Swiss say no to smoke ban plan

Two in three Swiss voters rejected a referendum Sunday aimed at tightening a smoking ban, to the relief of the hotel and restaurant sector that had complained of excess regulation. Only Geneva voted slightly in favour of the initiative, while results from Switzerland's other 25 cantons showed that 66 percent rejected it, the ATS news agency reported. The Swiss Business Federation hailed what it called a "heartening" result, saying the stricter laws would have "weighed on the restaurant sector as well as other economic sectors."

It added in a statement: "The initiative would have imposed more costs on restaurateurs who have already made considerable investments to protect non-smokers. Hotelleriesuisse, representing the hotel sector, said it was relieved by the outcome, saying a "yes" vote would have made "some investments obsolete". The Socialist party "deplored" the result, saying stepping up protection against passive smoking would have "incontestably been a major step in the improvement of (workers') conditions".

Voters were asked whether to strengthen a smoking ban in indoor workplaces and public spaces, with opponents decrying the move as a "witch-hunt." Polls had shown the country deeply divided on the eve of the referendum over the move initiated by the Swiss Pulmonary League, which aimed at clearing up confusion about the current legislation. In a survey published last week, 52 percent opposed the initiative, against 41 percent in favour, and seven percent undecided. Switzerland introduced a federal ban on smoking in enclosed workplaces and public spaces more than two years ago, but the law allowed for a number of exceptions and has been applied unevenly across the country's 26 cantons.

 While eight cantons, including Geneva, already have a total ban on indoor smoking in workplaces such as restaurants and bars, and public spaces like hospitals, the remaining 18 cantons apply the law less restrictively. In 11 cantons, smokers are allowed to indulge their habit in small bars, cafes and restaurants of less than 80 square metres, and in establishments with smoking rooms with customer service. In the other seven cantons, smoking is allowed in dedicated smoking rooms. According to the Swiss Pulmonary League, working an eight-hour shift in a smoke-filled environment is equivalent to smoking 15 to 38 cigarettes. A World Health Organisation study estimated that second-hand smoke kills upward of 600,000 non-smokers worldwide every year.

Imperial Tobacco says sales boosted by emerging markets

Britain's Imperial Tobacco, the maker of Lambert & Butler and Gauloises cigarettes, said Thursday that it expected annual sales to grow this year, lifted by strong demand in emerging markets. "We are delivering strong gains from our key strategic brands and improving our revenue momentum through our focus on driving quality growth across our total tobacco portfolio," the group said in a trading update.

"Tobacco net revenues are expected to be up by around four percent with particularly good performances in our Eastern Europe, Africa and Middle East, and Asia-Pacific regions." However, total stick volumes, which combine cigarettes and fine-cut tobacco, were predicted to drop by three percent due to weakness in Ukraine and Poland and compliance with international trade sanctions against Syria.

Imperial Tobacco said it was making "excellent progress" with its key strategic brands Davidoff, Gauloises Blondes, West and JPS, and expected this to be reflected in further strong volume and revenue gains. The group added that its overall financial trading position and operational performance for the year, which runs until September 30, was in line with expectations. Annual results are due for publication on October 30. In recent years, Imperial Tobacco has switched its strategy away from developed regions and towards the world's major growth markets in Asia, Africa, eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Fight on against student tobacco use

Young people in Tuolumne and Calaveras counties continue to use tobacco at higher levels than their peers statewide, prompting educators to scale up tobacco-use-prevention efforts and enlist students as a new ally in the fight. In Calaveras County, where the rate of tobacco use among young people is estimated at more than double the state’s, teenagers have joined the effort to keep their peers from smoking or chewing tobacco. Meanwhile, Tuolumne County is seeking more funding for drug use education and cessation programs.

The most recent results of the California Healthy Kids Survey, given to students in fifth through 12th grades, suggest that 29 percent of Calaveras County’s 11th graders have chewed tobacco — compared with roughly 10 percent of 11th graders in California. Not all students take California Healthy Kids surveys, and there are inevitably some who don’t answer truthfully. But the numbers are still cause for concern, according to Kathryn Eustis, director of Youth Development and Prevention Programs at the Calaveras County Office of Education.

“With our chew-tobacco numbers, somebody needs to take this seriously,” she said. “Nobody’s talking about it.” The reasons behind the higher rates may be cultural, she suggested. Chewing tobacco is something of a tradition among ranchers, with fathers simply telling their sons that they’re “old enough to chew now.” Athletes represent another population more likely to chew tobacco, particularly baseball players and wrestlers. Eustis said there has been a cultural movement to “deglorify” tobacco use among athletes, but tobacco companies have multimillion-dollar war chests to combat it.

Tuolumne County’s Healthy Kids survey results appear slightly higher than Calaveras County’s for chewing tobacco, with 30 percent of 11th graders having chewed tobacco at some point in their lives. Furthermore, 12 percent had chewed tobacco within the past 30 days, which may indicate habitual use. The Tuolumne County Healthy Kids data reflects the years between 2009-11, while Calaveras County’s is from 2011-12. Schools administer the surveys in two-year cycles. Tuolumne County does not yet have data from the past academic year. According to the survey results, both counties also had a relatively high percentage of students smoking cigarettes.

In Calaveras County, 35 percent of high school juniors had smoked cigarettes, as had 32 percent of their Tuolumne County peers. Tuolumne County Public Health Officer Dr. Todd Stolp said tobacco remains the No. 1 cause of death in Tuolumne County, above car accidents and other hazards. Nationwide, an estimated 435,000 people die every year from tobacco-related causes. That number topped deaths from diet-related causes by about 35,000, and motor-vehicle accidents by almost 360,000. Smoking has long been correlated with a greatly increased risk for cancer, heart disease, strokes and a variety of other ailments.

Contrary to some beliefs, chewing tobacco is not a safe alternative and causes many of the same diseases. The threats aren’t abstract, even to teenagers — some of whom already observe their peers’ health decline as a result of smoking or tobacco use. “I have never been a smoker, but I’ve been around a lot of people who do,” said Arianna Zylstra, 15, a sophomore at Calaveras High School. “I hate seeing that they do worse in PE or can’t walk up a hill without breathing hard.” Zylstra participates in Teens Against Tobacco, a group run by the Calaveras County Public Health Department, and a youth mentoring program.

Both are part of a collaborative effort in Calaveras County to steer young people away from tobacco and drugs. With an annual grant of $111,000, the Calaveras County Office of Education administers a tobacco cessation program at the Calaveras River Academy, a Saturday School intervention program for at-risk students across the county, and an anti-drug curriculum at middle and high schools. Collaborating with the public health department, it has also undertaken youth development programs to involve students in prevention efforts. When it comes to drug prevention, Zylstra said she and other teens have power that adults may not. “When someone has a question, they’re going to ask their friends,” she said.

“Adults can be intimidating, as far as telling them things.” Some students have joined the charge on their own initiative. Bret Harte High senior Chloe Ponce, 17, is making tobacco education the centerpiece of her senior project. “What I want to do is create sort of a sustainable program at Bret Harte, an alliance of some sort,” Ponce said. “I was hoping to create a video about the dangers of chewing tobacco.” She added that one of the project’s goals would be making more students aware of tools they can use, including a phone hotline, to quit chewing or smoking tobacco. “If we find out that students don’t want to quit, then we need to go back a few steps and figure out why,” she said. “We’re just trying to do as much research as we can.” Calaveras County’s Saturday School intervention program was “phenomenally successful” last year, Eustis said.

The three-hour course targets students who are first offenders, or those referred there by faculty. The Calaveras County grant, part of a state initiative called Tobacco Use Prevention Education, is entering its second of three school years. Without the grant money and cooperation between county agencies, efforts to combat tobacco use might no longer be possible, Eustis said. One source of funding for drug education, the federal Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities program, evaporated a few years ago. In the past, the Tuolumne County Office of Education was able to offer cessation programs at high schools. Money for those programs has also disappeared.

 But Sonora High School Principal Todd Dearden said tobacco use on his campus seems to have decreased in the recent past, which may be the result of a stricter approach to giving students in-school or out-of-school suspensions. “We’ve been much more severe about it,” he said. “Possession of tobacco, tobacco products and tobacco paraphernalia are all suspendable offenses.” Dearden added he would like to see the tobacco cessation program return to Sonora High, but the school will most likely maintain its disciplinary approach to tobacco prevention. In Tuolumne County, the nonprofit YES Partnership and Friday Night Live run additional anti-drug programs for young people. The Tuolumne County Office of Education is in its last year of funding from its own Tobacco Use Prevention Education grant. The program has provided an anti-drug curriculum called Project Alert. Tuolumne County Deputy Superintendent of Schools Margie Bulkin said she’s applying for another grant, but the selection process is “very competitive.”

Omaha Seeks 7% Occupation Tax On Tobacco Products

The Omaha, Neb. City Council is introducing an ordinance today that if adopted would require an “occupational privilege tax” on tobacco retailers equal to 7% of the gross receipts from the sale of tobacco products, including any pipe or other device intended for use in consuming tobacco products, the National Association of Tobacco Outlets (NATO) reported. The ordinance defines tobacco products as cigarettes, cigars, roll-your-own tobacco, snuff, chewing tobacco, any nicotine delivery device providing for the ingestion of nicotine into the body, and anything containing tobacco suitable for chewing, smoking in a pipe or inhaling.

The proposed occupational tax would be earmarked to raise revenue to support city government functions, including dedicating $35 million over a 10-year period to help fund the building of a $370 million cancer center at the University of Nebraska located in Omaha. However, Nebraska Governor David Heineman stated publicly last week that he signed a funding bill passed by the state legislature to provide a $50 million state commitment to the project and that the University of Nebraska was to raise all of the other capital from private sources rather than seeking out other tax revenue.

This proposed occupation tax of 7% on cigarettes would add about 35 cents to the cost of a pack of 20 cigarettes. Currently, the Nebraska state cigarette tax is 64 cents per pack. The price of smokeless tobacco, cigars, roll-your-own tobacco and all other tobacco products, including electronic cigarettes, would increase by 7% as well. An economic analysis of this proposed 7% occupational tax estimates that both cigarette and other tobacco product (OTP) sales would decline by about 20% if this new tax went into effect.

Omaha retailers would experience this sales decline likely due to customers traveling and purchasing these tobacco products outside the Omaha city limits in lower tax states, such as Missouri and Kansas. Besides losing tobacco product sales, Omaha retailers would also see a decline in sales of other ancillary goods that consumers purchase when shopping for tobacco products.

Law cracks down on stores that sell tobacco to minors

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation that creates tougher penalties for stores that sell cigarettes to minors, and the bill’s author, Assemblyman Jerry Hill, is crediting youth groups in San Mateo County with spurring the new law. Hill, D-San Mateo, said he introduced Assembly Bill 1301 in 2011 after meeting with teenagers from the Youth Leadership Institute of San Mateo, who enlisted him to help them curb sales of tobacco to underage teens.

“I’ve always been a proponent of anti-smoking issues, especially when it comes to young people,” Hill said. As a San Mateo city councilman in the mid 1990s, Hill helped pass an anti-smoking ordinance that prohibited smoking in restaurants and bars. The ordinance was among the toughest in the state at the time, he said. AB 1301 requires the state Board of Equalization, which issues tobacco sales licenses to retailers, to suspend a store’s tobacco license for 45 days if it is caught selling to a minor three times in a five-year period.

A fourth violation would result in a 90-day suspension, and a fifth would cause the retailer’s tobacco license to be permanently revoked. Before AB 1301, retailers or clerks caught selling tobacco products to minors were often just fined, which had less of an effect than a license suspension on a store’s profits, Hill said. The stricter AB 1301 was signed into law by Brown over the weekend. Hill said it was the young people he worked with — some of whom spoke before the Legislature — that generated the momentum for the new law’s passage.

“The nice thing is, it was really the young people who were the driving force,” he said. Hill joined members of the Youth Leadership Institute, San Mateo County Friday Night Live, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office and various other groups yesterday at the Mid-Peninsula Boys & Girls Club to celebrate the new law.

Deputies stumble upon hundreds of marijuana plants

At least $300,000 worth of marijuana plants were discovered early Thursday morning sheriff's deputies working near Arcanum, Ohio. Darke County deputies ascended a Greenville Fire Department ladder truck to get a good look at the sprawling grow operation. The plants were hidden behind an outbuilding, peeking out from behind dried corn stalks and posing as an everyday vegetable garden. The plants weren't hidden very well.

Deputies say they literally stumbled across the operation. "His efforts in concealing his marijuana grow operation is marginal at best. It was fairly obvious from the road that there was marijuana growing on the property," said Chief Deputy Mark Whittaker. In all, deputies estimated there were more than 300 plants, protected by a security system of sorts: lights mounted in the grow area. "This is probably the largest cultivation operation we've taken down in several years," Whittaker said.

 Deputies used a chainsaw to cut the tree-like trunks of the plants, some of which measured more than ten feet tall, and loaded them onto dump trucks. The suspects, a woman and her adult son, admitted to growing pot last year as well. Deputies were greeted by a shotgun when the arrived on the property. The suspect told officers someone stole his first batch of plants and said he armed himself because he thought the thieves were coming back again.

The Obama-Romney love-in: opposing marijuana law reform

Who's afraid of the big bad bud? President Obama and Mitt Romney, of course! Both 2012 candidates take hard-line stances on opposing marijuana law reform, although neither will definitively justify or defend their positions. Despite massive public support for reforming U.S. marijuana laws, Romney and Obama continue to ignore pleas from the American public to take a responsible look at regulating marijuana and its derivatives. President Obama - despite his 2008 claims that he would respect state medical marijuana laws - has proven to be the most militant and harsh commander-in-chief in the history of the War on Drugs.

His administration has raided and shut down dozens of legitimate medical marijuana dispensaries, robbing those operators and their employees of badly-needed jobs while denying their states of badly-needed tax revenues. Mitt Romney opposes any kind of reform of marijuana laws, stating he would fight "tooth-and-nail" against reform. His refusal to discuss the matter with potential voters and the media shines a bright light on his desire to avoid losing the undecideds - who tend to be liberal or independent voters - so he just clams up.

But others in his camp have plenty to contribute. According to The Fix: "But the real icon of drug policy in Romney’s campaign, deeply involved to this day, is Melvin Sembler, a Florida strip-mall magnate who was a national fundraising chair for Romney in 2008 and is again a Florida State Co-Chair for Romney’s finance committee. ...a teenage girl testified to being compelled into the [Straight, Inc] program after being caught with an airline bottle of liquor given to her by a friend, and then beaten, raped, locked in a janitor’s closet in pants soiled by urine, feces, and menstrual blood, forced into a false and bizarre confession to being a “druggie whore” who went down on truckers for a fix. Monroe’s story is extreme but in no way unique.

Similar accounts from Straight survivors have been collected en masse online at TheStraights.com." Both Mitt Romney and President Obama leave much to be desired when it comes to marijuana law reform - one refuses to even answer questions on the topic, while the other viciously and hypocritically raids state law-compliant dispensaries on one hand while mocking and trying to entice pro-marijuana voters on the other. Where does this leave American voters who support marijuana law reform (according to the 2011 Gallup poll)? Nowhere.

And that could seriously affect the 2012 elections... especially with Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Arkansas, and other states considering marijuana law reform ballots this November. Perhaps one or both of these presidential hopefuls will locate their spines, unclasp the hand of the other, and step forward to address this not-so-fringe issue in time for the October 3 presidential debate in the key state of Colorado.

Government Seeks To Cut Tobacco Use On College Campuses

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services wants college campuses nationwide to take steps to eliminate tobacco use. Howard Koh, assistant secretary for health at the department, is expected at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Wednesday to discuss the Tobacco-Free College Campus Initiative. The aim is to expand tobacco-free policies by universities, colleges, junior colleges and others.

 “We are witnessing a public health evolution to make smoking history and protect people from tobacco dependence so that they have a fighting chance to enjoy their full potential for health,” Koh said in a release. The University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor adopted a ban on smoking outdoors in 2011, making good on previous plans. The university earlier had banned smoking inside its buildings since 1987, and the university’s health system prohibited smoking in and around its facilities since 1999. Tobacco-free campuses are part of a national Tobacco Control Strategic Action Plan from the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Twenty million students, about a third of all young adults in this country, are enrolled in higher education. Through their campus policies, colleges and universities have a unique opportunity to influence a student’s daily life. The need for action is urgent, since the number of smokers who started smoking after age 18 increased from 600,000 in 2002 to 1 million in 2010,” Clifford Douglas, director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network said in a release. “A tobacco-free policy can help reduce asthma attacks and respiratory infections, lower rates of smoking among students and employees, increase class attendance, lower maintenance and cleaning costs, reduce the risk of fires, reduce insurance rates, and beautify a campus,” he said. Nearly 17 percent of all higher-education institutions now have tobacco-free or smoke-free policies.

U-M was not the first to go smoke-free but the university is recognized for its status as a major institution with a comprehensive plan that sought input from across the community. U-M’s chief health officer, Dr. Robert Winfield, noted that central to becoming smoke free at Michigan was a commitment to be respectful to smokers, while encouraging established smokers to quit.

 “The use of a robust cessation program, along with extensive marketing was central to the success of the effort. Changing the values of the community regarding tobacco use is a commitment that will become the norm over the coming years,” Winfield said, adding that there has been a dramatic reduction in smoking across all of U-M campuses. “The transition to smoke free went very smoothly and has overall been a positive experience,” he said.

Tobacco products to cost more in Oman after tax hike

The Ministry of Finance (MoF) has given its go-ahead to increase taxes on all tobacco products, according to a senior official from the Ministry of Health. This is a significant move as Oman was opposed to raising taxes on tobacco products in the past. The sultanate, along with other GCC states, currently levies 100 per cent importation tax, and the addition may be another 100 per cent.

A technical committee of the GCC General Secretariat will decide later how much the hike will be. Although talks on increasing taxes within GCC had been going on for some time, it was in May that a sub-regional inter-country meeting on tobacco control taxes was held in Cairo under the guidance of WHO's Tobacco Free Initiative. At the meeting, talks were held to introduce the excise system in GCC countries, and pave the way for adopting a new taxation system that could support tobacco control strategies.

Dr. Jawad al Lawati, director of the department of Non-Communicable Diseases Surveillance and Control, Ministry of Health, said that MoF has shown the green light to increase taxes. “The Minister [Responsible for Financial Affairs] has written to the GCC general secretariat about Oman agreeing to the proposal. It is a preliminary agreement, after which a technical committee of the secretariat will decide on how to frame taxes and how much to increase,” he said. Although Dr Lawati refused to speculate by how much the taxes would go up, Saudi and UAE Ministry of Health officials were quoted recently as saying that GCC states have agreed in principle to raise them from the current 100 to 200 per cent.

The May meeting also discussed the introduction of an internal excise system as a possible alternative to customs duties on imports, which might be repealed in the near future as a result of international agreements - bilateral and multilateral - including free-trade agreements. Dr. Lawati added that Oman has long objected to increasing tobacco taxes, which have remained the same since 1999.

“The cost of living has risen several folds in the last decade, but the tax on tobacco products has not increased,” he said. As it is not possible for any GCC state to take a unilateral decision without taking into account prevailing GCC rules and regulations, all members states have to reach a consensus to formally lay down the new taxes, Dr Lawati said.