Monday, December 26, 2011

Beauty out of hidingl

We were near the summit village, soaked through from several hours of hiking in the July rains, when a serpentine line of golden-cheeked, laughing girls streaked past us, heading down the lakeside mountain to work the ledged fields below. My guide, dressed in a red-and-white-checked skirt called a longyi, stopped up ahead to give me a breather. He flashed an encouraging smile, his teeth stained scarlet from betel nut, a recreational sedative that I was chewing, too. I was ratty and hungry from the morning’s muddy hike, and now I was buzzed as well.
When we reached the Shan village, high up in the mountains overlooking Lake Inle in central Myanmar, a scrum of boys took our shoes for washing, and then showed us to the upper floor of a thatched hut. Young men smoking cigars made from the local tobacco produced lunch: tomato salad with peanuts, peppermint, and lemongrass vinegar; fried potatoes; and Shan noodles with garlic and vegetables. My guide set out two bottles of Myanmar Beer (its slogan: Lucky Future).

While we ate lunch on the floor by the hut’s open side, the sun burst through, burning off the cloud cover. Suddenly, a mountainside of rolling tobacco fields came into focus, and then, farther down, the sun revealed the lake, a 23-square-mile body of water nestled among a fluorescent green patchwork of small farms and floating tomato plantations.
I asked my guide about the November 2010 elections, the first in 20 years in the country known before 1989 as Burma. He just shrugged. “Same wine, different bottle,’’ he said, popping the caps on the beer. “Is that how you say it?’’

I had come to Southeast Asia last year on a six-week trip. Having never been, I imagined, naively, that I would find some kind of old-world authenticity in Thailand or Cambodia or Vietnam. But somewhere along the way I began to feel like a walking dollar sign in a Western arcade of canned exotica: “Try the best Pad Thai in Ko Phi Phi,’’ “Lay down your towel on the same island where Leo made ‘The Beach.’ ’’
So my ears perked up when, three weeks into the trip, a fellow traveler told me that Myanmar “is like what Vietnam was 50 years ago.’’ Shaped like a giant diamond, Myanmar is lodged among Thailand, Laos, China, India, and Bangladesh. It is the largest country in mainland Southeast Asia and has been accused of being among the most corrupt, ruled by a military regime that presides over abundant reserves of oil and gas, teak and gemstones.

Hoping to create a more liberal feel in anticipation of the elections, in which the regime ran against itself, Myanmar instituted a new visa-on-arrival policy to attract tourists. This, along with other indications that Myanmar’s government is trying to democratize, has caught the attention of the Obama administration: Last month, the president dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Myanmar, which is still called Burma by the United States as a matter of policy.
The country had been visited by a US secretary of state only once before, in 1955, when John Foster Dulles tried to persuade Burma into a regional alliance against China. Clinton’s visit took place at a time when the United States is trying to assert itself in the region, in part to counter the rise of China.

A short flight from Bangkok put me in Yangon (formerly the capital Rangoon), Myanmar’s largest and gateway city in the south. Immediately I found travel difficult: No travelers’ checks or credit cards accepted, and no ATMs (though that has since changed). And, the kicker: US dollars, the only foreign currency accepted, must be pristine.
In the Yangon airport, I presented a crisp $50 bill to pay for my $30 visa. The customs official examined the money, then handed it back. He pointed to a pinhead-sized smudge on the face of Ulysses Grant, as if the blemish constituted clear evidence of counterfeit. I fished out my best-looking fifty, and then continued through to an empty baggage claim area. From Yangon I caught a flight north to Nyaungshwe, a one-hour drive from Lake Inle. On my second day in Inle, after the mountain climb, my guide picked me up from the guesthouse and led me through town to the mouth of the lake, where his friend waited with a long-tail boat.
The princes of Lake Inle are the fishermen, who perch on the sterns of dugout canoes, stand on one leg, wrap the other leg around the oar’s neck, and propel the canoe with a swooping motion of the leg that holds the oar, as if skating on one foot, a technique that leaves both hands free to work the nets. Teak canoes piled high with taro and chilies shuttle past them. On the lake’s reedy perimeter, near the market, we drifted through a village of stilted houses and floating tomato plantations. Children hang out their windows and fly kites cobbled together from bamboo sticks and Shan paper.

The many tribes of Inle - including the Shan, the Intha, and the reclusive Pa-O, former insurgents - congregate at the Phaung Daw Oo market, where they sell carp, eel, tea, acacia, mustard, pumpkin leaves, long beans, tofu, and buffalo skin, which is soaked in water and fried into chips. When we came upon a vendor offering fertilizer from China, my guide shook his head in disgust. The run-off, he said, poisons the lake.
China is one of the only countries to do business with Myanmar. The world’s embargo mentality has trickled down to tourism: Many Asia travelers avoid Myanmar. They argue that going there supports the regime’s repressive rule.

We docked our boat at a teak house where women weave scarves with thread made from the stalk of the lotus flower. Painstakingly, the fibers, thin as spider silk, are extracted from the stalks and rolled into thread that looks like hemp and retains a pleasant wooly smell. The manager of the store said each scarf takes three months to make. I was happy to pay the asking price of $60. When I looked in my wallet, however, I had only the $300 that was rejected by the money-changer in Yangon. I had $30 worth of kyat, the local currency, but I needed it for the next day’s journey back to Bangkok.
Sure enough, the manager determined that none of the dollars was passable. She expressed little regret, which seemed dignified. I promised to get more money and return. But that was impossible. In Myanmar, you have only the cash you come with.
We pushed away from the dock and waved goodbye to the lotus weavers. I saw the manager return my scarf to the pile of scarves. This was the price of authenticity. I hoped the next customer would bring clean notes.
Myanmar’s main religion is Theravada Buddhism, which began to flourish more than a millennium ago on a vast plain in central Myanmar called Bagan. Bagan is a 40-minute flight (or a 12-hour bus ride) west from Lake Inle. Situated on the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy River, Bagan was once a rich cosmopolis of Buddhist study and the capital of the first Burmese kingdom. What remains today are more than 4,000 temples spread across a 26-square-mile savannah of grassy knolls and leafy banyan trees. It looks like Buddhism brought to the Old West, a set piece worthy of Sergio Leone or Ridley Scott. The temples, taken individually, may not stagger the mind like those giants of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, but then neither do Bagan’s crowds.
For cyclists, a 12-mile paved road circles the plain and connects the three towns of Bagan. The temples are also accessible by horse-drawn carts that clop down the dirt roads.

On my last day in Bagan, just before sunset, a horse cart took me to Buledi Paya, a temple in the central plain that provides a popular end-of-day vista. I asked the driver about Myanmar’s clean-cash fetish. He believed the government was afraid of getting fake money. But when I suggested that a crisp bill, with no marks, was perhaps more likely to have come off a counterfeiter’s printer, he shrugged, laughed ruefully, and said he had no idea why the rule existed. “Our leaders no good! No writing! No talking! No freedom! Everything control! Everywhere spies!’’


Myanmar’s last bid to attract tourism and win international legitimacy came in 1996, when the regime inaugurated Visit Myanmar Year. According to a United Nations report, forced labor was used to restore the temples of Bagan. The regime’s opponents urged a boycott, arguing that tourist dollars would benefit the regime. Others argued that tourism revenue amounted to peanuts for the generals. Still others complained that unskilled laborers - caring nothing for archeological fidelity - dressed the temples indiscriminately in identical spires and red-brick walls made with modern commercial masonry.
At Buledi Paya I climbed to the temple’s upper ledge, where I encountered Myanmar’s version of a tourist throng: three people. Together we watched the sun decline beyond a phalanx of a thousand golden domes. The domes’ corncob spires stabbed through the haze.
As for Clinton’s November visit, it would not cause much excitement. The New Light of Myanmar, a government mouthpiece, reported her trip in a two-paragraph article on Page 2. On its front page, meanwhile, the newspaper printed the entire resume of Mikhail V. Myasnikovich, the prime minister of Belarus, another autocratic nation whose relations with the United States are also strained. Myasnikovich was scheduled to arrive the next day.






Teachers to check sale of tobacco near schools

Teachers to check sale of tobacco near schools

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4 Overvalued Tobacco Stocks To Avoid Today

Go smoke-free

Go smoke-free

Monday, December 19, 2011

WHO warns Chinese public of misleading tobacco industry research

Research indicating that some cigarettes are less harmful is tobacco industry hype meant to mislead the public, a World Health Organization official warned on Monday as a heated debate rages in China over the credibility of tobacco science.
"Low-tar cigarettes, for example, don't reduce the harm at all," said Sarah England, a technical officer on tobacco control with the WHO Representative Office in China.
She said tar, nicotine and other smoke emission yields derived from smoking-machine testing do not provide valid estimates of human exposure and there is no conclusive epidemiological or scientific evidence that cigarettes with lower machine-generated smoke yields are less harmful.
The debate on tobacco science flared up in China after Xie Jianping, a researcher known for his studies on low-tar cigarettes, was honored with a seat in the elite Chinese Academy of Engineering earlier this month.
Xie's accreditation was challenged by Chinese health experts, but some scientists and smokers also came out to defend the 52-year-old researcher, who has spent decades working with a tobacco research institute under the China National Tobacco Corporation (China Tobacco) -- the world's largest cigarette company.
Neither Xie nor authorities with the Chinese Academy of Engineering have publicly commented since the controversy heated up.
"The marketing of cigarettes with stated tar and nicotine yields has resulted in the mistaken belief that those cigarettes are less harmful. It is just a tobacco industry tactic. It is very misleading," England said.
The WHO official compared low-tar cigarettes to a green bullet and cigarettes with standard tar levels to a red one, and said, "It is meaningless to say which is better, to be killed by a red or green bullet."
"I recommend not going near the bullets. Quit smoking instead," she added.
Yang Gonghuan, head of the China Tobacco Control Office under the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), had previously blamed the tobacco companies' low-tar promotion strategy for the 41.15 percent growth in cigarette sales in China from 2000 to 2010.
China is the world's largest consumer of cigarettes. The country has 300 million smokers, and more than 740 million non-smokers are regularly exposed to second-hand smoke, according to experts' estimates. About 1.2 million people die each year in China from smoking-related illnesses ranging from lung cancer to heart disease.
China is a signatory of the World Health Organization-initiated tobacco control treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), but implementation has been slow mainly due to interference from the country's powerful tobacco industry, health experts have said. The FCTC requires nations to ban deceptive and misleading descriptions such as "low-tar" labels, they said.
Jonathan Samet, who chairs the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), told reporters in Beijing that he found Xie's accreditation unusual.
"No one has made a conventional cigarette product safer," Samet said. "A cigarette typically contains 7,000 dangerous chemicals and it is hard to say taking out one or two chemicals will make any difference."
"And how do you know any cigarette is low risk without watching people use it for 20 years?" he said.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Contraband cigarettes found in car

RCMP members stopped and seized a car containing 87,400 contraband cigarettes on Highway 1A near Middleton, P.E.I., Sunday.
Two men were arrested at the scene and later released with court appearance dates set for Feb. 9. The cigarettes destined for sale in the Charlottetown area, the police said.
Cpl. Stephen MacDonald said the sale of contraband cigarettes is a major problem on Prince Edward Island.
A dozen people will be appearing in a Summerside courtroom this week to answer to contraband tobacco charges, he noted.
"We did a project this summer in Summerside and we've charged 12 people all with bringing cigarettes into P.E.I. So, It's a huge problem."
Police said the selling and buying of contraband cigarettes is illegal and
aids in promoting and fortifying larger crime activities both here in Prince Edward Island and beyond. In addition, the underground activity of these activities undermines the hard work and dedication of Island businesses and being part of these activities is being part of crime.

The sale of contraband cigarettes also cuts into of tax revenues.
"These are the taxes that don't go into healthcare to pay for the people who have been smoking all of their lives," MacDonald said.
MacDonald said the illegal cigarettes come from reserves near Cornwall, Ont., and Montreal.
"A lot of the time they're manufactured on the New York side of the border and they bring them over the river either by boat of in the wintertime by snowmobiles," he said. "Now they're being manufactured on the Canadian side, too. They have their own cigarette making machines, they bag them, box them up and then people go on the reserve and buy them."
The public is encouraged to call police with information regarding the sale and transport of illegal cigarettes into P.E.I. Anyone believing they have encountered illegal cigarettes or have information regarding the distribution.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Smoking is not cool

Here are some reasons why smoking is not cool. It will never be cool, it will only look more stupid as time goes on. It's a terrible, awful drug. Don't be fooled!

1) YOU LOOK WEAK - To others, they think you can't accomplish anything, that you can't reach your goals. Perhaps your somebody that quit for a long period of time and then started up again. Your friends probably think you're addicted for life. That's what my friends thought. They laughed at me when I relapsed. It was almost like they expected me to. How awful is that?

2) YOU'RE STUCK DATING PEOPLE WHO SMOKE - People who don't smoke, which accounts for 80% of the population, don't want to date smokers. That's just the way it is. If you were a non-smoker, would you want to date a smoker and potentially go back to smoking? I would think the answer would be NO. So, you're stuck dating people who smoke. Is that what you want? That's a pretty narrow field. If you quit smoking, you've opened up your world to many more potential people. Think about it.
  
3) YOU SMELL LIKE CIGARETTES - Yes you do. Smokers don't smell themselves, so they don't understand how much they smell. But non-smokers do. They can smell everything. They can smell you when you come inside from having smoked outside. Perhaps you're one of those who smokes inside their house or apartment. Then you really smell like cigarettes! They might not even want to come over because of it. It's something to think about. Smoking is not cool because it makes you stink.

4) YOU'RE CONSTANTLY GOING OUTSIDE TO SMOKE - You're missing out on life. Perhaps you are out with friends. You're probably going outside once every half an hour. They probably expect you to go outside. But you might be missing out on great conversation. You never know. You never know because you are too busy going outside to smoke.

 5) YOU PAY MORE IN HEALTH INSURANCE - If you smoke, expect to pay more for health insurance. Insurance companies don't want to pay for all your medical bills. Therefore, they charge you more per month if you're a smoker. To the health industry, it's definitely NOT cool to smoke. You are a liability. You could cost them money and they know that. That's why you're charged more to be a smoker.

6) YOU'RE NOT KISSABLE - Nobody wants to kiss a smoker. It's like kissing an ashtray. You ask any non-smoker and they will tell you the same thing. It's gross! I've been a non-smoker many times and kissed a smoker and it almost made me gag. It tasted dirty. If it's with a smoker, then that's fine. But you're stuck with dating smokers. Non-smokers won't want to kiss you. They think smoking is not cool.

 6) IT DESTROYS YOUR LIFE - In every way possible. It takes OVER your life. Your life will revolve around cigarettes 24/7. They will mean more to you than a lot of things. They'll either be your best friend or your worst enemy, but they will definitely control you. After a while, you will be known notoriously as a smoker. Smoking will keep you from reaching your goals. Smoking will allow you to do negative things in excess. Cigarettes will make you lazy. You won't be as active as you could be. Catch my drift?

7) YOUR TEETH TURN YELLOW - After years and years of smoking, your teeth will begin to have a yellowish tone to them. It's something that toothpaste will not be able to get off entirely. You'll be stuck with it. The only way to remove it is to either go to the dentist and have your teeth cleaned, or quit smoking. Eventually, after stopping, your teeth will whiten-up, and they won't be as gross as before. The dentist will always call you out on smoking if he recognizes a mouth that smokes. What does he see? He sees how black the BACK of your teeth are. The smoke when you exhale hits the back of your teeth, turning them darker than the front. But you can't tell because you can't see it. Smoking is not cool if it gives you yellow teeth.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Who uses smokeless tobacco?

The 2009 data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) showed that more than 3% of people aged 12 and older were current users of smokeless tobacco. Use of smokeless tobacco was higher in younger age groups, with over 6% of people aged 18 to 25 saying that they were current users.

About 1.5 million people started using smokeless tobacco in the year before the survey. Nearly half of the new users were under age 18 when they first used it.

That is supported by the CDC's 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. They found that use of smokeless tobacco among high school kids is even higher than for young adults. The CDC found that more than 15% of male high school students and more than 2% of female high school students had used smokeless tobacco in the month before the survey.

The CDC Youth Tobacco Survey looked at even younger children. In their 2009 survey, nearly 3% of middle school students reported using smokeless tobacco at least once in the 30 days before the survey. The tobacco industry offers sweetened and flavored smokeless tobacco. It can taste more like candy with flavors such as vanilla, mint, and fruits, which makes it more appealing to young people.
Certain factors seem to be linked to whether or not young people will use tobacco. They include:
  • Peer pressure
  • Local lifestyles and fashions
  • General attitudes toward authority
  • Economic conditions
  • Examples set by teachers and school staff
  • Presence of gangs
  • Use of illegal drugs and alcohol
In 2003, more than 1 in 3 major league baseball players used smokeless tobacco, mainly moist snuff. Athletes are a large marketing source for smokeless tobacco, and are often seen on TV using it during a game. As role models, they can influence youth to be more open to and accepting of smokeless tobacco.

A more recent influence on the use of smokeless tobacco is the smoking bans many states are enforcing. In light of these bans, tobacco companies have been marketing smokeless tobacco products more heavily. Smokeless tobacco products are being advertised as alternatives to cigarettes in places where smoking is not allowed. When smokers use these products as substitutes instead of trying to quit tobacco, it continues to support the tobacco industry.

Smokers who put off quitting by using smokeless tobacco for a nicotine fix while in smoke-free settings do not decrease their lung cancer risk. They are still using tobacco and still smoking cigarettes. People who use smokeless tobacco and smoke often find it harder to quit tobacco. Lung cancer risk is affected most by how long a person smokes.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Why Do Teens Smoke?

The fact that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health is hardly new information. Cigarette smoking is the single most preventable cause of disease and early death in the United States. So why do so many teens continue to smoke? There are lots of reasons, you usually start for one reason or another and then it is really hard to quit. But you can--lots of people do.
Did you know that lung cancer caused by smoking is now the top female cancer killer, claiming 27,000 more of women's lives each year than breast cancer? And more teenage girls (about 30 percent) are smoking now than they did 10 years ago. That's a big increase.
So why do people smoke? Nicotine. Nicotine acts in the brain where it can stimulate feelings of pleasure, and pleasure feels good! It also will work as an appetite suppressant for many people; other people believe it relieves stress. Ask any model her secrets for being thin; most say caffeine and cigarettes.

Addiction
Nicotine activates areas of the brain that are involved in producing feelings of pleasure and reward. Recently, scientists discovered that nicotine raises the levels of a neurotransmitter called dopamine in the parts of the brain that produce feelings of pleasure and reward. Dopamine, which is sometimes called the pleasure molecule, is the same neurotransmitter that is involved in addictions to other drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Researchers now believe that this change in dopamine may play a key role in all addictions. This may help explain why it is so hard for people to stop smoking.

Experimental smoking usually begins the habit. Next comes occasional cigarette smoking at parties, on weekends, with friends or when trying to lose weight. This is the most dangerous stage, because it usually leads to an addictive phase, when teens become regular smokers. People who start smoking before the age of 21 have the hardest time quitting, and fewer than 1 in 10 people who try to quit smoking succeed.
There is no safe amount of smoking. Every cigarette causes some harm to the body. Once smoke touches the lips, it begins to attack living tissues, and it continues its attack wherever it goes. Cigarette smokers have less ability to carry oxygen to the rest of the body and this is why smokers have less endurance when running or participating in sports.

Smokers also get wrinkles at an earlier age. The smoke changes the elasticity of the skin and fine lines appear around the eyes and mouth. Your clothes and hair will smell from smoke and pretty soon you can no longer smell it. Kissing a smoker is like kissing an ashtray.

Smoking Can Make You Sick
Smokers miss more days of school and work than nonsmokers because they get more respiratory infections (colds, coughs, sore throats, and sinus and ear problems). The infections are a result of damage to cilia in the lungs. Cilia are tiny parts of the lung that act like little brooms, sweeping out bacteria, viruses and dirt. When they stop clearing the lungs, the germs and dirt stay there, resulting in more frequent and longer-lasting colds.

Quitting Smoking
Quitting smoking is possible. Every year, 2 million Americans stop smoking. But it's not easy. It requires motivation from the smoker and may take several attempts before success is permanent. The average number of attempts is believed to be three.
There is no right way to quit. Many smokers report they can quit abruptly--better known as "cold turkey." Others report quitting gradually by decreasing the number of cigarettes smoked each day. Those who are interested in quitting can talk with their health care provider or, in the United States, call the American Cancer Society at (800) 227-2345 or the American Lung Association at (800) 586-4872 for useful information on how to quit.
If you are thinking about smoking, the only way to avoid getting hooked on cigarettes is never to start in the first place. And with the price of cigarettes as high as they are today, you will have all that extra money if you stop smoking. Yes, you can do it!

Q. Is smokeless tobacco safer than cigarettes?
A. No! It's true that many people think smokeless tobacco (also known as chewing tobacco or snuff) isn't as bad as cigarettes. One study quoted said that 77 percent of kids thought cigarette smoking was very harmful, but only 40 percent thought smokeless tobacco was harmful.

The truth is that smokeless tobacco use is connected with all sorts of problems. Smokeless tobacco can cause bleeding gums and sores of the mouth that never heal. Eventually you may end up with cancer of the tongue or salivary glands. Tobacco is tobacco: it all contains nicotine, and nicotine is very addictive! It stains your teeth a yellowish-brown color. It gives you bad breath. It can make you dizzy, give you the hiccups and even make you throw up--definitely not cool!

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Celebrities killed by tobacco

Many of us watched the Oscar award ceremony over the past weekend, which is always very entertaining and includes a good deal of reminiscing about past great actors. As I watched some of the great old faces flash across the screen I was reminded how many of them had their life and career brought to a premature end by smoking-caused disease.
In the United States, many people are aware of the fact that great stars such as Yul Bryner , Michael Landon and John Wayne were killed by tobacco, but in fact many more stars have been killed by their smoking than we are generally aware of. Part of it is an understandable desire to preserve some privacy for the person at the end of their life. But in the case of smoking-caused illnesses, it seems that the media sometimes goes out of its way not to mention the ultimate cause of death in a way that they don’t do when it comes to drug or AIDS related deaths. It is not uncommon for newspaper reports also to simply refer to the cause of death as “cancer” rather than to specify it as lung cancer, even when the diagnosis was clear and obtainable in the public domain.

Here is how Professor Simon Chapman (University of Sydney) referred to this phenomenon with regard to the death of George Harrison, in his excellent book on public health:
"His death on 29 November 2001 from smoking caused lung cancer was noted in some reports as if he had died from any other cause, despite losing more than 20 years off the average life expectancy of a 58 year old man. Indeed the ABC network in the USA went so far as to note that unlike many other rock stars of his generation (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison) Harrison had died of "natural causes"44. If we assume Harrison took up smoking at the age of 15, and on average smoked 20 cigarettes a day, he therefore smoked for around 43 years, smoking 314,115 cigarettes in that time. Observations of smoking show that a cigarette takes about 5.6 minutes to smoke45. We can therefore calculate that Harrison had a cigarette alight for a cumulative total of 1221.6 days or 3.34 years of his 58 years. Recalling that he lost about 20 years off normal life expectancy for an Englishman, we can calculate that each of the 314,115 cigarettes he smoked took 33.5 minutes off his life – about 6 times longer than the time it took him to smoke each one."

I’m not writing this article to argue that celebrities shouldn’t smoke because of their role model status. Celebrities have the same right to smoke as anyone else, and the same human tendency to become addicted to the nicotine in tobacco and to be killed by it. Rather I think it is worth recognizing how much poorer the world is for having lost so many talented people too early. I suspect that George C Scott had a few more good movies in him, George Harrison a few more songs, and Peter Jennings a few more news stories. So rather than berate our current smoking celebrities, I think we should make sure they can get access to effective treatment and succeed in quitting.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

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Several top Hollywood celebrities have succumbed to their awful habit of smoking harmful tobacco filled cigarettes in the recent past. People from across the globe have picked up this habit only after viewing their favorite celebrity smoking harmful cigarettes either on or off screen. Nonetheless, the impact of such incidences is rather traumatizing as hundreds of millions of individuals take to smoking harmful tobacco filled cigars on a daily basis and end up dying a slow yet terrible death.  Cancers of the mouth as well as the lung region are fairly common to people who happen to be chain smokers.

If we are to mention Hollywood celebrities, then it would not be incorrect to state that several top Hollywood stars have actually died smoking cigarettes daily. One such star happens to be Audrey Hepburn, who was a sensation in her own times and known the world over for super hit flicks such as “My Fair Lady” as well as the “Nuns Story”. She was known to ignore her mother’s warnings and smoked three to four packs of tobacco filled cigarettes on her worst days. Owing to her bad habit, she suffered from asthma and then suffered from cancer before passing away at the age of 63. Another Hollywood celebrity who claimed she would never quit smoking as she was completely addicted to cigarettes was Gwyneth Paltrow. Brad Pitt was supposedly irate at her chain smoking habit and often told her to stop doing so but his words fell on deaf ears.
Kate Moss is yet another example of a chain smoker. Yet celebrities need to understand that they need to quit smoking or adopt healthier smoking options such as electronic cigarette smoking, as they are aped by millions of people worldwide. Catherine Zeta-Jones, Johnny Depp and many other top Hollywood celebrities have stopped smoking normal cigarettes and adopted the safer and healthier option of smoking electronic cigarettes instead. Not only is this safe for their body, it also ensures that they never get infected by the dreaded cancer of the lungs and mouth or suffer from miscarriages and numerous fatal diseases pertaining to smoking tobacco filled cigarettes.
The main reason why E Cigarettes are considered safe for human consumption is because they do not produce smoke and are completely devoid of tobacco. As no harmful chemicals are released in the air, the fact remains that you may smoke an E Cig even in a “No-Smoking” zone. Unless you opt for the safe E-Cigarettes, you would always be speaking like Gloria Swanson in the movie Sunset Boulevard, when your picture needs to be touched upon by several make up cessions to make you appear young and flawless.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Mother sues tobacco store for selling herbal mixture which mimics pot to son

Teen dies in car accident after smoking a popular boutique, synthetic marijuana.

A Chicagoland mother is suing a tobacco store after her 19 year old son, Max Dobner, died in a car accident earlier this summer.  Max reportedly bought the mixture of herbs called IAroma Hypnotic which Max’s mother, Karen Dobner claims has synthetic marijuana in it. She further alleges that the teen smoked the mixture and then drove off the road at 100 MPH, driving into a house and resulting in her son’s death. The smoking mixture is said to be one of the new boutique, synthetic marijuana mixtures which has seen a steady increase in popularity. With celebrities like Miley Cyrus reportedly smoking similar substances at Hollywood parties, those looking to obtain an alternative to marijuana, which is illegal, have turned to these boutique synthetic “drugs” in order to get high.
Many states have banned the substances, but the government and authorities are having a hard time keeping up with the new ones, released under new names with new formularies. Authorities say that new mixtures come out on the market as quickly as soon as the old one is removed.
According to CBS Chicago, the synthetic marijuana industry has quickly grown into a 1 billion dollar industry.
Max’s mother  is now suing the tobacco store which sold her son the mixture. At the time, it was marketed as potpourri. She claims the package failed to mention that synthetic marijuana was included.
The tobacco store who sold Max the product, Cigar Box, located in Aurora, Illinois, is now out of business.