Download PDF : 12 02 13 PHS Legco Briefing hs0213cb2-964-5-e
February, 2012:
Customs swoops on illicit cigarette smuggling syndicate in Sheung Shui
Hong Kong (HKSAR) – Hong Kong Customs yesterday (February 11) swooped on a cross-boundary illicit cigarette smuggling syndicate in Sheung Shui.On board a cross-boundary lorry, a total of 92 boxes containing 1.1 million sticks of duty-not-paid cigarette were found.The total value is about $2.8 million with a duty potential of $1.9 million.In the operation, two men, aged 41 and 54 respectively, were arrested and the cross-boundary lorry was seized.
At about 1.30pm yesterday, while conducting an anti-illicit cigarette operation in Sheung Shui area, Customs officers of Anti-illicit-cigarette Investigation Division spotted a cross-boundary lorry in a public car park at Fung Nam Road, Sheung Shui.Two men were seen off-loading some wooden boxes from the lorry to a local rental lorry.Customs officers then took action and found 92 boxes of illicit cigarette. The two men were arrested immediately.
Under the Dutiable Commodities Ordinance, anyone involved in dealing with, possession, selling and buying illicit cigarettes commits an offence.The maximum penalty on conviction is imprisonment for two years and a fine of $1 million.
Customs will continue to take stringent enforcement against cigarette smuggling activities to protect government revenue.
Members of the public are urged to report any suspected illicit cigarette activities to the Customs’ 24-hour hotline 2545 6182.
Source: HKSAR Government
Researchers find important ‘target’ playing role in tobacco-related lung cancers
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-important-role-tobacco-related-lung-cancers.html
Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., have discovered that the immune response regulator IKBKE (serine/threonine kinase) plays two roles in tobacco-related non-small cell lung cancers. Tobacco carcinogens induce IKBKE and, in turn, IKBKE induces chemotherapy resistance.
The study was published in a recent issue of Oconogene.
“IKBKE is a newly identified oconogene, a gene linked to cancer,” said study lead author Jin Q. Cheng, Ph.D., M.D., who studies genetic alterations and their molecular mechanisms in cancer. “In our study, we demonstrated that IKBKE is a STAT 3 target gene and is induced by tobacco. STAT3 is a signaling and transcription gene that is activated in various types of cancer and is required for cell transformation.”
As a “transcription factor” STAT3 plays a key role in many cellular processes, such as cell growth and programmed cell death, or “apoptosis.”
“It has been well documented that STAT3 is activated by growth factors and environmental carcinogenesis, such as nicotine,” said Cheng. “STAT3 directly binds to the IKBKE promoter and induces IKBKE transcription.”
Tobacco smoke is the strongest documented tumor initiator and promoter in lung cancer. The underlying molecular mechanism is still largely unknown.
“IKBKE is induced by tobacco carcinogens and mediates tobacco action in promoting lung cancer cell survival,” said Cheng. “Armed with this knowledge, interventions targeting the IKBKE pathway could be developed.”
Cheng and his colleagues found that when STAT3 induces IKBKE expression, IKBKE’s expression induces chemotherapy resistance. Conversely, “knocking down” IKBKE sensitizes cells to chemotherapy, suggesting that there is a therapeutic role for targeting IKBKE.
While IKBKE has been found to be “over expressed” in ovarian, breast and prostate cancers, in this study IKBKE has for the first time been associated with non-small cell lung cancer in patients with a history of tobacco use, and particularly by tobacco’s nicotine component. The researchers stated that upon exposure to nicotine, cells express high levels of IKBKE protein. In their study co-expression of STAT3 and IKBKE was “observed in primary non-small cell lung cancer.”
“Current treatments for non-small cell lung cancer include surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy,” explained Cheng. “Advanced patients generally develop chemotherapy and radiotherapy resistance, so there is a great need to understand the molecular mechanism of therapy resistance in order to find ‘targets’ to overcome resistance.”
The discovery that STAT3 appears to regulate IKBKE in response to nicotine induced by tobacco carcinogen may also help develop a strategy for an intervention in non-small cell lung cancer by targeting IKBKE.
Provided by H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute
Tobacco imports plunge
http://www.macaudailytimes.com.mo/macau/33550-Tobacco-imports-plunge.html
08/02/2012 10:44:00
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The importation of tobacco has decreased by 60 percent since the anti-smoking act came into effect last month.
Figures released by Portuguese language newspaper Tribuna de Macau show that the impact of the new law in tobacco sales was bigger than expected. It was expected to go down only by 40 percent.
President of the Tobacco Trade Association, Chan Ho Lam, warned that some local companies might declare bankruptcy due to the market downturn. He said that the sharp drop was a result of measures which are hampering the survival of the business, though the fight against tobacco smuggling was strengthened.
Tobacco tax increased by MOP 0.50 for each cigarette, to come into line with the ban on smoking in public places. Taxes on tobacco in Macau will reach MOP 10, around 38 percent of the retail price.
Chan said that the cheaper brands experienced a bigger drop in sales. Sales reductions amounted to about 70 percent, since prices went up, while the business of more expensive brands climbed 40 percent.
The association believes that the government must impose limits to duty free tobacco, just like in Hong Kong, that only allows people to enter with 19 cigarettes.
LCQ8: Sale of illicit cigarettes
http://7thspace.com/headlines/405290/lcq8_sale_of_illicit_cigarettes.html
Hong Kong (HKSAR) – Following is a question by the Hon Wong Ting-kwong and a written reply by the Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Professor K C Chan, in the Legislative Council today (February 8):
Question:
It has been reported that quite a number of traders are suspected of selling duty-not-paid cigarettes (illicit cigarettes) through a major shopping web site on the Mainland; as the retail price of these illicit cigarettes is 60% lower than that of genuine duty-paid cigarettes, and traders can deliver the illicit cigarettes through courier companies to the buyers’ residences in three days, thus quite a number of young people in Hong Kong are attracted to place orders. In this connection, will the Government inform this Council:
(a) whether it knows the details of the aforesaid online selling of illicit cigarettes (including the operation of online selling of illicit cigarettes, the monthly average sales volume, the number of local buyers and their main age groups, etc); if not, of the reasons for that;
(b) whether it had seized any illicit cigarettes smuggled to Hong Kong through courier service last year; if it had, of the quantity of illicit cigarettes seized, and the number of cases in which prosecutions were instituted; and
(c) what measures are in place to combat shopping web sites selling illicit cigarettes to Hong Kong people, and how enforcement will be stepped up to combat the smuggling of illicit cigarettes by couriers?
Reply:
President,
(a) The Customs and Excise Department (C&ED) has been closely monitoring illicit cigarette activities. Intelligence reveals that the sale of illicit cigarettes via internet is not common.
Last year, C&ED received only a single complaint regarding such activities in the local market. C&ED will continue to monitor the situation so as to prevent such illegal activities.
(b) In 2011, C&ED effected one case on the sale of illicit cigarettes via internet. One male offender was prosecuted with 600 sticks of illicit cigarettes seized.
There is so far no case on the sale of illicit cigarettes via Mainland shopping web site and delivered to Hong Kong by couriers.
(c) C&ED will take stringent enforcement actions against illicit cigarette activities. If the illicit cigarette activities involve Mainland websites, as these websites are operated outside Hong Kong, C&ED would refer such cases to the Mainland authorities for follow-up actions or appropriate preventive measures. Having regard to the mode of delivery adopted by such activities, C&ED will also step up inspection on import cargoes to prevent the smuggling of illegal commodities into Hong Kong.
Source: HKSAR Government
Smugglers Prosper in Spain’s ‘Perfect Storm’ for Tobacco Firms
February 07, 2012, 6:23 PM EST
By Manuel Baigorri
Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) — Spanish smokers, squeezed by higher taxes and a deepening recession, are increasingly relying on smugglers to feed their habit.
Illegal imports now account for 7 percent to 8 percent of Spanish cigarette sales, compared with almost nothing a year ago, according to the country’s tobacconists association. In southern provinces such as Cadiz, Seville and Malaga, the proportion is 20 percent.
“Smuggling and fake tobacco, which had been eradicated since 1993, came back strongly last year,” said Jaime Gil- Robles, corporate affairs director at Altadis, the Spanish unit of Imperial Tobacco Group Plc.
Smuggling, encouraged by a December 2010 increase in tobacco taxes and a ban on smoking in public places, has eroded both government coffers and company revenues. Spain, which has the European Union’s highest jobless rate, collected 14 percent less tobacco taxes in 2011 than a forecast of 9.05 billion euros ($12 billion), excluding value-added tax, according to Altadis.
“The fiscal policy was disastrous as it forced an average increase of 50 euro cents per packet,” Gil-Robles said. “Add the crisis and skyrocketing unemployment to that and you have the best scenario for smuggling and illicit tobacco.”
In a single week last month, Spanish tax authorities seized more than a million illegal packets of cigarettes worth about 4 million euros. In December, officials said they confiscated 561,500 packets of fake Marlboro brand cigarettes which were imported from China and entered the country through the port of Valencia in a container marked “synthetic fiber.”
‘Tremendously Worrisome’
The increase in smuggling is “tremendously worrisome for the whole industry,” said Mario Espejo, chairman of the Spanish tobacco association, which represents more than two-thirds of the country’s 14,000 tobacconists.
British American Tobacco Plc, Europe’s biggest cigarette maker, estimates that 6 percent to 12 percent of the 5.5 trillion cigarettes consumed worldwide each year are obtained through illicit means such as smuggling, its website shows.
In Spain, the number of packets sold last year declined 17 percent to 3.02 billion from 3.62 billion in 2010, according to the Tobacco Market Commission. Altadis this month requested a two-year freeze on tobacco tax to help the market recover. (CTA : this shows conclusively that increased tobacco tax and enforcement of non smoking restaurants and pubs WORKS !)
In May, Altadis cut the price of Fortuna, Nobel and Ducados in Spain to maintain competitiveness after it sold 16 percent fewer cigarettes there in the first half of the fiscal year.
“Last year, there were three big shocks in Spain for the consumer: the tough economic environment, excise increases and the smoking in public spaces ban,” Alison Cooper, chief executive officer of Bristol, England-based Imperial Tobacco, said in an interview in Madrid. “That caused the perfect storm in terms of the Spanish market.”
Bleak 2012 Outlook
This year will again be “tough,” though declines may not be as steep, Cooper said.
Altadis has the biggest share of Spain’s cigarette market at 33.3 percent, according to the tobacco market commission. That compares with 30.7 percent for Philip Morris International Inc., 21 percent for Japan Tobacco Inc. and BAT’s 11.8 percent.
Philip Morris, the world’s largest publicly traded tobacco company, isn’t anticipating much improvement in Spain this year.
“The dynamics observed in the Spanish market in 2011, mainly the adverse economic circumstances and the high unemployment rate, are likely to continue in 2012,” the maker of Marlboro said in a statement to Bloomberg News.
The ban on smoking in public places, introduced at the beginning of last year, is another reason for the decline in tobacco sales, according to Alfredo Arahuetes, dean of the Economic Sciences and Business Administration School at Madrid’s Comillas Pontifical University.
Restaurant Sales Decline
“Lots of bars have seen their business damaged,” Arahuetes said by phone. “Prices here are also a bit lower than in other European countries so tourists come not only for the sun, beaches and parties, but also to take as much tobacco as they can.”
Tobacco prices in Spain should be matched with other European countries, while being removed from the list of products measured to calculate the consumer price index, said Antonino Joya, a director at consumer rights group OCU.
The northwest region of Galicia, along with Gibraltar in the south and Andorra in the north, are the main locations for smuggling, the tobacco association’s Espejo said, adding that the Canary Islands, which benefit from lower taxes, have become another hot spot. A 4.25-euro packet of Marlboro cigarettes can be bought for about 2.25 euros on the black market, he said.
Alvaro Alonso, a manager at Los Angeles restaurant in Madrid, said revenue has dropped 15 percent to 20 percent since the smoking ban was introduced.
“The economic crisis and the smoking ban are a having huge negative impact on this type of business,” 33-year-old Alonso said. “We are just trying to survive.”
For the government, the need to tackle smuggling is just as pressing as it seeks to tackle the euro area’s third-largest budget deficit, said the tobacco association’s Espejo. About 80 percent of the cost of a packet of cigarettes is taxes, he said.
“As a country, we can’t afford the luxury of losing so much money in taxes as we fight to cut the budget deficit.”
–Editors: Paul Jarvis, Sara Marley.
To contact the reporter on this story: Manuel Baigorri in Madrid at mbaigorri@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kenneth Wong at kwong11@bloomberg.net
Smoking Slows Memory, Reasoning in Middle-Aged Men
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/smoking-speeds-cognitive-decline-men-study-finds/story?id=15524659
By CARRIE GANN (@carrie_gann) , ABC News Medical Unit
Feb. 6, 2012
New evidence suggests that smoking isn’t only bad for the body but can also take a toll on the mind.
A study published today in the Archives of General Psychiatry linked smoking to faster, more dramatic age-related mental decline in men.
Researchers from University College in London studied more than 5,000 men and 2,000 women from Britain’s long-running Whitehall II study, which has surveyed the health of thousands of British civil service employees.
The researchers studied each participant’s performance on tests of memory, verbal skills and reasoning over a period of 10 years, beginning when the participants were about 56 years old. They found that men who smoked showed a greater decline in these mental functions than those who had never smoked.
Smoking seemed to speed up the cognitive aging process, making men function mentally as if they were 10 years older, said Severine Sabia, the study’s lead author.
“For example, a 50-year-old male smoker shows a similar cognitive decline as a 60-year-old male never-smoker,” she said.
The brain changes weren’t necessarily permanent. Men who stopped smoking more than 10 years before the tests performed as well as those who had never smoked. But men who kicked the smoking habit less than 10 years before the cognitive tests began didn’t do much better than the men who’d kept smoking.
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While smoking seemed to drain men’s brains, the researchers didn’t find a similar connection between smoking and declining mental function in women. Sabia said that could be because women in this age group smoked less than men do, or that there were simply fewer women in the study.
Researchers said there are several factors that could explain the connection between smoking and mental decline. One reason could lie in the way smoking affects the heart, lungs and blood vessels. Because smoking ups the risk of vascular disease, it could limit the body’s ability to deliver the blood, oxygen and nutrients the brain needs to function at its best.
Dr. Charles DeCarli, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of California at Davis, said differences in cardiovascular disease may also explain why the study found that men showed more cognitive decline linked to smoking than women did.
“Men have more heart disease and greater stroke risk than women do up until about age 70 or so. Part of that is related to lifestyle,” DeCarli said. “Men of this age group often smoked more than women did.”
Philip Harvey, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami School of Medicine, said the addictive nature of cigarettes may also take a toll on the brain, noting that molecules of nicotine in the brain latch onto the same brain receptors involved in attention, concentration and memory.
“That just may lead to a disregulation of those receptors, it may make them function less well,” Harvey said. “But that could mean that rather than some kind of long-term damage, it’s a reversible process that may involve resetting the receptors.”
The study’s authors said that smoking’s long-term effects on mental function are probably underestimated, since smokers are more likely to die of other health problems before they have the chance to develop dementia.
Hong Kong’s failure to raise tobacco tax will take its toll on city’s youth
South China Morning Post – 7 Feb 2012
Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah has previously stated correctly in budget speeches that tobacco taxation, which makes tobacco unaffordable, is the most effective preventative health measure to stop youth smoking. The vast majority of nicotine addicts start smoking when they’re in the 10-19 age group.
There was no tobacco tax increase in the 2012 budget despite Hong Kong being legally bound by the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and requests from doctors, NGOs and government health bodies.
Thematic surveys show that in 2009, 383,000 10-19 year olds started smoking; in 2010 the number grew to 383,900. The situation cried out for a realistic preventative tax increase but was ignored by this business-friendly administration.
A pack of the most popular cigarettes costs HK$50 here, a city with one of the highest costs of living in the world. Compare the cost of that same pack in cities where authorities have genuine political will against smoking: Sydney HK$125, New York HK$117, Singapore HK$73 and Paris HK$62.
The WHO’s convention binds 174 parties, including China and the SAR, to specific tobacco control actions but these are repeatedly ignored by our officials.
Our government earned HK$4.384 billion from the tobacco excise tax and fixed-penalty notices last year but how much of this was invested in tobacco control in 2011? A meagre HK$174.8 million (HK$113.3 million for the Tobacco Control Office and the Council on Smoking and Health, HK$42 million for smoking cessation, and HK$19.5 million for the Health Authority’s efforts).
The Health Department has five smoking cessation clinics: four for government staff and only one for the public.
The Tobacco Control Office is woefully understaffed by a factor of at least six; the office has 107 staff covering two shifts for all of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, the New Territories and the Islands, and can only act on complaints.
This tobacco-friendly government issued flawed legislation with no onus on licensees to prevent smoking in liquor-licensed premises then failed to allocate adequate staff for enforcement. Hong Kong’s male smoking rate is 25 per cent higher than Australia’s. It seems the only political will of the Tsang administration is to keep our youth smoking, keeping the merchants of death in business and showing a flagrant lack of duty of care to Hong Kong’s children.
James Middleton, Clear the Air
Labor targets the Opposition over tobacco donations – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-06/labor-targets-the-opposition-over-toba
cco-donations/3812716?section=tas
Labor targets the Opposition over tobacco donations
Posted February 06, 2012 06:26:06
The Labor party in Tasmania is stepping up its campaign against the Liberal
party for accepting donations from tobacco companies.
Last week the Australian Electoral Commission released a list of donations
to Tasmania’s political parties, which showed the state Liberals received
about A$38,000 in donations from two big tobacco companies.
Labor’s state secretary, John Dowling says it’s re-released the Liberal
party’s “vision for the future” TV commercial on the internet with a health
warning about tobacco.
“The Liberal party has received tens of thousands of dollars from big
tobacco, they’ve received tens of thousands of dollars from other sources,”
he said.
“They should simply not be taking donations from tobacco companies.”
The Opposition Leader, Will Hodgman, has denied any link between political
donations and policy.
The state director of the Liberal party, Sam McQuestin, is not impressed by
Labor’s altering of the television commercial.
“This is a pathetic attack by Labor demonstrating just how desperate and
panicked they have become,” he said.
“I suggest Labor start focussing more on trying to run the state properly
and less on us.”
Topics:political-parties, tas