanted to develop products that were not necessarily origin-specific or rigidly tied down to one specific place. Davidoff is a brand, not a territory.”

  • Tobacco beats cannabis in battle of bad health

    Smoking tobacco and/or smoking tobacco mixed with cannabis might lead to worse physical health outcomes than smoking cannabis on its own, according to a San Francisco Chronicle blog quoting an Australian study.

    Researchers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, recruited 350 adults over the age of 40 and divided them into four groups: cannabis-only users, tobacco+cannabis users, tobacco-only users, and a control group of abstainers.

    The population size was small, but the authors concluded in a report published in the journal Addictive Behaviors that the control and cannabis-only groups tended to report the best health, while the two tobacco-smoking groups fared the worst.

    All three smoking groups reported significantly higher rates of emphysema than did the control group. But all members of the cannabis-only group diagnosed with the debilitating lung disease had formerly been regular tobacco smokers.

  • Prison doesn’t work, not for quitters

    A new study has found that behavioral intervention provided to U.S. prison inmates who smoked before going to jail substantially increased their ability to remain smoke-free after release, according to a report by MedPage Today.

    Most prisons in the U.S. are tobacco-free, with about 60 percent having total tobacco bans for staff and inmates, so most people entering the prison system are forced into abstinence.

    Despite this, about 97 percent of prisoners who were smokers on being sent to prison return to smoking almost immediately upon release.

    But three weeks after release, participants assigned to the behavioral intervention, known as Working Inside for Smoking Elimination (WISE), were 4.4 times more likely to refrain from smoking than those in a control group, according to Jennifer G. Clarke, MD, and colleagues at the Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

    In addition, in a multivariate analysis that controlled for factors such as age, ethnicity, and duration of smoking, the WISE participants were 6.6 times more likely to be smoke-free at three weeks, the researchers reported in their study, which was published online by JAMA Internal Medicine on April 8, that “forced smoking abstinence [was] not enough for smoking cessation.”

  • Housing project is growing initiative

    Tobacco growers and their families in Vietnam have moved into new homes built for them under an Imperial Tobacco responsibility initiative.

    Project Symphony is the result of a collaboration between Imperial Tobacco Vietnam, its local partner DOFICO and the Altadis Foundation.

    The homes, constructed from brick and steel, have been built in the provinces of Dong Nai and Tay Ninh, where DOFICO is based.

    “Project Symphony has been a tremendous example of partners working together to the benefit of those in the rural environment,” said Alistair Hepburn, general manager Indochina.

    “DOFICO and Imperial, together with the local community, identified the most needy families and constructed 10 new houses, directly supporting communities within our tobacco growing areas.

    “The project has been acclaimed by local authorities and plans are in place to invest further in 2013.”

  • Plain packaging a £5 billion gorilla for UK taxpayer?

    U.K. taxpayers could face a £5 billion ($7.67 billion) bill if ministers insist cigarettes are sold in plain packages.

    The money would be awarded by courts to tobacco companies in recognition of the fact that the government had destroyed their brand equity, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, as reported on the This is Money website.

    Legal challenges under the Human Rights Act or EU law could claim that requiring plain packages meant the industry had been unfairly deprived of its trademark rights, says a report by the think-tank.

    The Australian government, which has introduced plain packaging, is being sued by companies for the loss of their brands.

    The think-tank’s chief executive, Douglas McWilliams, said the use of plain packaging would lead to cheaper cigarettes as smokers became less aware of costlier brands and new entrants were spared the expense of marketing.

    This would mean less money for the treasury with “a reduction in tobacco’s aggregate annual contribution to the Exchequer of between £219 million and £348 million.”

  • Inconvenience: Philip Morris report says plain packaging could cost 30,000 jobs

    Thousands of jobs could be lost if plain packaging for cigarettes and tobacco products is introduced, according to a story in the South Wales Evening Post, citing a report released and commissioned by Philip Morris Ltd.

    The report suggests up to 30,000 of the 182,300 jobs in Britain’s small, independent retailers are at risk and concludes tobacco purchases will migrate to illegal street vendors, larger stores and purchases from abroad.

    Douglas McWilliams, co-author of the report, said, “Convenience stores depend  heavily on tobacco sales and the associated spending by those who drop in to buy cigarettes.

    “All the survey evidence and simulation exercises available suggest that plain packaging would cause spending to move to illegal street vendors, larger stores and purchases from abroad. If this is replicated in real life, high streets up and down the country would be dealt a body blow.”

  • Gutka takes gut shot, banned in India’s most populous state

    Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with more than 200 million residents, has started implementing a ban on the sale of gutka. This action follows the Supreme Court’s denial of a tobacco industry petition to stay implementation of the ban.

    Altogether, 23 of India’s 28 states and five of seven union territories have now joined the fast-growing movement to ban gutka.

    Adding to the momentum, the Indian Supreme Court this week directed the remaining states and territories to implement the gutka ban and to explain why they had not yet complied with previous court orders and national regulations requiring implementation. The high court also directed the states and territories that had already passed orders to implement the ban to file reports on implementation efforts.

  • Swedish Match fires against allegations it lied, altered ‘Dalligate’ story

    Swedish Match says that it has not lied nor altered its story during meetings about the resignation of the former EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Affairs.

    John Dalli resigned in October, shortly before the commission unveiled its proposed revisions to the Tobacco Products Directive.

    According to a story in Malta Today, the transparency watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) has submmitted a complaint to the transparency register secretariat against Swedish Match for allegedly violating the EU’s code of conduct for lobbyists. The complaint by CEO alleges also that Swedish Match lied to MEPs about ‘Dalligate’.

    According to the story, Swedish Match’s public affairs director Johan Gabrielsson admitted to Green MEP José Bove that his company was asked to tell MEPs a misleading version of events of an attempt to solicit a bribe from it, ostensibly to reverse an EU ban on the sale of snus, which Swedish Match produces.

    Asked about these allegations, Johan Wredberg, a spokesperson with Swedish Match’s public affairs department, stated in an email to TR that, in line with its commitment to cooperate with all the stakeholders seeking the truth in this matter, the company had welcomed and accepted several requests for meetings. “During those meetings we have never lied, nor altered our story,” Wredberg said. “We can only relate to our first-hand experience, which we have communicated in a transparent and consistent manner.”

    Wredberg said that a Maltese police investigation was currently in progress and that, despite a sincere effort from its side to be cooperative, any and all information the company had shared with certain stakeholders had been twisted and used in a media campaign whose purpose was, to it, unclear.

    Wredberg said Swedish Match did not see the benefits of such an approach, but rather saw it as one that could potentially obstruct the judicial process.

    Swedish Match trusted that the truth regarding all of these events would be clarified once the Maltese police investigation was completed, Wredberg added.