Important tobacco production news and info

Oregon lawmakers will hear public testimony on three bills that would increase cigarette taxes.

The House Revenue Committee will consider the bills on Thursday, along with a fourth that would allow counties to create their own taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products. Tobacco products include cigarettes and also hookah tobacco as Al Fakher hookah tobacco.

One bill would nearly double cigarette taxes, raising them from 65 percent to just over 120 percent. Stores selling cigarettes would also have to pay taxes on cigarettes in their inventory.

Relationships among Idaho's five recognized Indian tribes and descendants of white settlers who settled the state are once again the focus at the 2011 Legislature, with Republican lawmakers starting a push to tax cigarettes sold on Indian reservations -- over tribal objections.

House Speaker Lawerence Denney, R-Midvale, said Wednesday his bill will help prevent Idaho residents from traveling to reservations just to get a good deal, while leveling the playing field for off-reservation retailers that bear the full burden of the 57 cent-per-pack state tax. Currently, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe in northern Idaho only charges a 10 cent tax per pack, while the Nez Perce Tribe near Lewiston charges 24 cents.

More than just a tax policy bill, however, Denney's push yet again highlights how relationships between Idaho's original residents and the largely white population that began migrating here in the early 19th century continue to produce powerful emotions -- and suspicion among Indians that the dominant state government is still trying to exert unilateral influence over how their sovereign nations conduct their affairs.

"It's sending us the wrong message, by dropping a bill without consulting us," said Coeur d'Alene Tribal Chairman Chief James Allan, who said no Indians were consulted on this bill. "We seem to be taking a step backward again."

The Idaho Indian Affairs Council, which includes legislators, tribal leaders and a representative of Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter's administration, voted unanimously Wednesday to send a letter to the House urging that a hearing on Denney's bill be delayed at least until tribal officials have a chance to weigh in.

Idaho's tax adds $5.70 to a carton of 10 packs, while the Coeur d'Alene Tribe's tax only boosts the price by $1.00.

This isn't the first Indian issue to surface in this year's Legislature: Last week, Allan's tribe was rebuffed when it sought state authority for tribal officers to arrest non-Indians on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation without permission from the local sheriff in Benewah County. There's been a dispute since 2007, something that appears destined to continue after last week's razor-thin 34-35 defeat of the tribe's bill.

And in recent years, Idaho and its tribes have also sparred over how to share proceeds from the state's 25-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax from sales on reservations. That dispute was remedied by a 2007 agreement brokered by Otter.

The cigarette tax bill -- it's now due a hearing in the House Revenue and Taxation Committee -- would assess cigarettes at the wholesale level, before they're sold to reservation retail outlets.

At its introduction Wednesday, Denney told committee members that the measure was drafted by the Idaho attorney general's office specifically not to run afoul of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that protect tribal sovereignty.

He insists it's not an effort to boost Idaho tax revenue, since the tribes would be able to claim a tax credit for reservation sales, but a push to make sure off-reservation retailers don't face a disadvantage when state residents head to Indian country to stock up on cheap smokes. Denney does expect that the total number of cigarettes sold on Indian reservations -- which was just over 324 million individual cigarettes in fiscal year 2010 -- would decrease,

Not surprisingly, anti-smoking advocates who plan to introduce a measure later this session to hike Idaho's cigarette tax by $1.25 per pack are looking favorably at Denney's legislation, at least initially. Brent Olmstead, who lobbies for the Coalition for Tobacco-free Kids, said anything that increases the cost of cigarettes -- from reservation retailers or those elsewhere -- would likely be a disincentive for smokers.

What's more, Denney's measure could also undercut an argument that convenience stores are certain to employ in their fight against the anti-smoking coalition's proposed $1.25 per pack hike: That such a move would drive more buyers onto Indian reservations, to take advantage of lower prices.

The leaders of tribes who over the last two centuries often have borne the brunt of decisions made by the region's white newcomers insist Idaho should manage its tax and health care policy without encroaching onto Indians' right to manage their own affairs.

"It just sounds like another creative way to stick it to the tribes," said Helo Hancock, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe's lobbyist, of Denney's bill.

Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG), which is 49 percent owned by Swedish Match, will buy Lane, which makes a variety of tobacco products, including Kite and Bugler roll-your-own tobacco and Captain Black pipe tobacco.

"This is an opportunity to maximize the potential of the Lane business and brands under an owner who is focused on the 'other tobacco products' category," Susan M. Ivey, president and CEO of Reynolds American, the producer if Camel cigarettes said in a statement on Friday.

STG is the world's largest pipe tobacco manufacturer, shares the top position in sales of cigars internationally and is a leader in self-rolled tobacco products in Scandinavia.

Lane is expected to contribute $45 million in EBITDA, sales volumes of 525 tonnes of pipe tobacco, 980 tonnes of fine-cut tobacco and 450 million little cigars to STD.

With the acquisition of Lane, STG estimates its annual turnover will be about €800 million (7.18 billion kronor, $1.07 billion). It also estimates it will have sales volumes of more than 2.5 billion cigars, 2,175 tonnes of pipe tobacco, 3,170 tonnes of fine-cut tobacco, and 450 million little cigars.

The company have about 10,000 employees globally after the acquisition, which is subject to anti-trust review and approval by the US Federal Trade Commission. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2011.

On October 1st, 2010, Swedish Match acquired 49 percent of STG and contributed its US premium and European cigar businesses, as well as its pipe tobacco businesses, to the new entity.

Stockholm-based Swedish Match makes snus, tobacco, both handmade and machine-made cigars, chewing tobacco, dipping tobacco, matches and lighters.

The Department of Health is going to establish a tobacco products and incommunicable disease control section as part of efforts to implement the Tobacco Products (Control and Regulation) Directive 2066.

At the press conference held to inform about the directive, senior health education administration Badri Bahadur Khadka said that the section will be established to regulate and evaluate tobacco products. 

The directive bans smoking in public places and those found doing so will face action, he said.

The directive has it that warning messages should be printed in Nepali language in the front part of packets of tobacco products in a visible and clear way. It also prevents anyone from selling and providing tobacco products to people below 18 years of age and pregnant women. 

In many cases smoking cigarettes , no matter if they are Kiss cigarettes or Vogue cigarettes they can damage your health.

At the programme, Secretary of Ministry of Health and Population Dr. Sudha Sharma said that the implementation part of the directive is fraught with challenges. The directive was recently endorsed by the Cabinet.

A majority of Canadians who smoke don’t think new graphic images on cigarette packages – those featuring an emaciated and dying Barb Tarbox – will do much to get them to quit, according to a new online poll.

A majority of non-smoking Canadians, meanwhile, believe the images, which will take up 75 per cent of the space on a cigarette package, will be effective in getting people to quit.

The Angus Reid/Vision Critical poll of 1,022 Canadians was conducted between Jan. 4 and Jan. 5. The changes to cigarette packaging were announced by federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq last month.

Poll respondents were asked to look at four of the new images, including one featuring the 42-year-old Ms. Tarbox with the caption “This is what dying of lung cancer looks like.” A picture of a young boy with a breathing apparatus is also used, warning about the side-effects of second hand smoke. Angus Reid then asked respondents whether the images will be “effective or ineffective in convincing smokers to quit.”

Forty-eight per cent of all respondents said the images will be “very” or “moderately effective” compared to 33 per cent of those who identified themselves as frequent smokers. And 47 per cent of those who say they are occasional smokers believe the images will be very or moderately effective.

But 61 per cent of frequent smokers are skeptical. They say the images will be moderately or very ineffective in persuading people to quit compared to 45 per cent of all respondents.

Angus Reid vice president of public affairs Jaideep Mukerji says he found the reaction of the smokers the most interesting and revealing.

“A majority of them are supportive of the packaging in general, and a plurality think that this current wave are just about right in terms of graphic content,” Mr. Mukerji told The Globe in an email. “I think it points to a recognition among smokers that theirs is a bad habit that the government should be attempting to discourage. Support for these kinds of measures is broad-based across the country and among demographic groups.”

But he says Canadians are realistic – recognizing that it will take more than difficult images on cigarette packages to make people quit.

Still, the online survey also found that 60 per cent of Canadians believe the images are “about right” while 24 per cent would prefer they be even more graphic.

The government’s decision to take over the cigarette packaging was controversial, with tobacco companies objecting to increasing the size of warnings that were already taking up half of the package. However, six-years of consultations costing $3.6 million showed that the packaging and warnings needed updating as the impact of the old packaging labels was waning.

As legislative leaders in Illinois currently work on a revenue enhancement agreement, we at the American Heart Association are in full support of the proposed cigarette tax increase of $1 per pack. Smoking is a leading risk factor for heart disease, and such a tax would provide numerous benefits to both individual wellness and the state's fiscal health.

Adding a $1 to the state's per-pack cigarette tax would prevent more than 75,000 kids from becoming addicted smokers while encouraging more than 59,000 current smokers to quit. This action will also save the lives of more than 50,000 Illinois residents from premature smoking-related deaths.

The cigarette tax would generate an estimated $377 million for elementary and secondary education. This can be a double bonus because, historically, smoking rates in the population fall as education and income levels rise. The savings in long-term health care costs associated with lower smoking rates would be an estimated $2 billion, with the potential for saving hundreds of thousands of Illinois tax dollars in Medicaid expenses for every smoker who quits as a result of the tax.

During these fragile economic times, when raising taxes is a touchy subject, this tax is a popular choice. A statewide poll conducted last April showed that 74 percent of Illinois voters supported the proposed tobacco tax increase.

Having any luck with that New Year's resolution to stop smoking? Have faith, says Steve Braunias, who recounts his journey from addiction to freedom.

NEW YEAR'SDAY was five months ago. The date was July 25. On that cold, windy Sunday in winter, I made a New Year's resolution to stop smoking. I stopped smoking. Just like that, straight away, from 50 a day to none, no sweat, no worries, not a problem, apart from suffering the agonies of hell and wishing I was dead.

But I was used to feeling that way. I felt that way when I woke up on July 25. I had a hangover. The best way I knew to cure it was to smoke a lot of cigarettes. One of the great things about smoking is that it's a misery stronger than any other misery; its pain dulls all other pains. The hangover gave up its fight as smoking delivered unto me its sweet wispy sickness.

Cigarettes always made me feel lousy. I felt lousy 50 times a day. Credit where credit's due; cigarettes earned my respect for their potent brand of lousiness.

It was all very well to lounge about on the back porch that Sunday morning smoking and wishing I was dead, but I had an appointment. My fiancee had helped to set it up. She'd never seemed to mind my smoking all that much until we became parents, and now she worried that our daughter would lose her father.

The two of them had some sort of heart-to-heart about it at bedtime one night. I responded from the heart: "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just get off my god-damned back," etc. Smokers loathe being lovingly encouraged to cut down or quit. When I finished raving, I was given an email address for a woman from stop-smoking programme Allen Carr's Easyway.

All smokers have heard of Easyway, and every other quack cure. I'd heard of it from smokers who talked about reading Allen Carr's book of instructions on how to stop smoking. A lot of them said it'd worked, but not for long. I'd also heard of the Easyway one-day seminar from a smoker who said it'd worked and continued to work.

I booked online. I had nothing to lose except the $495 cost of the seminar. But that was chickenfeed. My weekly smoking bill was about $210, or $10,000 a year. I routinely tortured myself with how much money I spent on cigarettes. It inspired more terror than any of the lame health warnings on packets of smokes, with their silly little pictures of lungs and gums gone bad.

The only message that would have grabbed my attention was something like SMOKING COSTS A LOT OF MONEY.

The seminar began at 10am. It was held at a community centre around the corner from my house. I got ready. I showered – how I admired the friend in Christchurch who'd mastered the technique of smoking in the shower – and prepared to face the challenge. I took a deep breath. I was a man on a mission. A lifetime of addiction might, with luck, be coming to an end. I checked my pockets for the possessions I checked every day of my life for the past 28 years. Cigarettes: check. Flame: check. I lit up. I took a deep breath.

How lovely to inhale as I walked up the road on a cold, windy day in winter, hoping – but not believing for a second – that I was going to stop smoking, that all my failed New Year's resolutions were coming home to roost.

THERE WERE four of us. Four losers, three men and one woman, with our tar-stained fingers and our pungent clothes, loitering outside the community centre, smoking.

We were all in it together, but I instantly felt competitive. "I've actually done the seminar before, yah," said the South African. He'd stopped smoking for a year, but then someone gave him a cigarette at a party, he lit it without thinking, and had got hooked again. I thought: horrible voice, bloody idiot. "I'm an alcoholic, eh," said the Australian. I thought: horrible voice, total loser. There was a nice woman from New Zealand. "My biggest fear of quitting," she said, "is that I'll get fat?" I thought: quaint rising inflection, doomed.

And then we trooped upstairs and sat in a room with our instructor who talked and talked and talked until 4pm. I can't remember what she said but it was quite possibly the most intense day of my life. I felt as I though I was having a nervous breakdown all day, because every nerve in my body was desperately straining to catch hold of her meaning.

She talked about how depressing it was to smoke. She knew; she'd been there, knew the need, the desperate, stomach-churning need. She took us to the dead centre of our addiction. She talked about the freedom we would experience when we stopped smoking. She knew; she'd been released from the damp, suffocating cellar where all smokers live.

It was a compelling speech. But how would it end? When would she unveil the miracle cure? I was on the edge of my seat for the whole six hours. The miracle cure was never announced.Throughout the day, she gave us 10 rules to observe and obey in our quest to quit. After the third or fourth rule, the Yarpie said, "Hang on. How are we supposed to remember all the rules, yah?" The instructor said: "You're not." A lot of what she said was designed to make its way inside the subconscious, her words and mantras drilling down, down, deep down into the muck of the id.

I guess that's what happened. I don't know. I wasn't consciously aware. It was a strange day. The instructor allowed us a fag break about every 45 minutes. We stood on the footpath outside the community centre. A large, energetic woman with a pair of bongos approached our smokey band of losers and said, "Are you the African drumming class?"

I had a better question. At lunch, I bought the Sunday paper, read New Zealand's best-loved columnist, and wondered: how the hell am I ever going to be able to write without a cigarette? And then it was back to the room, and the talking cure.

I thought a lot about Peter Cook and Palmerston North. Cook, because I admired the great English comedian for his magnificent dedication to smoking as much as for his genius, and I worried that my presence at the seminar was letting him down. Palmerston North, because it was where I began smoking, at 22, in the newsroom of a radio station. The excitement of a deadline every hour and the excitement of falling in love with a blonde intern fed into the superior excitement of those first, gleaming packets of Sportsman 25.

O Palmerston North! O birthplace of my miserable, expensive addiction! I remembered it all. The happy snap of the plastic seal as I broke it open to get at the cigarettes. The view from the office of the blue mountains of the Ruahine ranges, seen through the blue smoke of a rapidly diminishing pack of Sportsman. The enchanted evenings after work with the blonde intern on the banks of the Manawatu River, smooching and smoking.

Smoking began as a youthful enterprise. It became the central fact of my life: I smoke, therefore I am. I was very good at it. Most smokers are tense and unnatural when they smoke. I knew my way around a cigarette. My whole body relaxed around it. But the pleasure gave way to need, and smoking turned into a drag. It stayed that way every day for the past 10 years. All I wanted was to quit.

The fact is that I hated smoking. I hated everything about it. I'd particularly come to hate having to shop for cigarettes at my seven local suppliers – the two service stations, two dairies, two bottle stores, and one supermarket – and make the same boring request for a packet of 25 Marlboro Lights twice a day, every day, at any time of night or day. But the thought of moving house inspired terror. What if it was too far away from the shops?

The thought of so many things inspired terror. I had a specific fear of flying: it deprived me of smoking. So did dinner parties, restaurants, movies, showers. I hated standing outside on decks and in alleyways just to have a cigarette. It made me hate decks and alleyways. One of the great myths of modern life is: "The most interesting people smoke." It's so totally not true. I hated smoking with an unending stream of bores, nags, blow-hards, and losers.

But mostly I hated myself. I hated the fact I smoked 50 a day. It took up so much time. I began to think that all I actually did in life was smoke. It was as though I was permanently occupied strangling myself; smoking is a slow asphyxiation.

Would I ever be free? "You're about to be free," the instructor said just before 4pm. We were sent outside for our final cigarette. We all had two, and then trooped back inside. She said some more things I can't remember, and we left at 4pm. I walked back down the road. Where to? Home, or one of my seven suppliers? I'd run out of cigarettes.

AND THAT'S all it took. One day, $495, a spellbinding instructor, and I haven't smoked since. True, I began crawling the walls of hell and wanting a quick death when I got home. But then I began to suspect I was acting, that the addictive qualities of nicotine were exaggerated, that all I needed at the shops were biscuits. A lot of biscuits. For a small while, Super Wines, Krispies and Milk Arrowroot became the new Marlboro Light. I developed a habit of 50 biscuits a day. I'm a new man: fatter. I'm an ex-smoker. I used to smoke. I don't smoke anymore. Those declarations are as boring to me as to you, because I don't feel anything about cigarettes anymore. It would be nice to report joy or elation at my new-found freedom, or at least pride. But I don't think I actually did anything. I didn't employ will or determination to quit; I feel like some Nazi stooge – I was just following orders. What I think happened is that the Easyway subliminal messages got put in my head. I was powerless to resist, and just went along for the ride, quite brainwashed.

It was like hypnosis, but different. Something mystical, possibly, happened in that room in the community centre. I felt as though I was given a system of beliefs. For the first few days afterwards, I had terrific urges to devour the Koran and misread it as an exhortation to kill people in a thrilling jihad bloodbath. In short, I was ripe for any form of religious extremism.

It was in this state that I appeared as a guest on Jim Mora's show on National Radio. The date: Monday, July 26. I hadn't gone 24 hours without a cigarette and already I felt cleansed, holy, manic. I'd been invited on to talk about my favourite songs. I wanted to talk about my favourite jihads.

There was definitely a kind of fundamentalism to Allen Carr's Easyway. The seminar felt like it should have been called Allen Carr's Oneway. The instructor dismissed all other cures – patches, hypnosis, acupuncture, whatever – as junk. Allen Carr and only Allen Carr had the answer. He was the one true God.

It inspired a kind of psychosis, but it soon wore off. So did the anguish of nicotine withdrawal. This was disappointing. Where was the drama of going cold turkey? Before I knew it, I was going lukewarm turkey. I counted the hours and the days without a cigarette, and then the weeks, but I'd stopped counting long before I realised I'd clocked up 100 days. No religious mania, no withdrawal symptoms; no pride, no joy – there are times when I kind of feel ripped off by Easyway. I expected tremendous dramas followed by a deep sense of peace. I thought my life would be totally different. It isn't. It's the same life. It's just got more biscuits in it, and a lot less self-loathing – the fact I don't smoke has taken away 50 opportunities a day to hate myself.

I really hope the South African, the Australian and the nice New Zealand woman have all managed to quit. There's nothing stopping them. There's nothing stopping anyone.

The disarming truth is that quitting smoking isn't that much of a big deal. The plain fact is that cigarettes aren't in your head. They're just things that you hold in your hand, a thin, wispy possession. You'll have heard this one before: imagine no possessions. It's easy if you try.