http://allafrica.com/stories/201304020298.html
‘Hong Kong has significantly increased its uptake of Zimbabwean tobacco
with more than 1,3 million kg worth US$10,9 million from 415 800kg worth
US$2,7 million taken up last year.’

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/04/09/commentary/comparing-tobacco-fight-to-the-opium-wars/

NEW YORK – To know if tobacco is the equivalent of the opium wars in China, it is useful to briefly review history. When Christopher Columbus explored the New World in 1492, he found the natives smoking a native plant, tobacco, which they did both for medicinal and ceremonial purposes. He was the first to introduce it in Europe.

From 1617 to 1793, tobacco was the most widely used and valuable staple export from the English American mainland colonies and the United States

Columbus could have never imagined that, shortly after its introduction in Europe, tobacco would become one of the main threats to health in several Latin American and Asian countries, just as opium would plague China in the 19th century.

Tobacco, one of the most addictive substances in the world, was introduced to China via Japan or the Philippines in the 1600s. In 1643, Fang Yizhi, a Chinese scholar, was one of the first to warn of the dangers of exposure to tobacco. He wrote that smoking tobacco for too long would “blacken the lungs” and lead to death. Chongzhen, the Chinese emperor at the time, outlawed growing tobacco and smoking its leaves.

In 1858, the Treaty of Tianjin (Tientsin) which ended the first part of the Second Opium War (1856-1860) not only legalized the import of opium but allowed cigarettes to be imported to China duty-free. By 1900, foreign companies thoroughly permeated China.

In 1929, Fritz Lickint, a German scientist from Dresden, published the first statistical evidence linking tobacco use and lung cancer, a finding that was confirmed in 1950 in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Only in 1999 did the Phillip Morris tobacco company acknowledge that “there is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers.”

Today, while its use has diminished considerably in industrialized countries, it is having a devastating effect on the health of the Chinese population.

As Dr. Bernard Lown, a famous cardiologist, already indicated in 2007, “the struggle against tobacco is not being won, it is being relocated.” He also denounced that cigarettes are becoming more addictive and more lethal because of the higher tar and nicotine content.

The state-owned China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC), trading as China Tobacco and founded in 1982, accounts for roughly 30 percent of the world’s total production of cigarettes, and is the largest manufacturer of tobacco products. China National Tobacco Corporation falls under the jurisdiction of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (STMA).

The STMA has been under constant pressure from the World Trade Organization to loosen its monopoly. Since 2001, increased access has been granted to foreign companies.

Today, although CNTC dominates China’s market, foreign brands can still be found in large cities in China. In 2007, it was estimated that CNTC had 32 percent of the world tobacco market.

Tobacco smoking still continues to place a heavy toll on the Chinese people’s health. It is estimated that every day roughly 2,000 Chinese die because of smoking. China has now approximately 360 million smokers — a number greater than the U.S. population — who consume 37 percent of the world’s cigarettes. In addition, almost 800 million people suffer the consequences of second-hand smoke.

According to the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, smoking will be responsible for approximately 3.2 million deaths annually by 2030.

Tobacco is also costly to the country’s economy. Although tobacco companies paid 864.9 billion yuan in taxes in 2012, when the health care costs of the people made sick by tobacco are combined with lost productivity, the total cost is probably much higher. The increased health costs as a result of smoking are part of the tragic legacy of tobacco.

Paradoxically, while the U.S. government has been extremely successful in discouraging smoking at home, its pressure on Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand to break their domestic tobacco monopolies has resulted in their markets being flooded with American cigarettes. This prompted former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop to state that “people will look on this era of the health of the world, as imperialistic as anything since the British Empire — but worse.”

By issuance of the China Tobacco Control Plan (2012-2015), the Chinese government has indicated its intention to lower the negative impact of smoking. The plan, however, has been widely criticized for its lack of concrete proposals.

To effectively combat smoking, it is necessary to mobilize communities, educate the people about the health risks and high costs of smoking, impose punitive fines in class action suits and increase tax on cigarettes.

Unless these measures are implemented, tobacco will end up causing more damage to the Chinese people than the Opium Wars did in the 19th century.

Cesar Chelala, M.D. and Ph.D., is an international public health consultant and the author of “Tobacco or Health,” a publication of the Pan American Health Organization.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/25/obama-doe-fracked-gas-export-study-contractors-tobacco-industry-roots/

Weekend Edition January 25-27, 2013

Smoke and Mirrors

Obama DOE Fracked Gas Export Study Contractor’s Tobacco Industry Roots

by STEVE HORN

At first, it was kept secret for months, cryptically referred to only as an “unidentified third-party contractor.”

Finally, in November 2012, Reuters revealed the name of the corporate consulting firm the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) hired to produce a study on the prospective economic impacts of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.

LNG is the super-chilled final product of gas obtained – predominatly in today’s context – via the controversial hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) process taking place within shale deposits located throughout the U.S. This “prize” is shipped from the multitude of domestic shale basins in pipelines to various coastal LNG terminals, and then sent on LNG tankers to the global market.

The firm: National Economic Research Associates (NERA) Economic Consulting, has a long history of pushing for deregulation. Its claim to fame: the deregulation ”studies” it publishes on behalf of the nuclear, coal, and oil/gas industry – and as it turns out, Big Tobacco, too.

Alfred E. Kahn, the late “Father of Deregulation,” founded NERA in 1961 along with Irwin Stelzer, now a senior fellow and director of the right-wing Hudson Institute’s Center for Economic Policy.

The NERA/Obama DOE LNG export economic impact study, released in early-December 2012, concluded that exporting the U.S. shale gas bounty is in the best economic interest of the country. The commenting period for that study closes today at 4:30 PM EST.

This conclusion drew metaphorical hisses from many analysts, including prominent shale gas market economist and former Wall Street investor Deborah Rogers, who now maintains the blog Energy Policy Forum. Her critique cut straight to the very foundation of the study itself, stating that “economic model[s] are only as good as their inputs.”

She proceeded to explain,

In fact, it is neither difficult nor unusual for models to be designed to favor one outcome over another. In other words, models can be essentially reverse engineered. This is especially true when the models have been commissioned by industries that stand to gain significantly in monetary terms. Or government agencies which are perhaps pushing a political agenda.

Beyond its history working as a hired gun for the fossil fuel industry, NERA also has deeper historical roots producing “smoke and mirrors” studies on behalf of the tobacco industry. The long view of the firm’s past is something NERA would likely rather see “go up in smoke,” forever buried in the historical annals. But that would be a disservice to U.S. taxpayers since NERA continues to receive government contracts to produce tobacco-era disinformation to this day.

NERA and the “Tobacco Playbook”

Many fossil fuel industry public relations flacks learned the tactics of mass manipulation by reading the “tobacco playbook,” meticulously documented in Naomi Oreskes’ and Erik Conway’s classic book, “Merchants of Doubt.”

“Doubt is our product,” a tobacco industry CEO once said of the playbook, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

NERA Health “Benefits” of Smoking

The University of California-San Francisco’s Tobacco Archives reveal NERA worked on behalf of the tobacco industry dating back at least to 1986.

A May memo from that year written by then NERA Vice President William B. Shew (who now works at the previously mentioned Hudson Institute as an Adjunct Fellow alongside NERA Founder, Irwin Stelzer) addressed to Arnold & Porter attorney Thomas Silfen says the tobacco industry should aim to explain the so-called health “benefits” of smoking.

Most studies don’t explain “the satisfactions that induce smokers to put up with health hazards,” Shew explains in the memo. “This imbalance would be rectified by looking at the satisfaction derived from smoking.”

At the time of the internal memo’s publication, Arnold & Porter served as national counsel for Philip Morris.

A memo published in 1988 by Silfen posits that Big Tobacco has an obligation going forward to overcome its “long agony over health issues–to get the industry out of the ‘it hasn’t been proven’ trap once and for all.”

Attempt to Defeat L.A.’s Restaurant Smoking Ban

Working alongside public relations industry giant Ogilvy-Mather and the Tobacco Institute, NERA also attempted to defeat the then-proposed smoking ban in Los Angeles County in 1990, the Tobacco Archives reveal.

SourceWatch details that the Tobacco Institute hired Ogilvy ”to provide public affairs consulting services aimed at helping the Instutitute fight cigarette excise taxes, public smoking restrictions and to help with coalition building issues,” proceeding to explain that it helped to “devise ad campaigns to take the public’s focus off the health hazards of secondhand tobacco smoke.”

Among other accolades, Ogilvy helped BP rebrand itself ”Beyond Petroluem,” a propaganda campaign which won the corporation nowinfamous for its Gulf Coast oil disaster the PR Week ”Brand of the Year” in 2001. Critics at the time called it a case of “greenwashing.”

Yet in the end, it was a case of “too little, too late” for NERA, Ogilvy and the Tobacco Institute.

In 1990, San Luis Obispo, CA “became the first city in the world to ban indoor smoking at all public places, including bars and restaurants,” according to the San Francisco Gate. By 1998, California adopted these regulations as the law of the land statewide.

NERA Offers Philip Morris Advertising Analytics

In 1992, tobacco giant Philip Morris hired NERA to analyze whether cigarette advertisements made an impact on consumption habits. This came during a time when the industry faced sharp scrunity for whitewashing the dangerous health impacts of smoking in its ads.

Given this premise, it’s no shock NERA concluded that the concerns about the effectiveness of Big Tobacco’s advertising charm offensive were overblown.

“The issue of whether cigarette advertising has had any effect on cigarette consumption per adult in Western countries over the last several decades remains uncertain,” NERA explained in the lenghty report now posted on the Tobacco Archives. “However, it seems clear that advertising has had at most a minor effect, if any, on consumption per adult.”

NERA/Philip Morris’ War on OSHA and Maryland Workplace Smoking Regs

Later, in 1994 and 1995, the Tobacco Archives also reveal that NERA served as a contractor for Philip Morris (now owned by Altria Group), taking the fight to an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposal to implement regulations for smoking on the job.

OSHA proposed banning smoking everywhere within the workplace except for in small, desiginated and isolated lounges.

Dr. Albert L . Nichols authored a Dec. 1995 NERA economic study contracted out by Philip Morris which critiqued OSHA regulations. That study predictably concluded that OSHA’s regulations were “draconian” in nature, suggesting OSHA relied on “patently ludicrous” economic assumptions.

While NERA/Philip Morris waged its battle against OSHA, NERA also devoted itself to fighting back against Maryland’s state-level workplace smoking regulations.

A Feb. 1995 Associated Press article quotes Nichols saying that cigarette sales in Maryland “could fall by $27 million” on an annual basis if the regulations are implemented.

Much to NERA’s chagrin, a month later, the proposed regulations became Maryland state law.

Should Firm with Big Tobacco Roots Be Trusted?

The Sierra Club is skeptical of the Obama DOE’s choice of NERA as the contractor to perform the fracked gas LNG export study. The Club just filed a Freedom of Information Act request to ascertain exactly how the Department went about choosing NERA for its “study” that will play a large part in shaping the future of global energy markets.

“Deciding to export the U.S. gas supply is a major public decision,” Deb Nardone, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Natural Gas Campaign, said in a press release. “We deserve a full and fair conversation about it. That’s why we deserve to know how and why DOE picked this anti-environmental, pro-corporate consultant for this crucial report.”

With easily apparent deep-seated roots dating back to the halcyon days of Big Tobacco, the DOE’s NERA selection begs the question: Can one view the NERA/Obama DOE economic findings on LNG exports as anything but a deeply cynical PR ploy?

Steve Horn is a Madison, WI-based freelance investigative journalist and Research Fellow at DeSmogBlog.

Dutch Minister for Tobacco replaces Dutch Minister of Health

http://zembla.vara.nl/Afleveringen.1973.0.html?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=50853&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1974&cHash=b9b24f35e1713a3d41df6db263ba49ae

Download PDF : translation_ZEMBLA_20111021

Download PDF : BMJ_2011_343d7137

Published on South China Morning Post (http://www.scmp.com)

Home > More mainland girls smoke than officials claim, says researcher

Submitted by admin on Jan 15th 2013, 12:00am

News›China

HEALTH

Alice Yan ting.yan@scmp.com

Researcher says real figure is about four times higher than officials claim

The number of mainland girls who smoke may be higher than the authorities recognise, a Shanghai-based health research team has found.

According to a two-year study led by Ma Jin of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s school of public health, up to 14 per cent of girls on the mainland could be smokers, much higher than the rate estimated in an earlier government study.

The China Tobacco Control Blueprint (2012-2015), issued by seven state ministries and the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration last year, put the number of mainland teenagers who smoke at 11.5 per cent. It said only 3.6 per cent of girls smoked, compared with 18.4 per cent of boys.

Ma’s study, published in The Lancet medical journal last month, also reported that the number of adult women smokers on the mainland reported by authorities could be a third lower than the actual figure.

Ma said his survey gave a more accurate picture of mainland tobacco-use in comparison with a similar study led by State University of New York Professor Gary Giovino published in the same journal in August.

According to Giovino’s study, which analysed tobacco use in 16 countries, more than half of mainland males over the age of 15 smoked. The figure was only 2 per cent for females. The study estimated the mainland has 301 million smokers. The results from his study matched estimates of mainland authorities.

Ma said Giovino’s study used a self-report method which was regarded as reliable in some Western countries, but it “severely” underestimated the true number of smokers on the mainland.

“Young students, especially girls, and adult women tend to cover up their identities as smokers because of pressure from society, which generally regards smoking as bad behaviour for students and women,” he said.

Ma’s study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Shanghai’s municipal government, canvassed 11,104 people, which included students aged 12 to 20 and their parents from five city districts.

The students are from 18 high schools, 45 junior middle schools and five technical schools, and these schools are located in five central and suburb districts in Shanghai

“We focus on young people’s smoking activities because many smokers initiate this addiction when they are young,” Ma said.

His team first asked the students to answer a questionnaire, based on a World Health Organisation questionnaire template on juvenile smoking behaviour. The questionnaire found 13.6 per cent of boys and 5.2 per cent of girls smoked. But Ma thought the figures were far too low in light of his everyday observations.

So his team adopted a “capture-recapture” method – resampling the schools – to adjust the results.

They concluded that the real smoking rates for boys should be 18.3 per cent and 14.2 per cent for girls.

“The actual number of smokers in China could be substantially higher than 301 million,” Ma wrote in The Lancet. “Such underestimation could hinder our ability to assess the progress of current and future intervention efforts.”

Compared with Western countries, where a high percentage of teenagers let their parents know of their habit, in Shanghai, only 2.9 per cent of boys’ parents and 0.6 per cent of girls’ parents were aware that their children smoked, Ma’s survey found.

He said most students were encouraged to smoke by their peers and ignored all the health warnings because they thought holding a cigarette and blowing a smoke ring was “cool”.

Wu Yiqun , deputy director of the Beijing-based Think Tank Research Centre for Health Development, said the number of juvenile smokers on the mainland had been increasing over the past decade and children were taking up the habit at a younger age.

“Preventing children and teenagers from smoking is vital for our smoke-control campaign because people pick up habits when they are young and smoking is especially bad for their health since their bodies are growing,” she said.

Three years ago, the Ministry of Education launched a nationwide “non-smoking schools” movement which bans smoking in outdoor and indoor areas at primary and middle schools and kindergartens.

Topics:

Health

mainland girls

Smoke

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Submitted by admin on Dec 13th 2012, 12:00am

Comment›Insight & Opinion

SCMP Editorial

Statistically, Hong Kong stands a chance of being the world’s first city to be declared smoke-free, which is defined as having less than 5 per cent of the population smoking. With only an estimated 11 to 12 per cent of people over 15 smoking, we already have the lowest rate in the Asia-Pacific region and what would appear to be the best among developed societies.

But the world is watching to see if Australia snatches the smoke-free title from under our noses. On December 1 a law forcing tobacco firms to sell cigarettes in identical plain, drab packets featuring graphic health warnings came into effect in Australia in an effort to strip away any fashion or glamour and discourage young people from taking up the habit.

The government pressed ahead with the new law, the first of its kind anywhere, after it was upheld by the country’s top court. This despite continuing legal challenges and threats by the tobacco industry over claimed infringement of its intellectual rights and unfair restriction of trade. The lure is the potential saving of 15,000 lives lost to smoking-related diseases each year, and A$31.5 billion (HK$262.86 billion) annually in related healthcare costs and lost productivity.

What is Hong Kong waiting for in following suit? Our indoor no-smoking regime is plagued by defiance, weak enforcement and poor law drafting, which does not hold managers and owners of bars, discos and the like liable for breaches of the law.

That our smoking levels are so low is thanks to three decades of campaigning by anti-tobacco lobbyists, government education campaigns, indoor bans and tax increases that have hurt smokers badly in the pocket for the sake of their health. But it is still not uncommon to see smoking in some pubs, nightclubs and karaoke bars. Busy shopping districts are prone to pollution by the cigarette smoke of tourists, particularly those from the mainland. Overseas studies show that children remain easily influenced by the behaviour of their parents and peers.

Do we really need to wait and see how the Australian initiative turns out before considering further measures?

Topics:

Smoke free

Hong Kong

Australia

Smoking