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Humourist David Sedaris is no longer a smoker, and, oddly, he has Japan to thank for it.

The American author, most recently of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, kicked his 30-year cigarette habit in Tokyo. Quitting smoking is probably a feat for anyone, yet one needs extra willpower to do it in a true puffer’s paradise.

Travelling to this land of dirt-cheap cigarettes and omnipresent ashtrays to beat your addiction is like going to Madrid to give up pork, Prague to escape beer cravings or Beijing to get away from crowds. That didn’t keep Sedaris from spending three months in Japan last year, and succeeding.

"I read in a book that the best way to quit smoking was to move, and in Tokyo it’s against the law to smoke on the street," Sedaris joked recently to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. "It’s not second-hand-smoke-related, it’s you put a hole in my Comme des Garcons jacket-related."

For most of the nation’s 127 million people, Japan’s views on smoking are anything but a laughing matter. Japan Tobacco Inc., the world’s third-largest publicly traded cigarette maker, is 50 per cent government-owned. When you consider the tax revenue from its $31.4 billion in domestic tobacco sales, it’s no wonder Japan Tobacco has friends in high places.

Some gutsy lawmakers want to more than triple cigarette prices to about $10 a pack. That would put Asia’s biggest economy in closer alignment with the anti-smoking movements in other industrialized nations. It also might increase government revenue amid modest economic growth. Japan Tobacco, which markets about 30 cigarette brands in Japan, isn’t happy.

"It would be disastrous harm for consumers first and the industry as well," president Hiroshi Kimura said last month.

This is really a story about Japan — how the government’s tentacles travel around the business world, and vice versa. The finance ministry is Japan Tobacco’s largest shareholder, leaving little doubt anti-smoking efforts will lack teeth. The arrangement has Japan implicitly encouraging smoking.

The tobacco debate is a reminder that as much as we talk about the "New Japan" of high technology, anime and hybrid cars, much of the old remains. Politicians are protecting vested interests without considering the bigger picture.

Kimura complains that most smokers would quit if the price of cigarettes were tripled. Some economists say so many people would stop smoking that tax revenue may actually decline.

Yet the end — a more productive workforce that takes fewer smoking breaks and has lower health-care burdens — would justify the means. This isn’t just a fiscal issue. This isn’t about shares in Japan Tobacco falling. It’s a public-health issue.

Ideas such as banning tobacco advertising, sponsoring tobacco-control programs and public-service announcements haven’t caught on in Japan. All this says much about the government’s economic policies.

Japan has the world’s largest public debt, and the demographics make pledges to reduce it unrealistic. With the population both aging and shrinking, Japan must find new revenue, while funding the skyrocketing health-care costs.

Hoping to lure a new generation of smokers, tobacco companies routinely manipulate levels of menthol so that their cigarettes prove more appealing and less harsh to novice users, Boston researchers reported yesterday.

Scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health scoured thousands of pages of industry documents from the 1980s through 2006 and commissioned laboratory tests of cigarettes to confirm a long-suspected link between menthol levels and marketing strategies.

The researchers found that tobacco companies embrace a Goldilocks approach when launching brands: Add too little menthol, a chemical that has an effect akin to anesthesia, and tobacco retains its intense bite. Add too much, and first-time smokers are overwhelmed. Add just the right amount, and cigarettes become powerfully seductive.

A 1987 internal memo from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., maker of the Salem brand, which uses menthol, summarized the benefits of low-level menthol cigarettes: "Smoother, more refreshing tobacco taste." Such a product, the memo said, would be a "proven winner" among 18- to 24-year-olds.

Once hooked, the documents show, smokers require increasing levels of menthol to maintain the same cooling effect. Cigarette makers, in turn, respond with brands that contain more of the additive, the Harvard scientists said.

Representatives of large tobacco companies decried the study, with Lorillard Tobacco Co., maker of Newport and other menthol products, saying in a statement that the firm "does not control levels of menthol to promote smoking among adolescents and young adults."

A spokesman with the nation’s largest cigarette maker, Philip Morris USA, said the company doesn’t "believe the study’s hypothesis or conclusions are supported by the facts cited in the study."

The findings, published online by the American Journal of Public Health, arrive at a critical moment, as Congress is close to giving the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco. Those rules would not explicitly ban menthol, something that has deeply divided public health advocates.

Stanton Glantz, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, said the Harvard study shows a willful pattern of action by tobacco companies that can only be remedied by a federal ban.

"As you always find when you go digging into the industry documents, the companies are very smart and very thorough and don’t do anything by accident," Glantz said. "This is a very important element of cigarette marketing and design."

Smoking - which is linked to cancer, heart disease, and other ailments - kills more than 400,000 Americans a year and is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.

Scientists not involved with the Harvard study hailed it as a landmark piece of research, sketching the richest portrait ever of the industry’s use of menthol to attract consumers. Dr. Michael Siegel, a tobacco-control researcher at Boston University School of Public Health, said it "really demonstrates that menthol is playing a major role in maintaining cigarette consumption and especially in recruiting and supporting addiction among youth and young adults."

They just won’t stop nagging. No matter how many excuses you come up with, some individuals will still go on and on about how smoking is dangerous for your health. But people know the risks that come with cigarettes. Some choose to ignore them while some try to create a healthy lifestyle for themselves by cutting back or quitting altogether. One new invention has created the opportunity to making those cutbacks easier.

The SuperSmoker is an electronic cigarette that contains no tobacco whatsoever. It doesn’t need to be lit, there’s no combustion, no tar or real smoke. As an alternative cigarette, the SuperSmoker uses a vaporization chamber and a disposable cartridge that contains a small amount of nicotine. To operate it, all a person has to do is simply inhale as there is no on or off switch.

Since it is an electronic device, it runs on batteries and cartridges. Available in various concentrations of nicotine, each cartridge is equal to 15-20 cigarettes. The product also comes with a battery charger as it has to be charged after one day of regular use.

The electronic cigarette is a great alternative because it’s free of certain health hazards. When you exhale, condensation is released instead of smoke. The cigarette also prevents nicotine poisoning as it has a security system that stops automatically for 30 seconds after 15 inhalations.

Legally used in public areas in the UK, the SuperSmoker is a great alternative to ordinary cigarettes. The device contains no tobacco, helps make sure that you’re not overusing and causes no hazards to the people around you.

The truth is, The Times’ indomitable campaign finance expert Dan Morain finds, where once tobacco interests and money carried a lot of influence, this time there’s not much tobacco money flying around this cycle. The candidates who took the most cigarettes money have dropped out of the White House race. So much for big business picking winners. One-time Republican front-runner and cancer survivor Rudy Giuliani took $114,000 during his unsuccessful run. Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, whose home state is home to UST Inc., formerly known as U.S. Tobacco Inc., accepted $55,000.
Among candidates still standing or running… … Sen. Hillary Clinton has taken the most — $46,300 from executives and employees of tobacco companies. Sen. John McCain, himself a cancer survivor, has taken $27,400. Sen. Barack Obama, who famously has tried to quit smoking with off-and-on success, has taken $22,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These remaining candidates have not been particularly kind to the cigarettes industry, according to Stanton Glantz, an anti-tobacco advocate, researcher and medical school professor at University of California, San Francisco.
McCain actually advocated a tobacco tax hike in the 1990s, and carried legislation to implement the 1998 national tobacco settlement, in which the tobacco companies agreed to pay the states more than $200 billion. Clinton pushed for a smoking ban in the White House when she was first lady, and President Clinton’s Food and Drug Administration sought to regulate tobacco. Obama has cast anti-tobacco votes, Glantz noted.
“Tobacco companies know they’re a liability,” Glantz said. “The money is there but it’s hard to see.” Indeed, the tobacco industry is not without its resources. In 2007, tobacco companies donated more than $525,000 to various campaign organizations known as 527s, a Times review shows. So far in the 2007-08 election cycle, tobacco companies and their employees have given $2.1 million to federal candidates and parties.
That’s down some 80% from 1995-1996 when it gave $10.6 million in campaign donations to federal candidates. Three of the 14 most costly California initiatives sought to hike tobacco taxes, according to data compiled by the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles for its latest report, “Democracy by Initiative.” The tobacco industry spent $66 million to kill the latest measure in 2006.

TALLAHASSEE — Legislation that would mandate safer-burning cigarettes designed to reduce home fires will soon land on Gov. Charlie Crist’s desk.

On Monday, the Senate unanimously approved new cigarette standards for tobacco companies, following the House’s lead Friday.

Nearly two dozen other states and Canada have adopted similar standards, which by 2010 would require the so-called fire-safe cigarettes.

They contain "speed bumps" - two or three rings of less porous paper - that cause the cigarettes to extinguish themselves if they are left unattended.

"The fact of the matter is it (smoking) is a leading cause of house fires in the United States, and it’s a preventable tragedy," said Sen. Lee Constantine, R-Altamonte Springs, who sponsored the bill. "Now, it’s not going to stop all cigarette fires, but it will stop a significant number. I would say 75 percent."

All tobacco wholesalers and retailers must sell only those cigarettes or risk monthly fines that could total no more than $100,000 and $250,000, respectively.

The tobacco industry, which supported the legislation (HB 1167), insists the costs of the special wrapping paper or bands to reduce cigarette ignition is negligible.

But tobacco representatives would not detail to what extent the new cigarettes along with state inspection and certification costs would cost Florida smokers.

"If you look historically at the states that have enacted this legislation, the list price for cigarettes we have offered has not changed as a result of these laws being enacted," said Bill Phelps, a spokesman for Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris USA.

Constantine said the savings of safer burning cigarettes would outweigh any increase in a pack of cigarettes.

Florida Fire Marshal Les Hallman said smoking-related fires in the state in 2006 and 2007 caused more than $6.3 million in property losses.

Many times, home fires result when smokers fall asleep with or don’t properly extinguish a lit cigarette.

The human toll in that period was nine deaths and 64 injuries, including seven firefighters, Hallman added.

One pro-smokers group says self-extinguishing cigarettes’ effectiveness can’t be measured.

"You can’t say the fire-safe cigarette is the reason for a reduction in fires," Maryetta Ables, a representative with FORCES Inc., an advocacy group against smoking restrictions.

"There’s no difference in the number of smoking-related deaths or fires" before or after the cigarette ignition standards.

The budget cuts lawmakers are considering to health programs for the poor are unconscionable — especially when a reasonable increase of the tax on cigarettes could raise badly needed money.
Florida’s 34-cents-a-pack tax is the fifth lowest in the country and hasn’t changed in 20 years. The average cigarettes tax nationally is $1.12 a pack. By adding $1 to a pack of cigarettes, Florida could move its tax in line with most other states and raise $1 billion.
That’s about the same amount the Legislature is looking to cut from the state’s human-services budget. The $1 billion in cuts would decimate optional programs under Medicaid, which pays for the health care of poor Floridians. That includes children and the disabled and programs such as hospice care for the dying and hospitalization for transplant patients.
Cutting Medicaid programs also means losing matching federal tax dollars, which is shortsighted. While increasing a tax isn’t always smart public policy, in this case it is. Studies show that when states increase the cigarettes tax, more people quit smoking. Teens, who can’t afford the higher costs, are the most likely to quit or not to start in the first place. In the long run, that will mean the state will save billions of dollars in years to come, because there will be fewer people suffering from cigarette-related diseases. As fewer smoke, revenues will drop, but, over time, so will the need.
It doesn’t make sense that Florida’s cigarette tax is so low. Lawmakers should be discouraging people from getting sick, not making it easier.