Charges under smoking ban postponed -MB

canada.com Tuesday, November 30, 2004

SELKIRK, Manitoba -- A second establishment, charged under Manitoba smoking ban, has had its case set over until next month.

Finley Michaud and Leslie Dumas, who own Finley's restaurant in Selkirk, will be back in court December 21st.

Their lawyer says he needs more time to go over evidence from the prosecution.

Monday, a business owner from Treherne, in western Manitoba, had his case put over for two weeks.

Robert Jenkinson faces 13 charges under the new Non-Smokers Health Protection Act which went into effect October 1st.

http://www.canada.com/fortstjohn/story.html?id=a7005c07-507c-4362-b435-1f79179c188e

By JANET L. JACKSON-- Calgary Sun Wed, December 1, 2004

Don't you know that smoking pot makes you a better driver? It is surprising how many people buy into pro-pot propaganda.

John Collison's attitude and lack of facts versus fiction, on AM 1060's Western Standard Hour Radio, is pathetic. I debated with Collison on his Monday show. He believes marijuana is just another cottage industry where the state should butt out.

But Collision, like most Canadians, is woefully unaware of the practical reality -- they wink at the problem the Liberal government has created. Collison and other uninformed pro-pot proponents should support decriminalization only if they are in favour of organized crime moving into their own suburb.

At the movie theatre, it is becoming impossible to avoid taxpayer-funded anti-tobacco ads while at the same time escaping second-hand pot smoke on the way out of the show.

Federal studies show 30% of 15- to 17-year- olds and 47% of 18- to 19-year-olds used marijuana in the past year. But, is it any surprise school kids think it is healthier to toke than smoke cigarettes?

You have to dig to find facts on the Internet. Fact 1 - Marijuana's tetrahydrocannabinol THC (active drug ingredient) has increased from less then 1% in the 1960s to street marijuana today that is now approaching levels over 25% THC. Pot is no longer a "soft drug." Fact 2 -- Marijuana smoke contains 50% to 70% more carcinogenic hydrocarbons than tobacco smoke.

For those who think legalization and government taxation is the answer, sorry to purge the cloud of smoke.

Nowhere in the world is marijuana legal. Do you really want the feds taking the place of organized crime?

The newest immigration peelergate scandal and Gagliano affair will then become an accepted way of life.

Just like Mexico, or Holland -- the country with the failed drug experiment even France now criticizes.

Holland, where non-addicts carry their car radios to the bakery, hoping to avoid their cars being broken into by drug addicts, is of course the model the federal Liberals are using for Canada's drug policy.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, "a cannabis grower operating a 50 plant hydroponics operation that harvests three crops of 15% potency can realize an annual profit of $225,000 (Canadian)."

So a home with 200 plants will clear $1 million in three cycles. Post-modern crime lords don't need to rent the house they grow in, they can purchase with cash and abandon the now toxic mould condemned house when finished, leaving the city or municipality and insurance to clean up behind them.

Some $6 billion a year is now generated from grow-ops in B.C. alone -- almost one-quarter of its legal annual provincial budget.

Police, however, are urging realtors to help them bust the burgeoning basement grow-op racket.

Safety issues to also keep in mind are dangerous booby-trapped homes and home-made wiring. Allowing grow-ops to steal power from power companies are a serious cause of home fires today. Up in smoke is no longer a joke. It could mean your own home going up along with your friendly neighbourhood grow-op.

With less than $500 million spent per year to combat illicit drugs in Canada (prevention, border and police budgets included) if Paul Martin wants to get U.S. President George Bush to look at opening the border for cattle and lumber, cracking down on the Canadian grow-ops, where the lucrative goal is smuggling high-grade weed into the U.S., would be an excellent rapport-building strategy.

http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Calgary/Janet_L_Jackson/2004/12/01/750042.html

Thursday, December 02, 2004

OTTAWA (CP) - Canadian cigarettes will be designed to go out when left untended under new regulations proposed by Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh.

The so-called "reduced ignition propensity" cigarette has been promoted as a way of reducing the thousands of fires caused by untended lit cigarettes every year. Tobacco manufacturers oppose the regulations, saying smokers would rather turn to contraband or roll their own than smoke the fire-safe products.

Manufacturers says the reduced-ignition cigarettes frequently go out, and a cigarette that has been relit after going out tastes awful.

The proposed regulations would require all cigarettes manufactured or imported for sale in Canada to meet the new standard by next October.

Dosanjh warned that the cigarettes should not be called fire-safe, because a burning object is never completely fire-safe.

"By reducing the ignition propensity we feel we will lower the amount of fires started by cigarettes and save more lives," he said.

http://www.canada.com/health/story.html?id=6c011170-fb3b-416c-8dbc-736c7e2c9cb5

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The government has found traces of a rocket fuel chemical in organic milk in Maryland, green leaf lettuce grown in Arizona and bottled spring water from Texas and California.

What's not clear is the significance of the data, collected by the Food and Drug Administration through Aug. 19.

Sufficient amounts of perchlorate can affect the thyroid, potentially causing delayed development and other problems.

But Environmental Protection Agency official Kevin Mayer called for calm, saying in an interview Tuesday: "Alarm is not warranted. That is clear."

"I think that it is important that EPA and FDA and other agencies come to some resolution about the toxicity of this chemical," Mayer said. "That has been, frankly, a struggle for the last few years."

The FDA found that of the various food items it tested, iceberg lettuce grown in Belle Glade, Fla., had the highest concentrations of perchlorate. The greens had 71.6 parts per billion of the compound, the primary ingredient in solid rocket propellent. Red leaf lettuce grown in El Centro, Calif., had 52 ppb of perchlorate. Most of the purified, distilled and spring bottled water tested around the nation tested had no detectable amount of perchlorate.

Whole organic milk in Maryland, however, had 11.3 ppb of perchlorate.

Asked whether that level of chemical in milk was worrisome, Mayer, the EPA's regional perchlorate coordinator for Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada, said, "The answer is, we don't know yet."

The FDA said in a statement that consumers should not change their eating habits in response to the test results, posted on the agency's Web site Friday.

The testing comes as federal agencies try find how much perchlorate people are exposed to from food so they can determine whether action is needed to protect the public health. Federal agencies have been trying since the early 1990s to determine what level of perchlorate is safe.

The state of California, meanwhile, set a standard of no more than 10 ppb of perchlorate in drinking water. That was lowered to 6 ppb in drinking water to account for the chemical also lacing food, Mayer said.

A more conservative suggestion, in a draft from the EPA, would allow no more than 1 ppb of perchlorate in drinking water.

The FDA tested lettuce samples collected at farms and packing sheds and bottled water from retail stores. Raw milk samples came from a research facility in Maryland and other milk samples were obtained from retail stores.

"These data are exploratory and should not be understood to be a reflection of the distribution of perchlorate in the U.S. food supply," the agency said in a statement. "Until more is known about the health effects of perchlorate and its occurrence in foods, FDA continues to recommend that consumers eat a balanced diet, choosing a variety of foods that are low in trans fat and saturated fat, and rich in high-fiber grains, fruits and vegetables."

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1101908786049_18?hub=SciTech

 THURSDAY, Dec. 2 (HealthDayNews) -- Exposure to the commonly used chemical benzene, even at levels below current guidelines deemed to be safe, could still have harmful health effects, a new study says.

Researchers have found that workers in China who were exposed to benzene at concentrations below the current U.S. occupational standard experienced damage to their blood cells.

Whether those biological changes actually translate into health problems down the line remains to be seen. "We do not know the health consequences," said Dr. Nat Rothman, co-author of the study and a senior investigator in the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). "These findings need to be independently confirmed. This is not a done deal, but it does raise a question about whether there are more serious effects occurring in the bone marrow."

The paper, which appears in the Dec. 3 issue of Science, represented a collaboration between the NCI, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Above certain levels, benzene, a hydrocarbon used in the manufacture of many common products -- including household items from plastics to pesticides to detergents -- is known to harm the blood system and to cause leukemia. As a result, the United States has set exposure limits in the workplace at one part per million of air. It hasn't been clear what effect the chemical has below that level.

Exposure to benzene is mostly an issue for workers in the oil, shipping, automobile repair, shoe manufacture and other industries. The general public can be exposed through cigarette smoke, gas and automobile emissions. There has been concern that people in urban areas are exposed to benzene via air pollution.

For this study, researchers looked at factory workers in Tianjin, China. Specifically, they compared 250 workers in a shoe factory who had been exposed to various levels of benzene to 140 controls who worked in clothing manufacturing and thus had not had any exposure.

Although other studies had looked at some of these questions before, Rothman said this paper was especially meticulous in carrying out measurements. Researchers also assessed the volunteers' out-of-work exposure to benzene and other chemicals.

Significant blood defects were found only in the workers who had been exposed to benzene, including some who were exposed to levels under the U.S. standard of one part per million. White blood cell and platelet counts were lower in the exposed workers, even if that exposure was below the standard.

Much of the damage was to the progenitor cells that give rise to different types of blood cells.

"These cells seemed to be a bit more sensitive to benzene's effect than mature cells," Rothman said. "We could only show for more highly exposed people, but even though statistical significance was only reached at higher levels, it showed that these cells are more sensitive -- and that means that perhaps monitoring people with a standard approach [i.e., monitoring mature cells] might underestimate effects."

What all of this means for health is a subject for future studies to address. "We need to understand what the long-term effects are of exposure to benzene in this particular range, what kinds of real disease. That's the bottom line," Rothman said. "We looked at people who were healthy, but we did see these biological changes. We want to confirm and understand what it means for the long term."

More information

Learn about exposure to benzene from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (www.osha.gov ).

Last Updated: December 02, 2004

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WASHINGTON A report released in Washington today ranks Texas 41st in the nation in funding programs to protect children from tobacco.

A coalition of public health groups says only Maine, Delaware and Mississippi are meeting the minimum levels recommended by federal health officials.

It says all states are spending a combined 538 (M) million dollars on preventing smoking. That's about a-third of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says should be spent.

 The head of one anti-smoking group says states are receiving (B) billions of dollars from legal settlements with cigarette makers and through raising taxes on tobacco products. He says states are getting "more and more revenue" but spending "far too little" to cut the habit.

On the Net:

Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids: http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/

http://www.kltv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2640529

Thu Dec 2, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Safeway Inc. (SWY.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Thursday agreed to pay $245,000 and boost its efforts to curb under-age cigarette sales to settle a California lawsuit charging the grocer with selling tobacco products to minors.

State Attorney General Bill Lockyer said Safeway agreed to a number of new policies, such as checking the identification of any person buying tobacco products who looks younger than 27 and using cash registers programmed to prompt checks on all such sales.

The settlement, which takes effect immediately, also requires Safeway to pay $145,000 in civil penalties and another $50,000 each to cover the state's and city of Los Angeles' costs in bringing the lawsuit.

A spokesman for Safeway -- the state's second biggest grocery chain --- could not immediately be reached for comment.

Lockyer sued Safeway last June, saying the supermarket had a worse record on under-age sales than the other major grocery chains in the nation's most populous state.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, sought civil penalties and asked for an injunction that would require Safeway to take action to curb tobacco sales to those under 18 years old.

Safeway, which also operates the Vons, Pavilions and Pak N' Save stores, had said that it was being singled out by Lockyer and that it was committed to keeping cigarettes out of the hands of children.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=6981674

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. The leader of an anti-smoking group says New York should spend a lot more to encourage residents to kick the cigarette habit.

Russell Sciandra (SHON'-druh) -- director of the Center for a Tobacco-free New York -- says a recently-released report indicates smoking has been declining in the state.

 But Sciandra says the independent evaluation shows the change isn't linked to the state's educational efforts -- it's because New York has raised its tax on cigarettes. He says restrictions on smoking in public places also have helped.

 Sciandra told a Binghamton radio station (W-N-B-F) that the tobacco industry has plenty of money and -- his words -- "very smart people" who work to respond to anti-smoking initiatives.

 Sciandra said the state needs to "keep one step ahead of them." But with New York's current program, Sciandra said, "we're about three steps behind."

http://www.wstm.com/Global/story.asp?S=2641063

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Tennessee is one of only five states not to allocate any significant funding for anti-smoking efforts.

That's according to a report released Thursday by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and American Lung Association.

 The other states are Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire and South Carolina. The District of Columbia also has not set aside money for that purpose.

 Altogether, the states have set aside $538 million for smoking prevention for fiscal 2005, which began in October and runs through September.

 That is just a third of the nearly $2 billion the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say should be spent nationwide.

 The states are expected to receive an estimated $7.1 billion this year from the tobacco industry through legal settlements they reached with cigarette makers in the late 1990s.

http://www.wate.com/Global/story.asp?S=2640184

(CBS/AP) Five states do not to allocate any significant funding for anti-smoking efforts, a coalition of public health groups said Thursday.

The states are Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The District of Columbia also has not set aside money for that purpose, the report stated.

Only three states — Maine, Delaware and Mississippi — are spending money on anti-smoking efforts at more than the minimum levels recommended by federal health officials, the report found.

Altogether, the states have set aside $538 million for smoking prevention for fiscal 2005, which began in October and runs through September. That is just a third of the $1.6 billion minimum the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say should be spent nationwide, says the report. The CDC's minimum funding recommendations for each state are based on population and other factors.

The states are expected to receive an estimated $7.1 billion this year from the tobacco industry through legal settlements they reached with cigarette makers in the late 1990s, according to the report released by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and American Lung Association.

The settlements were meant to help the states recoup the cost of treating sick smokers, and the states pledged to fund tobacco prevention programs.

In 17 states where the federal government spent $128 million to discourage tobacco, smoking dropped by about three percentage points over eight years, just over half a point more than in states without the program, a study found last year.

The program was responsible for reducing the number of smokers in the target states by about 104,000, estimated Frances A. Stillman, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Stillman said the 17 states included some that already had strong anti-smoking programs and some that didn't, including Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina.

She said the results showed that "states can reduce smoking prevalence and the enormous health and economic burden of smoking if they put in place proven programs and policies."

Meanwhile, states in recent years have been raising cigarette taxes, and they are slated to get nearly $13 billion in tobacco tax revenues this year, the report says.

"The states are receiving more and more revenue related to tobacco but doing far too little to fund programs to reduce tobacco use, particularly among children," said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "They're using the money to fill short-term budget shortfalls, build roads and every other conceivable political purpose."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/02/health/main658718.shtml

Charles Spencer reviews Anna in the Tropics at Hampstead Theatre

A play is only a play, but a good cigar is a smoke. Nilo Cruz's drama about Cuban cigar-factory workers in 1920s Florida really comes to sensual life not during the obligatory bout of graphic sex but in a far more daring scene in which the characters relish the joy of tobacco. One fears such unexpurgated scenes of full-frontal smoking will soon land the actors and management in court.

In New York, theatres already post signs in their foyers warning squeamish patrons that those on stage light up, for in Manhattan smokers are now regarded with the extravagant horror once reserved for child molesters.

Even in Britain, still only trembling on the brink of the totalitarian nightmare of a public smoking ban, I have seen fastidious audience members make a big show of noisy coughing when a character takes a drag - even though most actors now wimpishly favour herbal cigarettes. Noël Coward doesn't seem quite the same with the sickly-sweet smell of Honeydew wafting into the stalls.

So to discover a play that celebrates tobacco, with love, pride and manifest affection, and without a programme plastered with government health warnings, is a real relief. The moment when the cigar factory workers light up their latest line, hold it to their ears, breathe in the fragrant smoke, and declare that "it burns like a blue dream" is pure joy.

The rest of the play's not bad either, although I have to say that, intermittently affecting though it is, Cruz's drama, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in the States, sometimes seems more than a touch contrived.

The action in Indhu Rubasingham's production, with a lovely, smokily evocative design by Liz Ascroft, is set in a small family cigar factory in Tampa, Florida, in 1929.

As was the delightful custom in those times, the workers employ a "lector" to help while away the long hours of tobacco rolling by reading to them. The new lector (Enzo Cilenti ) turns out to be an absolute dish, and when he chooses to entertain them with Anna Karenina, passions become dangerously inflamed in the Florida heat.

Frankly, I didn't quite believe that the members of the family firm would fall so fatefully, and in one case fatally, under the spell of Tolstoy that they would start reliving Anna Karenina's romantic adventures on the factory floor.

I was also less than persuaded by some of the English actors' attempts to play passionate Cubans. Hitch up her skirts though she may as Conchita, and indulge in no end of rumpy-pumpy, Rachel Stirling still puts one more in mind of a dashing head girl at Roedean than a sex-crazed Latino.

Lorraine Burroughs is far more persuasive as her delightful, romance-addicted younger sister, who becomes so excited when she first meets the handsome lector that she wets herself, but whose melancholy fate is to become the object of desire of one of the factory's co-owners, Cheche.

Peter Polycarpou plays this villain of the piece in incisively sinister, cold-hearted fashion, consumed with bitterness because his wife ran off with a previous lector, and now determined to abolish the tradition and replace human workers with machines.

There's strong support from Joseph Mydell as the factory's dignified, decent boss, filled with remorse about his cockfighting debts (this is a show to anger every kind of anti) and from Diana Quick as his furious, passionate wife, who regards the lector almost as fondly as her daughters.

In the final analysis, Anna in the Tropics seems just a little too intent on charming the pants off its audience, but it certainly makes one feel better about lighting up that post-show cigarette.

tobacco on stage

[Hollywood News]: Los Angeles, Dec 2 : Hollywood superstar Johnny Depp shocked an American woman in a London restaurant by refusing to put out his cigarette.

"I'm sorry, but we're not in LA any more," the Oscar nominated Depp bluntly told the woman.

The star of "Pirates of the Caribbean" was dining in the smoking area at Scalini's, when the unidentified woman took offence to his smoking and asked him to extinguish the cigarette, media reports said.

Anti-smoking laws are far more stringent in the US than they are in Britain.

--Indo-Asian News Service

http://www.newkerala.com/news-daily/news/features.php?action=fullnews&id=45564