Download PDF : 2013 Policy Address Suggested tobacco control measures
January 11th, 2013:
Tobacco industry argues domestic trademark laws and international treaties preclude cigarette health warning labels, despite consistent legal advice that the argument is invalid
1. Eric Crosbie1,
+ Author Affiliations
1. 1Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, Cardiovascular Research Institute, San Francisco, California, USA
2. 2Department of Medicine (Cardiology), Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA
1. Correspondence to Professor Stanton A Glantz, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California San Francisco, Room 366 Library, 530 Parnassus, San Francisco, CA 94143-13990, USA; glantz@medicine.ucsf.edu
Received 15 April 2012
Accepted 12 October 2012
Published Online First 24 November 2012
Abstract
Objectives To analyse the tobacco industry’s use of international trade agreements to oppose policies to strengthen health warning labels (HWLs).
Design A review of tobacco industry documents, tobacco control legislation and international treaties.
Results During the early 1990s, the tobacco industry became increasingly alarmed about the advancement of HWLs on cigarettes packages. In response, it requested legal opinions from British American Tobacco’s law firms in Australia and England, Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry and the World Intellectual Property Organisation on the legality of restricting and prohibiting the use of their trademarks, as embodied in cigarette packages. The consistent legal advice, privately submitted to the companies, was that international treaties do not shield trademark owners from government limitations (including prohibition) on the use of their trademarks. Despite receiving this legal advice, the companies publicly argued that requiring large HWLs compromised their trademark rights under international treaties. The companies successfully used these arguments as part of their successful effort to deter Canadian and Australian governments from enacting laws requiring the plan packaging of cigarettes, which helped delay large graphic HWLs, including ‘plain’ packaging, for over a decade.
Conclusions Governments should not be intimidated by tobacco company threats and unsubstantiated claims, and carefully craft HWL laws to withstand the inevitable tobacco industry lawsuits with the knowledge that the companies’ own lawyers as well as authoritative bodies have told the companies that the rights they claim do not exist
Big Tobacco: Geneticists Create a Plant That Can’t Stop Growing
http://www.livescience.com/26213-tobacco-plant-genetics.html
Marc Lallanilla, Life’s Little Mysteries Assistant Editor
Date: 11 January 2013 Time: 05:12 PM ET
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In the comedy “Little Shop of Horrors,” a carnivorous plant named Audrey Jr. grew nonstop by feasting on unsuspecting human beings. In a somewhat more benign development, researchers in Germany have developed tobacco plants that also can’t stop growing.
Under normal conditions, the tobacco plant has a rather uninspiring lifespan. They grow for three or four months, according to Investor’s Business Daily, reaching 6.5 feet (2 meters) in height at the most, while their older leaves turn yellow and fall off. After flowering, the plants die.
But researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME) in Münster, Germany, have isolated the genetic switch that tells the tobacco plant to stop growing, flower and die. By suppressing that gene, the scientists have tricked the plants into growing like Jack’s beanstalk — even the older leaves stay green and healthy.
“The first of our tobacco plants is now almost eight years old but it still just keeps on growing and growing,” Dirk Prüfer, a professor at the Department of Functional and Applied Genomics at IME, said in a statement. “Although we regularly cut it, it’s six-and-a-half meters [21 ft.] tall.”
Genetic research on plants has also produced a variety of switchgrass (an important source of biofuels) that grows faster and produces thicker roots. By switching off a gene called UPBEAT1, the switchgrass never receives a signal to stop growing, leading scientists to believe they can use the modified plant to create a higher-yielding biofuel crop.
In other tobacco research, the plants have been genetically engineered to glow in the dark: By inserting a gene from bioluminescent marine bacteria, researchers at BioGlow, Inc., developed a tobacco plant with faintly glowing green leaves.
The scientists at IME hope to use their genetic engineering technique to create larger, longer-lived food plants. They are currently working with a Japanese company to develop a potato plant that possesses the same robust growth as their giant tobacco plant.