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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."

Cigarette sales will be licensed in the same way as alcohol is, if an influential group of Cumbria county councillors get their way.

A new council report puts the case for stricter controls on tobacco sales and tougher sanctions on shopkeepers that flout the rules.

It is likely to form the basis of a county council response to a Government consultation on smoking, which could in turn lead to a change in the law.

Cleator Moor South and Egremont county councillor Simon Leyton chaired a group of councillors that drew up the report, The Last Gasp.

He said: “Licensing tobacco products would act as a powerful deterrent against the sale of cigarettes to children.

“Alcohol is licensed and there is no reason why the sale of tobacco should not be subject to similar regulation.”

The Last Gasp argues that, if retailers were licensed, those who sold cigarettes to children or traded in bootleg tobacco products could have their licences revoked.

It also calls for shops to be allowed to sell nicotine replacement products more widely alongside cigarettes.

Both measures would require changes in the law.

The report was approved by the council’s health and wellbeing scrutiny committee this week and goes before the full council next Thursday.

Councillors took evidence from a range of experts.

They also commissioned the Cumbria Youth Alliance to survey attitudes to smoking among 2,000 young people.

Mayor Sheila Dixon’s proposal to ban the sale of individual "little cigars" would probably discourage some Baltimore youngsters from buying them, but it’s only the tiniest step in the right direction. The problem is more fundamental: They aren’t really cigars at all, but an increasingly popular way to skirt cigarette taxes and distribute flavored tobacco cheaply, especially to young African-Americans.

Unlike genuine cigars that are rolled tobacco leaf, little cigars are more like oversized cigarettes in dark brown paper. They are usually inhaled rather than puffed and come in flavors such as chocolate, raspberry and cinnamon.

Because they are classified as cigars, they aren’t as heavily taxed as cigarettes, don’t carry as many health warnings and can be sold individually. As a result, they can be purchased for as little as 69 cents compared with a $5 pack of cigarettes.

The General Assembly last year raised the tax on cigarettes to $2 per pack (and part of the justification was to make them less attractive to children by increasing their price) but failed to address little cigars, which are taxed at about one-sixth the rate of cigarettes. .

The U.S. Treasury was petitioned two years ago by 40 state attorneys general to redefine little cigars as cigarettes, but so far no action has been taken.

Shame on all of them.

Baltimore can ban the sale of individual little cigars, but it’s foolish to assume that will solve the problem. Their too-low price is the real culprit, and a product that may look a bit like a cigar but is actually made (and is smoked) like a cigarette ought to be treated by government as the same.

That would not only discourage underage smoking but essentially close a tax and regulatory loophole that harms people of all ages.

New York now has the highest tax on cigarettes in the nation.

Tuesday it went up by $1.25.

That pushes the tax to $2.75 per pack.

As Action News Reporter Caitlin Nuclo tells us, the move is getting mixed reactions today from smokers, and non-smokers alike.

Smokers can now expect to pay as much as 6 or 7 dollars for a pack of cigarettes.

The increase has some smokers angry, but many people are happy with the change.
"Having the highest tax in the country we have the lowest number of smokers, said "Dr. Richard Terry from United Health Services.

Anti-smoking groups say every state that has increased their cigarette tax has seen a drop in both teens starting to smoke and in daily smokers.

They say about 140,000 people will stop smoking because of the added cost.

"We don’t want our kids to start smoking and even smokers who have been smoking for all of their lives agree that they don’t want their children to start smoking, said Christie Finch with the Tobacco Free Broome Coalition.

"Health officials hope that the tax hike will help smokers kick the habit"

And it has for some.

Gregory Winnick says he couldn’t afford to buy cigarettes anymore.

He was smoking 6 to 7 packs a week, spending about 35 dollars.

He says he feels ten times healthier since he quit, and offers some advice to smokers.

"Just find that one emotional push to get you over the edge to quit. Everybody has one," said Winnick.

For Winnick, the extra $1.25 was enough for him to kick his habit.

But Steven Gradijan says he’s been smoking for 30 years, and the tax increase isn’t going to make him stop anytime soon.

"I don’t think that raising the price is going to make anyone quit just because of the price. You want to quit you are going to quit on your own and cost is not a factor," he said.

Gradijan says until he’s ready to quit, he’ll look for ways to save, like buying his cigarettes online.