Uncategorized

By NEAL HALL, Vancouver Sun

February 12, 2010

VANCOUVER – Vancouver billionaire David Ho set a trial date for next year on charges of unlawful confinement of a woman and possessing a loaded handgun and illegal drugs.

His lawyer, Len Doust, appeared in Vancouver provincial court and entered a not guilty plea on behalf of his client and electing a trial by provincial court judge.

Five days have been set aside beginning on Feb. 9, 2011, for the trial, which will hear from 13 witnesses, the court was told by prosecutor Greg Weber.

Ho, 57, is facing trial on eight criminal counts. He was charged last year for an alleged incident that occurred on Dec,. 28, 2008.

Police alleged that Ho contacted a woman over a telephone chat line who went to his $5-million mansion at 7190 Hudson St. But when the woman tried to leave at about 4:45 a.m., Ho allegedly prevented her from leaving.

A violent struggle allegedly ensued and the woman called 911, but she didn’t know the address, police alleged. She managed to get away but fractured her ankle and suffered other minor injuries, police said.

Neighbours called 911 after hearing her screams.

Ho, who owns the high-end auto dealership MCL Motor Cars and the now-defunct Harmony airline, was later charged with unlawful confinement, possession of a loaded 9mm Glock pistol, which was illegally stored, and possession of cocaine and marijuana.

He was born in China and is an heir to the Hong Kong Tobacco Co. fortune. He holds passports to several countries and was in Shanghai when charged, but returned to Canada and has been released on $100,000 bail..

Ho, whose full name is Ting Kwok David Ho, is a longtime Liberal supporter who donated $100,000 to the provincial Liberals since 2005 and is a former member of the Vancouver police board.

In 2007, Ho had been stopped by police while driving his Porsche in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with two sex-trade workers and a quantity of cocaine in the vehicle. But he was never charged.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1911796-1,00.html

By JEFFREY KLUGER Friday, Time Inc.

Three men smoke on a street in Lagos Photograph for TIME by Sunday Alamba

It’s easy enough to buy a smoke at Isa Yakubu’s grocery store on a busy street in Lagos, Nigeria. Never mind if you don’t have much money. Most local merchants are happy to break open a pack and sell cigarettes one at a time — single sticks, as they’re known — for about 10 Nigerian naira, or 7 cents. “St. Moritz is the most popular brand,” says Yakubu. “But [people] also like Rothmans and Benson & Hedges.”

Single sticks go fast at 7 cents each — an especially good price point for kids. And while Yakubu says he doesn’t sell to children, other shopkeepers do. About 25% of teens — some as young as 13 — use tobacco in some parts of Nigeria, double the smoking rate of Nigerian men, and many pick up the habit by age 11. That’s a demographic powder keg, one that means big trouble if you’re a health expert and big promise if you’re a tobacco executive. Both sides agree on one thing, though: across all of Africa, cigarettes are set for boom times.
(See pictures of vintage pro-smoking propaganda.)

In recent years, the world has increasingly been cleaving into two zones: smoking and nonsmoking. In the U.S. and other developed countries, Big Tobacco is in retreat, chased to the curbs by a combination of lawsuits, smoking bans, rising taxes and advertising restrictions. Fewer than 20% of adult Americans now smoke — the lowest rate since reliable records have been kept — and a tobacco crackdown is under way in Europe, Canada and elsewhere. In April, Congress boosted federal cigarette taxes threefold, from 32 cents a pack to $1. In June, President Barack Obama signed a law giving the FDA the power to regulate cigarettes like any other food or drug.

But the West is not the world, and elsewhere smoking is exploding. In China, 350 million adults are hooked on tobacco, which means the country has more smokers than the U.S. has people. Smoking rates in Indonesia have quintupled since 1970. In Russia, boys as young as 10 start lighting up. This year, tobacco companies will produce more than 5 trillion cigarettes — or 830 for every person on the planet.

It’s in Africa, however, that the battle for the hearts, minds and lungs of new smokers is being waged most aggressively — and Nigeria offers a telling look at how the fight is unfolding. For all the woes that beset the continent, Africa still enjoys the lowest smoking rates in the world, largely because most people just can’t afford it. In Ghana, the male smoking rate (which in most places in the world is higher than the female rate) is only 8%; in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s 14%; in Nigeria, it’s 12%. Compare that with 31% in India, 56% in Malaysia and a whopping 61% in China. But the tobacco industry abhors a vacuum, and in recent years, industry players — principally London-based British American Tobacco, Switzerland-based Philip Morris International and the U.K.’s Imperial Tobacco — have been working hard to fill it. “We’ve done this before,” says Allan Brandt, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the author of The Cigarette Century. “When something gets regulated here, we move the risk offshore.” Says Michael Eriksen, a former policy adviser for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Africa is in play.”
(See how many people smoke around the world.)

Spreading the Scourge
Big Tobacco’s footprint in Africa has been hard to miss for a while. British American markets its wares — which include Dunhill and Pall Mall — in a vast crescent sweeping from South Africa to Congo and west to Ghana, as well as throughout North Africa. In 2003 the company planted its stakes deeper, building a $150 million factory in Nigeria. Philip Morris, whose brands include Marlboro and Chesterfield, has a smaller presence on the continent. “We are a minor, minor player,” says spokesman Greg Prager. But that could change. The company does no business in Nigeria, but it controls about 15% of the market across North Africa and has a scattered 10% share elsewhere. It has also built a new factory in Senegal.

That expansion increasingly happens through the single-stick model, and that’s the traffic that causes the most worry. People who buy cigarettes by the stick are typically the poor, the uneducated or the young — all groups less likely to have learned of the perils of smoking. “[A single stick is] much more affordable, and for young people, it’s easier to conceal,” says Babatunde Irukera, an antismoking lawyer working with the Nigerian government.

Will Clem in Shanghai, SCMP

The Shanghai World Expo 2010 has handed back 200 million yuan (HK$227 million) in sponsorship funds from a tobacco company, state media reports.

If confirmed, the move would be a major coup for anti-smoking activists on the mainland, who have been pressuring authorities to live up to their commitments to international health treaties.

The Southern Metropolis News reported yesterday that the Expo organising committee had decided to return the Shanghai Tobacco Group’s contribution to the China national pavilion to promote a “healthy World Expo”.

The paper quoted anonymous sources in the Expo bureau as saying the decision had been reached in a document ruling out gifts from firms linked to the tobacco industry.

When the Shanghai Tobacco Group made the donation in May, it was the largest single contribution the national pavilion had received since fund-raising began in 2007.

No one at the Expo organising bureau could be reached for comment, and no announcement that the sponsorship money had been returned was on the fair’s website.

However, the company is no longer listed among the fair’s 13 global partners, 12 senior partners or 14 project sponsors on either the Chinese or English versions of the site.

Campaigners submitted a petition to the Expo organisers arguing that the sponsorship was in breach of the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the South China Morning Post reported last week.

China ratified the convention in 2005. The 20 signatories included medical experts, prominent anti-smoking activists and health officials.

Jiang Yuan , a tobacco- control official at the Ministry of Health, said she had not heard confirmation that the campaign was successful, but welcomed the news.

“This would be a huge step forward,” she said.

“The Shanghai government has the chance to set a positive example to the rest of the country, to show that a change in attitude is needed.

“This is not just about the Shanghai World Expo. There are many other public events that have received money from tobacco companies, and I am certain the Shanghai government’s decision will have an impact.”

She said she believed that the initial decision by organisers to accept the money had been made “without fully understanding the issues and the implications”.

“The Expo is an international event, and so it should keep with international standards,” she said. “After this, there will be more room for understanding.”

With 350 million smokers, the mainland is the largest tobacco market, accounting for one-third of the world’s smokers.

About a million mainlanders die each year from smoking-related illnesses, Ministry of Health figures show.

The anti-smoking lobby is still in its relative infancy, but has begun making inroads – despite state-run cigarette manufacturers’ political influence.

The mainland has already banned direct tobacco advertising and plans to implement a total ban on promotions in 2011.

1. 32-history

2. historyoftobacco – by CTA

http://www.bmj.com/archive/7070nd2.htm

BMJ No 7070 Volume 313

Robert N Proctor

Historians and epidemiologists have only recently begun to explore the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world’s strongest anti smoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s,encompassing bans on smoking in public spaces, bans on advertising, restrictions on tobacco rations for women, and the world’s most refined tobacco epidemiology, linking tobacco use with the already evident epidemic of lung cancer. The anti-tobacco campaign must be understood against the backdrop of the Nazi quest for racial and bodily purity, which also motivated many other public health efforts of the era.

Medical historians in recent years have done a great deal to enlarge our understanding of medicine and public health in Nazi Germany. We know that about half of all doctors joined the Nazi party and that doctors played a major part in designing and administering the Nazi programmes of forcible sterilisation, “euthanasia,” and the industrial scale murder of Jews and gypsies.(1) (2) Much of our present day concern for the abuse of humans used in experiments stems from the extreme brutality many German doctors showed towards concentration camp prisoners exploited to advance the cause of German military medicine.(3)

Tobacco in the Reich
One topic that has only recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.(4-6) Germany had the world’s strongest anti smoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s,supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the race.(1) (4)Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders of Europe-Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco-were all non-smokers.(7) Hitler was the most adamant, characterising tobacco as “the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man for having been given hard liquor.” At one point the Fuehrer even suggested that Nazism might never have triumphed in Germany had he not given up smoking.(8)

German smoking rates rose dramatically in the first six years of Nazi rule, suggesting that the propaganda campaign launched during those early years was largely ineffective.(4) (5) German smoking rates rose faster even than those of France, which had a much weaker anti-tobacco campaign. German per capita tobacco use between 1932 and 1939 rose from 570 to 900 cigarettes a year, whereas French tobacco consumption grew from 570 to only 630 cigarettes over the same period.(9)

Smith et al suggested that smoking may have functioned as a kind of cultural resistance,(4) though it is also important to realise that German tobacco companies exercised a great deal of economic and political power, as they do today. German anti-tobacco activists frequently complained that their efforts were no match for the “American style” advertising campaigns waged by the tobacco industry.(10) German cigarette manufacturers neutralised early criticism-for example, from the SA(Sturm-Abteilung; stormtroops), which manufactured its own”Sturmzigaretten”-by portraying themselves as early and eager supporters of the regime.(11) The tobacco industry also launched several new journals aimed at countering anti-tobacco propaganda. In a pattern that would become familiar in the United States and elsewhere after the second world war, several of these journals tried to dismiss the anti-tobacco movement as “fanatic”and “unscientific.” One such journal featured the German word for science twice in its title (Der Tabak: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Internationalen Tabakwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, founded in 1940).

We should also realise that tobacco provided an important source of revenue for the national treasury. In 1937-8 German national income from tobacco taxes and tariffs exceeded 1 billion Reichsmarks.(12) By 1941, as a result of new taxes and the annexation of Austria and Bohemia, Germans were paying nearly twice that. According to Germany’s national accounting office, by 1941 tobacco taxes constituted about one twelfth of the government’s entire income.(13) Two hundred thousand Germans were said to owe their livelihood to tobacco-an argument that was reversed by those who pointed to Germany’s need for additional men in its labour force, men who could presumably be supplied from the tobacco industry.(14)

'Tobacco capital' raining down to spoil the people's health.

Culmination of the campaign: 1939-41
German anti-tobacco policies accelerated towards the end of the 1930s,and by the early war years tobacco use had begun to decline. The Luftwaffe banned smoking in 1938 and the post office did likewise. Smoking was barred in many workplaces, government offices, hospitals, and rest homes. The NSDAP (National sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) announced a ban on smoking in its offices in 1939, at which time SS chief Heinrich Himmler announced a smoking ban for all uniformed police and SS officers while on duty.(15) The Journal of the American Medical Association that year reported Hermann Goering’s decree barring soldiers from smoking on the streets, on marches, and on brief off duty periods.(16) Sixty of Germany’s largest cities banned smoking on street cars in 1941.(17) Smoking was banned in air raid shelters-though some shelters reserved separate rooms for smokers.(18) During the war years tobacco rationing coupons were denied to pregnant women (and to all women below the age of 25) while restaurants and cafes were barred from selling cigarettes to female customers.(19) From July 1943 it was illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to smoke in public.(20)Smoking was banned on all German city trains and buses in 1944, the initiative coming from Hitler himself ,who was worried about exposure of young female conductors to tobacco smoke.(21) Nazi policies were heralded as marking “the beginning of the end” of tobacco use in Germany.(14)

Cover page from Reine Luft, the main journal of the German anti-tobacco movement

German tobacco epidemiology by this time was the most advanced in the world. Franz H Muller in 1939 and Eberhard Schairer and Erich Schoniger in 1943 were the first to use case-control epidemiological methods to document the lung cancer hazard from cigarettes.(22) (23) Muller concluded that the “extraordinary rise in tobacco use” was “the single most important cause of the rising incidence of lung cancer.”(22) Heart disease was another focus and was not infrequently said to be the most serious illness brought on by smoking.(24) Late in the war nicotine was suspected as a cause of the coronary heart failure suffered by a surprising number of soldiers on the eastern front. A 1944 report by an army field pathologist found that all 32 young soldiers whom he had examined after death from heart attack on the front had been “enthusiastic smokers.” The author cited the Freiburg pathologist Franz Buchner’s view that cigarettes should be considered “a coronary poison of the first order.”(25)

'Our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler drinks no alcohol and does not smoke...His performance at work is incredible...(from Auf der Wacht, 1937)

On 20 June 1940 Hitler ordered tobacco rations to be distributed to the military “in a manner that would dissuade” soldiers from smoking.(24) Cigarette rations were limited to six per man per day, with alternative rations available for non-smokers(for example, chocolate or extra food). Extra cigarettes were sometimes available for purchase, but these were generally limited to 50 per man per month and were often unavailable-as during times of rapid advance or retreat. Tobacco rations were denied to women accompanying the Wehrmacht. An ordinance on 3 November 1941 raised tobacco taxes to a higher level than they had ever been (80-95% of the retail price). Tobacco taxes would not rise that high again for more than a quarter of a century after Hitler’s defeat.(26)

Impact of the war and postwar poverty
The net effect of these and other measures (for instance, medical lectures to discourage soldiers from smoking) was to lower tobacco consumption by the military during the war years. A 1944 survey of 1000 servicemen found that, whereas the proportion of soldiers smoking had increased (only 12.7% were non-smokers), the total consumption of tobacco had decreased-by just over 14%. More men were smoking (101 of those surveyed had taken up the habit during the war, whereas only seven had given it up) but the average soldier was smoking about a quarter (23.4%) less tobacco than in the immediate prewar period. The number of very heavy smokers (30 or more cigarettes daily) was down dramatically-from 4.4% to only 0.3%-and similar declines were recorded for moderately heavy smokers.(24)

German cigarette consumption in 1940-1. Germans smoked 75 billion cigarettes, or enough to form a cylindrical block 436 metres high with a base of 1000 square metres. (From Reine Luft.)

Postwar poverty further cut consumption. According to official statistics German tobacco use did not reach prewar levels again until the mid-1950s. The collapse was dramatic: German per capita consumption dropped by more than half from 1940 to 1950, whereas American consumption nearly doubled during that period.(6) (9) French consumption also rose, though during the four years of German occupation cigarette consumption declined by even more than in Germany(9)-suggesting that military conquest had a larger effect than Nazi propaganda.

After the war Germany lost its position as home to the world’s most aggressive anti-tobacco science. Hitler was dead but also many of his anti-tobacco underlings either had lost their jobs or were otherwise silenced. Karl Aster, head of Jena’s Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research (and rector of the University of Jena and an officer in the SS), committed suicide in his office on the night of 3-4 April 1945.Reich Health Fuhrer Leonardo Conti, another anti-tobacco activist, committed suicide on 6 October 1945 in an allied prison while awaiting prosecution for his role in the euthanasia programme. Hans Reiter, the Reich Health Office president who once characterised nicotine as “the greatest enemy of the people’s health” and “the number one drag on the German economy”(27) was interned in an American prison camp for two years, after which he worked as a physician in a clinic in Kassel, never again returning to public service. Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, the guiding light behind Thuringia’s antismoking campaign and the man who drafted the grant application for Astel’s anti-tobacco institute, was executed on 1 October 1946 for crimes against humanity. It is hardly surprising that much of the wind was taken out of the sails of Germany’s anti-tobacco movement.

The chain smoker: 'You don't smoke it, it smokes you! Chainsmoker " (from Reine Luft, Clean Air 1941)

The flip side of Fascism Smith et al were correct to emphasise the strength of the Nazi anti smoking effort and the sophistication of Nazi era tobacco science.(4) The anti smoking science and policies of the era have not attracted much attention, possibly because the impulse behind the movement was closely attached to the larger Nazi movement. That does not mean, however, that anti smoking movements are inherently fascist(28); it means simply that scientific memories are often clouded by the celebrations of victors and that the political history of science is occasionally less pleasant than we would wish.

Funding: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC; Hamburger Institut fur Sozialforschung in Hamburg.

Conflict of interest: None.

Department of History,
Pennsylvania State University,
University Park,
PA 16802,
United States

Robert N Proctor, professor of the history of science

1 Proctor R N. Racial hygiene: medicine under the Nazis.Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988.

2 Kater M H. Doctors under Hitler.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

3 Annas G, Grodin M. The Nazi doctors and the Nuremberg code.New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

4 Smith G D, Strobele S A, Egger M. Smoking and death.BMJ1995;310:396.

5 Borgers D. Smoking and death. BMJ 1995;310:1536.

6 Proctor R N. Nazi cancer research and policy. J Epidemiol Community Health (in press).

7 Bauer D. So lebt der Duce. Auf der Wacht 1937:19-20.

8 Picker H. Hitlers Tischgesprache im Fuhrerhauptquartier.Bonn: Athenaum Verlag, 1951.

9 Lee PN, ed. Tobacco consumption in various countries. 4th ed. London: Tobacco Research Council, 1975.

10 Reid G. Weltanschauung, Haltung, Genussgifte.Genussgifte1939;35:64.

11 Kosmos. Bild-Dokumente unserer Zeit.Dresden: Kosmos,1933.

12 Reckert FK. Tabakwarenkunde: Der Tabak, sein Anbau undseine Verarbeitung.Berlin-Schoneberg: Max Schwabe, 1942.

13 Erkennung und Bekampfung der Tabakgefahren. DtschArztebl 1941;71:183-5.

14 Klarner W. Vom Rauchen: Eine Sucht und ihre Bekampfung.Nuremberg: Rudolf Kern, 1940.

15 Rauchverbot fur die Polizei auf Strassen und in Dienstraumen. Die Genussgifte1940;36:59.

16 Berlin: alcohol, tobacco and coffee. JAMA 1939;113:1144-5.

17 Kleine Mitteilungen. Vertrauensarzt 1941;9:196.

18 Mitteilungen. Off Gesundheitsdienst 1941;7:488.

19 Charman T. The German home front 1939-1945. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989.

20 Fromme W. Offentlicher Gesundheitsdienst. In: Rodenwaldt E,ed. Hygiene. Part I. General hygiene. Wiesbaden: Dietrich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung,1948:36.

21Informationsdienst des Hauptamtes fur Volksgesundheitder NSDAP.1944;April-June:60-1.

22 Muller F H. Tabakmissbrauch und Lungencarcinom. Z Krebsforsch1939;49:57-85.

23 Schairer E, Schoniger E. Lungenkrebs und Tabakverbrauch.Z Krebsforsch1943;54:261-9.

24 Kittel W. Hygiene des Rauchens. In: Handloser S, Hoffmann W, eds.Wehrhygiene. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1944.

25 Goedel A. Kriegspathologische Beitrage. In: Zimmer A, ed.Kriegschirurgie.Vol 1. Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1944.

26 Pritzkoleit K. Auf einer Woge von Gold: Der Triumph der Wirtschaft.Vienna: Verlag Kurt Desch, 1961.

27 Werberat der deutschen Wirtschaft. Volksgesundheit und Werbung.Berlin: arl Heymanns, 1939.

28 Peto R. Smoking and death. BMJ 1995;310:396.

(Accepted 6 November 1996)

1575: Mexico:
The first recorded passing of legislation prohibiting the use of Tobacco occurs when the Roman Catholic Church passed a law which prohibited smoking in any place of worship throughout the Spanish Colonies
1600s: World-wide
Popes ban smoking in holy places and all places of worship. Pope Urban VIII (1623-44) threatens excommunication for those who smoke or take snuff in holy places.
1612: China
Royal decree forbids the use and cultivation of tobacco
1617: Mongolia
Mongolian Emperor prohibits the use of tobacco. People breaking the law face the death penalty.
1620: Japan
bans the use of tobacco
1632: America
The first recorded smoking ban in America occurs when Massachusetts introduces a ban on smoking in public places
1633: Turkey:
Sultan Murad IV bans smoking and as many as 18 people a day are executed for breaking his law.
1634: Russia
Czar Alexis bans smoking. Those found guilty of a first offence risk whipping, a slit nose, and exile to Siberia. Those found guilty of a second offence face execution.
1634: Greece
The Greek Church bans the use of tobacco claiming tobacco smoke was responsible for intoxicating Noah..
1638: China
The use and supply of tobacco is made a crime punishable by decapitation for those convicted
1639: America
Governor Kieft of New Amsterdam beats Bloomberg by hundreds of years and bans smoking in New Amsterdam later to become New York.
1640: Bhutan
The founder of modern Bhutan, Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal introduces that countries first smoking ban outlawing the use of tobacco in government buildings.
1647: America
People are only allowed to smoke once a day and public smoking is prohibited in Connecticut
1650: Italy
Pope Innocent X’s issues a decree against smoking in St Peter’s, Rome
1657: Switzerland
Smoking prohibition introduced throughout Switzerland
1674: Russia
Death penalty introduced for the crime of smoking.
1683: America
First laws in America passed prohibiting smoking outdoors in Massachusetts. Philadelphia follows suit introducing fines for offenders.
1693: England
First recorded ban in England introduced prohibiting smoking in certain areas of the chambers of parliament

* Smoking bans and prohibitions became rare during the 18th and 19th century. Trade in tobacco became an important source of revenue for monarchs and leaders and tobacco bans were revoked. Even the Pope not to be left out opened a tobacco factory in 1779.

1719: France
Smoking is banned with the exception of a number of provinces.

America and Prohibition

Smoking bans and restrictions found little favour in the developing Industrial world of the 19th century. However in the USA as the century drew to a close moral crusaders outraged by the consumption of alcohol and tobacco by American people began to demand action by federal and state legislators. This culminated in an amendment to the American constitution which allowed for the prohibition of alcohol in 1920.

Believing that prohibition might be “for their own good” Americans at first seemed to reluctantly accept it. However they rapidly grew disenchanted with the oppression. The rich and powerful colluded and rubbed shoulders with gangsters in efforts to maintain the flow of alcohol. Speakeasies flourished, hip flasks became a popular symbol of defiance.

Te-Ping Chen, Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

YUNXIAO, China—On first approach, Yunxiao seems like any other Chinese backwater caught in an uneasy industrial transition. Faded advertisements line the downtown streets, where motorcyclists wearing bamboo-frond hats vie for paying passengers in a riot of honking. A cheerful red banner in the city center exhorts citizens to develop the local economy. The message seems ironic. After all, since the 1990s, Yunxiao has sprouted its own league of millionaires, famous throughout China.

But you won’t find their activity downtown.

Ringed by thickly forested mountains, illicit cigarette factories dot the countryside, carved deeply into caves, high into the hills, and even buried beneath the earth. By one tally, some 200 operations are hidden in Yunxiao, a southwestern Fujian county about twice the area of New York City. Over the last 10 years, production of counterfeit cigarettes has soared in China, jumping eightfold since 1997 to an unprecedented 400 billion cigarettes a year—enough to supply every U.S. smoker with 460 packs a year. Once famed for its bright yellow loquat fruit, Yunxiao is the trade’s heartland, the source of half of China’s counterfeit production.

Slate V: Hunting Chinese cigarette pirates

Today, China’s fake cigarettes—knockoff Marlboros, Newports, and Benson & Hedges—are flooding markets around the globe. They fuel a violent, multibillion-dollar black market and are even more hazardous to smokers than the real thing, yet the industry is little-known.

“Most factories are underground,” a Yunxiao cigarette broker confided in hushed tones. “They’re under buildings, unimaginably well-hidden, with secret doors from the basements.” Even the village temple—topped with an arched red roof and twisting, frescoed spires—conceals a factory below, she said.

Cigarette counterfeiting is immensely lucrative, with profits easily rivaling those of the narcotics trade. While a pack of fake Marlboros costs 20 cents to make in China, it can fetch up to 20 times that amount in the United States. And though a drug trafficker might land a life sentence if caught, a cigarette counterfeiter usually receives a comparative slap on the wrist—a handful of years in jail or possibly a fine.

“In the last few years, pretty much every market has been targeted,” said Andrew Robinson, who directs Philip Morris International’s efforts to protect its brand. In 2001, Chinese manufacturers were producing eight different varieties of counterfeit Marlboros. As of last year, though, Chinese counterfeiters were manufacturing separate versions of Marlboro tailored for some 60 countries—down to the specific details of tax stamps and regional health warnings. As many as 99 percent of counterfeit cigarettes in the United States come from China.

When it comes to top-quality fakes like these, all roads lead back to Yunxiao. “Any brand or quality, Yunxiao can help you make it,” said a former cigarette smuggler from Fujian. “You just need to name your price.”

Villagers wary of strangers act as sentries along Yunxiao’s narrow side streets and in its hotels, and outsiders are frequently tailed. Factory raids carried out by Chinese police have yielded semiautomatic rifles and met with machete-armed resistance. Every year, several state and private investigators are murdered in retaliation killings. Though Chinese authorities offer rewards of thousands of dollars for information, few residents dare to take them. “Even if you get the money,” one villager said, “you won’t have any life left to enjoy it in afterward.”

It’s hard to overstate the ubiquity of tobacco in China, home to one of the world’s most elaborate and entrenched smoking cultures. Here, the introductory exchange of cigarettes is as ritualized as a handshake, and expensive brands moonlight as everything from wedding gifts to bribes—even offerings on ancestors’ tombs.

As an official from the tobacco company Rothmans once put it, “Thinking about Chinese smoking statistics is like trying to think about the limits of space.” Every year, China’s smokers consume 2.2 trillion cigarettes. The number of counterfeits flooding the domestic market is similarly off the charts. “Each of us has come up with our own strategy to deal with it by now,” confided one Beijing smoker who refuses to buy at locations where he doesn’t know the owner. On trains, conductors roam the aisles, industriously hawking 75-cent keychain lights that purportedly reveal fake packs.

In China, all legal manufacture and distribution of cigarettes is state-owned and state-controlled. With cigarette sales accounting for nearly 8 percent of China’s budget in 2007, the state has a strong motive to keep its supply counterfeit-free. (Officials are zealous about protecting the market, too: Until this April, officials in the central Chinese province of Hubei were required to smoke a collective 230,000 packs of regional brands a year.)

Accordingly, counterfeiters deploy a number of tricks to dodge authorities. One manufacturer built a factory that masqueraded as a military compound, complete with 20 laborers—dressed in castoff army uniforms—who would conduct faux-military drills and sing the national anthem in the yard every morning. Other cigarette-making machines have been hidden on ships, inside concrete bunkers, and even under a lake.

Back in the 1990s, Chinese counterfeits often came with misspelled health warnings, blurred lettering, and other obvious giveaways. These days, their sophistication sometimes challenges forensic investigators. In the United Kingdom—where authorities report that up to one-third of all cigarettes sold in some areas are fake, mostly from China—customs officers have deployed a trained dog to sniff out counterfeits on the streets.

For the enterprising smuggler, custom-made fakes are only a few clicks away. Manufacturers openly court clients through online storefronts, touting quality guarantees and their equipment’s international caliber. One Yunxiao operation, established in 1993, assures customers of its experience exporting to Asia and Africa and says it maintains its own tobacco fields in Laos. The company—which churns out 80 million cigarettes a week—promises a six-day turnaround, door-to-door delivery for certain overseas clients, and impeccable customer service.

The tone is reassuring and gently instructive. For hesitant buyers, the owners guarantee that the U.S. market in particular is a “profit business.”

“We strive to build and maintain a total honesty management culture,” the manufacturers say, “and will appreciate the chance to do business with you.”

But for U.S. consumers, inhaling the knockoff cigarettes may do even more damage than their genuine counterparts. Lab tests show that Chinese counterfeits emit higher levels of dangerous chemicals than brand-name cigarettes: 80 percent more nicotine and 130 percent more carbon monoxide, and they contain impurities that include insect eggs and human feces.

None of that stops counterfeiters, who reap prodigious rewards from the trade. According to manufacturers in Yunxiao, state-of-the-art cigarette-making machines can set a factory back $1.5 million to $3 million. “But everyone knows that the investment can be recouped

in just a few months of manufacturing,” a Yunxiao cigarette broker told me.

Even area officials speak of the region’s counterfeiting prowess with pride. “For a long time now, a lot of Yunxiao’s cigarettes have gone to Russia,” said one police officer. “The feedback from Russian customers is that they’ve gotten used to the fake flavor, and now they don’t want the real ones anymore.”

The broker says Yunxiao might change someday, but the transition could take many years. One of the manufacturers she knows invested $2.5 million to start a legitimate business elsewhere, but recently quit and returned—disappointed because “the profits could never match counterfeit.”

Still, she hopes the industry will make a shift: “We locals would like to see Yunxiao start its own legal cigarette factory someday.”

Te-Ping Chen is a staff reporter with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2221438/

The West Australian, June 22, 2009

Places where smoking is prohibited in NSW will soon include cars, if any of their passengers are under the age of 16.

Billboards and print advertisements will start appearing this weekend to remind drivers and smokers of new government regulations aimed at protecting children from tobacco smoke.

The new laws come into effect on July 1.

“The advertisements will hammer home the message that from July 1, drivers and smokers will be banned from smoking in cars when a child or passenger under the age of 16 is present,” Minister assisting the Minister for Health (Cancer) Jodi McKay said in a statement on Saturday.

“Any driver or passenger who is caught violating this new law could attract a $250 on-the-spot fine from NSW Police.”

Stafford Saunders, who co-ordinates a coalition of pressure groups called Protecting Children from Tobacco, says exposure to second hand smoke can greatly increase the risk of childhood asthma.

“(It can also) lead to an increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as pneumonia and bronchitis, as well as coughing and wheezing,” he said.

The new laws do not just include banning smoking in cars if passengers are under the age of 16.

In addition, retailers will be required to store all tobacco products out of sight.

Retailers who employ more than 50 people will have six months to comply and other retailers will have 12 months from July 1, 2009.

Updated on Jan 02, 2009 – SCMP

A new national regulation prohibits foreign-invested supermarkets, including Wal-Mart and Carrefour, from selling tobacco products on the mainland, the Beijing Youth Daily reports. The regulation, which took effect yesterday, also bans foreign-invested businesses and self-employed individuals from any involvement in the retail or wholesale tobacco industry.