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FROM THE DIRECTOR'S DESK
Many of you will probably not have heard of her until now. I don't think she seeks to hog the limelight, yet her decision to open her shop "Moolicious" (this name could only come from Taranaki) and not stock cigarettes is a truly courageous stance to take. Sandy is not the first dairy/convenience store owner to take this stand, but she sets another example to small retailers about the ethics of running a community business. At a time when strong calls are being made to get cigarettes out of sight this small blow for what is right needs to be applauded. Further on in this Update we read of another honour for Helen Glasgow. I for one want to pass on my congratulations to her on achieving this recognition. Only one other person has been so honoured - and that is the Prime Minister herself. The honour is in recognition of Helen Glasgow's work on tobacco control at a time when it was even more politically difficult to be involved in tobacco control than it is today. And let's not forget the Smokefree Warriors. If ever there was a strong example that smoking is not cool - this is it. It happens to be relevant to our target audience too. It is no surprise to me that they have started the season with a couple of great wins. While we always have something more to do, taking a little time to stop and smell the roses is a good thing. I am sure that if we stop to think about it, we are all surprised at the progress that has been made. And, our people don't ease up! Have a good fortnight. Mark Peck Director IN THIS ISSUE:
DAIRY KICKS CIGARETTES INTO TOUCH
"I don't smoke and I don't see why I should sell cigarettes to young ones that just have to end up going through withdrawal symptoms to give up when they're older," Mrs Sharrock said. She has opened her shop Moolicious in the premises of the old Spotswood Dairy. In her mind, cigarettes are too expensive to stock and they attract thieves. "There's not much profit on cigarettes so I don't think that's the main income for a dairy," she said. Taranaki District Health Board health promoter Emma Hope said the shop could have a huge positive impact on the surrounding Spotswood community. "By going smokefree, Sandy is doing her bit to break the stigma that dairies need to stock cigarettes to be economically viable." The shop is across the road from Spotswood Primary School. "Spotswood parents can be confident that their children can go to this dairy without being bombarded by a wall of cigarettes," Ms Hope said She doesn't know of any other dairy-type shops in Taranaki that don't stock cigarettes but she hopes it will catch on. About 4500 people die from tobacco-related illnesses every year which adds up to more than deaths from road crashes, suicide, skin cancers, drowning, homicide and AIDS combined. Taranaki Daily News, 23 March 2007 CALL TO STUB OUT DUTY-FREE TOBACCO SALESDr George Thomson from the Wellington School of Medicine is calling for the Government to act on a World Health Organization (WHO) commitment it signed in 2003 and ban duty-free sales of cigarettes and tobacco. "Banning duty-free sales would send a signal that you do not have dangerous addictive substances having no control. It would also seal off a source of low-price cigarettes." Duty-free cigarettes sell for half the price they do in dairies and supermarkets and are sold in cartons of 200 rather than individual packs of 20. The Government signed up to the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) four years ago, agreeing to work towards prohibiting or restricting duty-free cigarette sales to travellers. Last month the Australian Medical Association (AMA) urged the Australian Government to ban duty-free sales, saying Australia too had done little since signing the FCTC. "Raising the price of cigarettes through the imposition of tax is an important deterrent to would-be smokers - the AMA sees no reason why some cigarettes would be exempt," AMA president Dr Mukesh Haikerwal said. A spokeswoman for the New Zealand Medical Association said it was aware of the AMA's actions and was considering its own response. But a spokesman for Associate Health Minister Damien O'Connor said the clause in the WHO convention regarding duty-free tobacco was one of the non-mandatory provisions. He said banning duty-free sales would require "cross-agency and cross-jurisdictional action" and there were no plans to do so. But Thomson said the argument that a ban would be too difficult to implement was not good enough and the real obstacle appeared to be commercial pressure from duty-free retailers. "They appear to be an extremely well organised lobby group." Sunday Star Times, 25 March 2007 HELEN GLASGOW HONOURED
The award is given to people who have demonstrated a strong track record in promoting respiratory health through tobacco control. The Prime Minister Helen Clark is the only other New Zealander who has received the President's Award. Helen Glasgow's contributions include being a leading advocate for the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990. The act resulted in an almost total ban on tobacco advertising and the introduction of smokefree office environments. As a founding member and former Chair of the Smokefree Coalition, Helen motivated other health groups to lobby about the dangers of second-hand smoke. This led to the banning of smoking in bars, restaurants, clubs and casinos in 2004. Helen has received many awards in acknowledgment of her contributions to tobacco control. These include:
The President's Award was presented to Helen at the Society's 2007 Annual Scientific Meeting held in Auckland on Monday 26 March. THE QUIT GROUP UPDATE - FEBRUARY 2007A total of 3,073 callers were registered with the Quitline in February this year. Caller levels climbed when the new Video Diaries campaign featuring Stu Sutherland got underway on television. 25.4 percent of registered callers were Māori (781), 74.4 percent were New Zealand European (2285) and 5.6 percent (172) of the callers identified themselves as Pacific peoples. In the past Pacific registered callers have hovered around two percent and The Quit Group is pleased to see the increase in Pacific caller levels being maintained. The highest proportion of callers was in the 30-34 age bracket, followed by the 25-29 age group.
Numbers of callers registered with the Quitline by month (registered callers are those who receive a quit pack and are offered advice and support). CALLERS REGISTERED WITH THE QUITLINE BY DHBCallers to the Quitline who registered to make a quit attempt during October, November and December 2006, by District Health Board.
TOBACCO CONTROL UPDATE SURVEYDon't forget to tell us what you think of Tobacco Control Update. We're keen to make sure the Update continues to be a relevant channel of information for those interested in tobacco control, and are seeking some feedback. Do you think we could do the Update better or a little differently? Are you finding it still meets your needs as someone with an interest in tobacco control? We'd be delighted to hear from you, whether you have praise or criticism. We've designed an online feedback from that we hope you'll find the time to fill out. It's mostly tick boxes and multiple choice, so it shouldn't take too long. There's also room for comments. All who fill out the form and include their contact details will go into a draw to win a $100 Sounds music/DVD voucher. If you don't want to go into the draw, we're also happy for you to fill out the form anonymously. The form will be available for the next two weeks. We'll weigh up the comments that come in and give you the results once they are collated. The form is online at http://www.sfc.org.nz/tcufeedback.html, or you can follow the link from our homepage. NATIONAL DRUG POLICY LAUNCHEDThe new National Drug Policy 2007 to 2012 was launched on 15 March. Speaking at the launch, Hon Damien O'Connor said from the point of view of the overall health of New Zealanders, it is the legal drugs tobacco and alcohol which have the greatest risk of harm. "There is no disputing this. Tobacco is the number one killer in New Zealand, accounting for nearly 5000 preventable deaths every year. That is more than the number of people in my home town of Westport." He said there is still a lot of work to be done as almost one in four adults smoke, just over 23 percent, and the rate is twice that for Māori. "We will continue with our media campaigns, promoting smoke-free cars and homes and pictorial warnings on cigarette packets will be in place by early 2008," he said. LEGAL SUBSTANCES OFTEN MOST DANGEROUSAlcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than illegal drugs such as marijuana or Ecstasy, according to a new British study. In research published in The Lancet, Professor David Nutt, of Britain's Bristol University, and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most-dangerous substances. Prof Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug's potential for addiction, and the impact on society of drug use. The researchers asked two groups of experts - psychiatrists specialising in addiction and police officials with scientific or medical expertise - to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, amphetamines and LSD. Prof Nutt and his colleagues then calculated the drugs' overall rankings. In the end, the experts agreed with each other - but not with the existing British classification of dangerous substances. Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth-most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy. Prof Nutt called for more education so that people were aware of the risks of various drugs. "All drugs are dangerous," he said, "Even the ones people know and love and use every day." Otago Daily Times, 24 March 2007 LET'S NOT CONFUSE HEALTH AND MORALITY
Restricting smoking has gone into overdrive in recent weeks with four developments that pose important questions for the ethics of public health policy. South Australia has announced a ban on smoking in cars containing children. Fremantle Council in Western Australia intends to ban smoking in outdoor restaurant settings. The NSW Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal ordered a couple smoking inside their apartment to stop because of significant smoke drift into other apartments. And this week, Mosman Council in Sydney has announced plans to ban smoking in parks, bus shelters and perhaps footpaths. Banning smoking in confined public spaces has moved at glacial pace over the 30 years since smoking was stopped on trains in the 1970s. The history of this delay is a case book in half-pregnant politics. Bar staff, the most exposed of all workers, will be the last to get legislative protection from second-hand smoke in July this year, when the final states introduce indoor bans at least 10 years after office workers were accorded the same protection. Lobbying from the tobacco and hotel industry effectively shredded the occupational health rights of bar staff over this time. There are many precedents for the state legislating to protect children from harmful freedoms exercised by their parents and others. But there are worrying signs in what has now become almost predictable, repeated policy success. There are signs that some are starting to abandon the ethical and evidence-based principles that underpin all good public health policy. Smokefree workplaces were built on a bedrock of research about second-hand smoke being harmful. Some experimental work has shown that even brief, acute exposure to second-hand smoke can cause measurable physiological changes in those exposed. But the evidence of acute exposure being harmful to all but the most exquisitely sensitive is poor. As smoking becomes exiled outdoors, reasonable debates have emerged about banning smoking in outdoor, roofless areas where people gather in sardine tin-like densities. Sports stadiums are now increasingly smokefree, with little protest occurring because what is being regulated is so reasonable. Equally reasonable debates are also occurring about the unintended effect of indoor smoking bans in concentrating smoking in the alfresco sections of restaurants and bars where similar cheek-by-jowl seating causes patrons to be again half pickled in smoke. Typical regulations specify that smoking areas should be a minimum of 5m from building entrances. But for some like Mosman Council, this is not enough. They want to prevent the possibility of any involuntary exposure, no matter how fleeting, from ever occurring. Smoking, they argue, should be banned from pavements, parks, beaches, the open decks of ocean cruise liners, and from dedicated smoking rooms at airports (because of leakage when smokers come and go from these rooms). It has become almost profane to ask where smokers might be allowed to light up. I have even heard some argue for policies that ban smokers from employment because smoke on the breath and clothes off-gassed particles when they returned to a building after smoking. By the logic of the same argument, smokers would presumably be forbidden from using public transport, attending cinemas or indeed ever mixing with non-smokers. Their children could be taken from them for their own good, the reductio ad absurdum would run. Undeterred by the scorn poured on such suggestions, some unashamedly argue that the threat of unemployment is a fine example of enlightened paternalism: smokers should be virtually forced to quit for their own good. The evidence base for public health policy must be vigilantly respected and the arguments for tobacco control never allowed to haemorrhage into the moralism that characterised tobacco control of previous centuries. For enthusiasts of untethered paternalism that abandons respect for smokers' choice to harm themselves, their hubris awaits its inevitable fate. Simon Chapman is Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney. The Australian, 20 March 2007 WOMEN SMOKERS FACE DOUBLE LUNG CANCER RISKWomen smokers are twice as likely to die from lung cancer than men, landmark Australian research shows. The study of 500,000 adults in Australasia also concluded that male smokers are 10 times more likely to be killed by the disease than non-smokers. But women have a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer, according to the paper published by the George Institute for International Health. The data, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, is part of the region's largest ever study of non-communicable disease. It found that giving up smoking reduced the risk of dying from lung cancer by up to 70 percent. But lead researcher Dr Rachel Huxley said the finding regarding women's risk was even more significant. The results were consistent with previous findings from the US, but this had never been shown in Australia or New Zealand. The link was not fully understood, but Dr Huxley said there was some data to suggest women actually absorb more of the harmful chemicals in cigarettes than men. "This might be for bio-chemical reasons or it might be that women actually smoke differently, maybe drawing harder on the cigarette. We just don't know yet." The trend was particularly concerning because despite falling rates, young women as a group were taking up smoking more frequently, she said. Dr Huxley called for more comprehensive tobacco control policies to manage the problem. "There are huge numbers of lives to be saved through campaigns to alert current smokers to its dangers." The Australian, 22 March 2006 BLAST FROM THE PAST
Full Text: The fresher the better! APPLE "HONEY" HELPS KEEP OLD GOLDS FRESH! You want fine tobacco of course. But you want it fresh! A mist of Apple "Honey," the nectar of luscious apples, is sprayed on Old Gold's fine tobacco to help hold in the natural freshness. "Something new has been added" to these tobaccos. It's Latakia a costly imported leaf that give richer flavor. Try Old Golds and see why they have won a million new friends.
Retrieved from: 20th Century Tobacco Ad Collection Collected by Richard Pollay, catalogued by Roswell Park Cancer Institute http://roswell.tobaccodocuments.org/pollay/dirdet.cfm.
QUOTABLE QUOTES"Mosman is nowhere near the most smokefree district in the world. Even the sale of tobacco is banned in Bhutan (little country near China) and there is an entire town in California which has banned smoking everywhere except inside your own private home. You cannot even smoke in your garden because it might drift into a neighbour's garden. How do I move there?" Comment to The Daily Telegraph website is response to "Cigarettes are no more addictive than carrots." Trial testimony by Andrew Schindler, CEO of R.J. Reynolds, 1997 MEDIA THEMESFramework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) Update The FCTC entered into force on 27 Feb 2005. 168 countries signed the treaty, and 146 have become parties. Yemen became a party on 22 Feb 2007, and Bahrain on 20 March 2007. Glaswegian crackdown Glasgow's two footballing giants today vowed to take action against fans who are flouting the smoking ban in their stadiums. Rangers and Celtic have both had to deal with fans repeatedly lighting up in stadium toilets at half time and more than 100 fans have been ejected from Rangers Ibrox Stadium for smoking since the ban was introduced almost a year ago. Laurence Macintyre, head of safety at Rangers Football Club, said: "While the club has tried to be as understanding as possible with smokers in the transition between a 'smoking' and 'no smoking' stadium, over 100 fans have been ejected from matches over the last year at half time. "This may now need to be followed up by the suspension of season tickets and indefinite bans if smokers persist in defying the legislation." The two clubs will direct fans towards NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's Smoking Concerns service, where support is available to help any smoker quit. The Scotsman, 14 March 2007 Fit to quit Even just five minutes of exercise could help smokers quit, says a new study. Research published in the international medical journal Addiction showed that moderate exercise such as walking significantly reduced the intensity of smokers' nicotine withdrawal symptoms. According to the British research, just five minutes of exercise was often enough to help smokers as effectively as a nicotine patch. This is possibly because exercising stimulates the mood-enhancing hormone dopamine. However it is unknown how long the effects of the exercise would last. Dominion Post, 19 March 2007 Tobacco mix offer Britain's Imperial Tobbaco has offered €11.5 billion (NZ$22.3 billion) for Franco-Spanish rival Altadis, which makes Gauloises cigarettes, after more than two years of speculation that the two would link up. The deal would bring together the the world's fourth and fifth biggest cigarette companies. Dominion Post, 19 March 2007 |
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Produced by The
Smokefree Coalition. PO Box 12-084, Wellington. |
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If you are considering using any material from the Smokefree Coalition Tobacco Control Update, please first seek permission from Mark Peck - director@sfc.org.nz |
I always have great respect for people who are capable of breaking the mould and striking out on their own. Sandy Sharrock is one such person.
Sandy Sharrock is stubbing out cigarette sales at her corner store, and health authorities hope it's the beginning of a trend.
Quit Group Executive Director Helen Glasgow has been awarded the prestigious 2007 President's Award of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand.
by
Simon Chapman
Apple "Honey" helps keep Old Gold fresh (1944)