Close loophole in smoking law: anti-tobacco group - TW

[dArKeR]

By Wang Hsiao-wen
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Aug 28, 2004,Page 4

Local governments should tighten the regulations on an estimated 70,000 betel nut stands around the nation who illegally display cigarette packs and who are suspected of selling the addictive product to minors, the anti-tobacco group John Tung Foundation urged yesterday.

"Because of their easy accessibility and popularity, betel nut stands have become a major source for supplying cigarettes to teenagers," the foundation's chief executive officer Hwang Jenn-tai (???), said at a press conference yesterday in Taipei.

About 17 percent of teenaged males and 4 percent of females in this country take up smoking, according to statistics from the Bureau of Health Promotion. Since Taiwan opened its market to foreign tobacco companies in 1987, the smoking rate among youngsters under the age of 18 has climbed steadily. The figures also suggested that smoking is responsible for approximately 20 percent of all deaths brought on by illnesses annually. Roughly 17,500 die of smoking-induced diseases nationwide each year.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/08/28/2003200572

I never see discussed in the Whore Media about Clinton being the President who broke American Tobacco Companies! But then they regrouped and character assassinated him.

Taiwan Betel Nut Girls
http://darkerxdarker.tripod.com/betelnutgirls.html

Big Tobacco - by Mark Schapiro

Tobacco is one of the most globalized industries on the planet. More cigarettes are traded than any other single product, some trillion "sticks," as they're known in the business, passing international borders each year. As a result, American brands have been propelled into every corner of the world, with just four companies controlling 70 percent of the global market. Marlboro, Kool, Kent: They have become as omnipresent around the world as they are here in the United States. With declining sales in this country, foreign markets have become increasingly critical to the tobacco companies' financial health: The top US tobacco firms now earn more from cigarettes sold abroad than in the United States. How they got there is a tale that leads straight into a global underground of smugglers and money launderers who have played a key role in facilitating the tobacco companies' entry into foreign markets…

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020506&s=schapiro

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How Big Tobacco Subverted Anti-Terror Act

How Big Tobacco nicked terror act Firms accused of smuggling cigarettes feared language on laundering

Mark Shaprio
MSNBC

NEW YORK, June 13 — On the one-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the tobacco industry took aim at Congress’ first effort to respond to the crisis with a major piece of new legislation — the Patriot Act. Why would America’s largest tobacco companies take an interest in a bill designed to go after America’s terrorist adversaries?

THE ANSWER: legal liability. Not that the tobacco companies are terrorists, but some of their marketing and distribution strategies look awfully similar to the illegal financing systems used by terrorists. At least they do from the U.S. Department of Justice perspective.

To get to the bottom of this story, we need to return to those traumatized days last fall, in which our lives were filled with fears of another terrorist attack, the retaliation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and shock and horror at the revelation that anthrax had contaminated the halls of
Congress.

http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/intl-tobacco/2002q2/000750.html

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Cigarette giant denies smoking leads to cancer - Imperial Tobacco

A giant British tobacco company is to take the unprecedented step this week of denying there is a proven causal link between smoking and lung cancer in the first case against a cigarette firm to go to a UK court.

The unique defense, to be heard in Scotland's Court of Session, denies decades of scientific proof of such a link, which was accepted by the British Government in 1957.

Imperial Tobacco is being sued for £500,000 (US$835,000) by Margaret McTear, whose husband, Alf, a 60-a-day smoker from Beith near Glasgow, died of lung cancer in 1993. The case, which starts tomorrow, will be scrutinized across Europe by lawyers who want to bring similar actions against tobacco firms.


http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2003/10/06/2003070628

[rabid_nerd]

1. Alf died?

Melmac is mourning...