Cigarettes and tobacco store.

NATCHEZ — The Dymka Shop on Lower Woodville Road had a quiet grand opening this week, but its wide selection of tobacco water pipes, hookahs and sex toys has prompted public outcry.

Both the Natchez Police Department and the Adams County Sheriff’s Office are investigating whether particular goods at the new pipe, tobacco and adult novelty shop are legal to sell.

Sheriff Chuck Mayfield said Friday the ACSO and NPD launched an investigation into The Dymka Shop approximately two weeks ago, before it officially opened for business. The shop sells tobacco water pipes that bear a striking resemblance to a bong, which is generally used to smoke marijuana. A sign posted above the pipes states, “These are called tobacco water pipes.”

Another sign, also posted above the pipes, states, “Stop. Think about this. If it rhymes with CHONG we do not sell it. And would appreciate it if you DIDN’T talk about it.”

A third sign states, “Do not mention any illegal substances. If you do, all sales may be refused to you and your party.”

Finally, a fourth sign states, “All devices sold by The Dymka Shop that are designed for smoking are intended for use with tobacco and legal herbal blends only.”

Metro Narcotics Commander David Lindsey said local authorities have contacted the state attorney general’s office for legal guidance.

“The owner told us he’s selling under the presumption people will be using alternative tobacco products,” Lindsey said. “But in my experience and training, (the pipes) are used with illegal narcotics rather than legal tobacco sources.”

Repeated attempts to reach The Dymka Shop owner Barrett Moffett Friday were unsuccessful.

Mayfield said the sale of the pipes and alternative herbal incense only exacerbates Adams County’s existing drug problem.

“My main thing is everybody knows there’s a problem with drugs in our community, and I’m not going to sit back and let a place facilitate the use of drugs, and that’s what it is,” Mayfield said.

“Obviously we’re not anti-business. We’re anti-illegal business.”

Mayfield said state law defines “drug paraphernalia” as products that are used or designed for use in ingesting or inhaling controlled substances. Such paraphernalia includes, but is not limited to, water pipes or bongs.

However, according to Mississippi Code 41-29-105, in determining whether an object is paraphernalia, a court or other authority should consider statements by an owner or anyone in control of the object concerning use, the proximity of the object to controlled substances and the existence of any residue of controlled substances on the object, to name a few.

Mayor Jake Middleton said Police Chief Mike Mullins planned to visit The Dymka Shop Friday morning. Middleton said he has not visited the shop.

“Everybody’s working to make sure it’s within the law, and if it’s not, we’ll deal with it,” he said.

Repeated attempts to reach Mullins were unsuccessful.

David Holland, who serves as landlord of the shopping center where The Dymka Shop is located, declined comment.

Patrons must be 18 years old to enter The Dymka Shop, and 21 years old to browse its adult novelty section, which is located behind a ropes curtain toward the back of the shop.

Brenda Williams, owner of Ja’Nel’s Flowers and Gifts located next to The Dymka Shop, said she’s wary of the shop’s image among families that frequent other business located in the shopping center.

“I do have some concerns and reservations about the image that might be perceived about the atmosphere of this shopping complex,” Williams said.

“I think that advertising that they are an adult novelty store could put a parent in a situation if the child asks, ‘Mommy, what’s an adult novelty?’”

Many public and private offices have no proper mechanism to check violation of anti-tobacco laws affecting the health of non-smokers.

Citizens complain that managements of majority of offices have failed to implement tobacco control laws with complete ban on smoking during office timings.

They say smokers openly use cigarettes in offices even in the presence of other colleagues, which is clear violation of the concerned laws. According to such laws all public and work places have become smoke free, they add.

They demand that such smokers should not be allowed smoking or using tobacco at their offices or public places. They say complete implementation of law will help protect health of non- smokers.

Muhammad Hamid, a government employee said, “I am a heart patient and smoke is dangerous for my health, but my colleagues openly use cigarettes despite knowing my problem.” He said if anti-tobacco laws exist then why such violators have been given free hand to break the law. They should be treated as law violators and office management should take action against them, he demanded.

Zahid Haleem, who is working in a private company, said it is an unbecoming attitude of the smokers who totally ignore people in their surroundings by smoking openly.

He said, “If they have no worries about their own health at-least they should know that their acts may cause severe medical complications for their colleagues who also inhale smoke when they use tobacco.”

Dr Sharif Astori from the Federal Government Polyclinic said the use of tobacco is a major public health challenge in the country where 100,000 annual deaths occur due to tobacco related diseases.

SYDNEY, Australia – The tobacco tax enacted by Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has not slowed cigarette sales, but has instead caused sales of other products to decrease, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Small retailers, such as convenience stores, gasoline stations, newsagents and grocery stores, have seen a sharp drop in chocolate, magazines and soda purchases as smokers pay an additional $2.20 per cigarette pack. The 25 percent tax increase on tobacco began April 30.

“It’s definitely a noticeable effect: people won’t buy the magazine, the chocolate bar or the newspaper they used to buy with their cigarettes, but they’re still purchasing tailor-made cigarettes at the same rate,” said Mick Daly, national chairman of IGA supermarkets.

“They are cutting back on some purchases and trading down on others, so they’ll either stop buying chocolate biscuits or move down to a budget brand,” said Daly.

Merchants also worry about an uptick in contraband cigarettes. Retailers are mad about the increased tax, said Russell Zimmerman of the Australian Retailers’ Association. Impulse items can account for as high as 40 percent of a business’s sales.

“Smokers have to make choices, and they may include looking for cheaper sources of tobacco, or they may access the illicit (tobacco) market and some tobacconists are selling single cigarettes,” said Sheryle Moon, executive director of the Australian Association of Convenience Stores. “People won’t disadvantage their families so they won’t cut back on groceries — they’ll cut out the impulse items.”

ISLAMABAD, May 30 (APP): Speaker National Assembly, Dr. Fehmida Mirza has stressed upon people, NGOs and government health departments to join hands to raise awareness against use of tobacco.On the occasion of World No Tobacco Day, Fehmida Mirza said, this day serves us an opportunity to renew our commitments to highlight health risks associated with the use of tobacco that cause multitude of health problems.
She called upon the masses to abandon the use of tobacco to minimize risk to their health. “We should collectively draw attention to harmful effects of tobacco smoking and marketing to women and girls.”
She complimented the World Health Organization (WHO) for adopting theme “Gender and Tobacco” for World No Tobacco Day, 2010.
The Speaker said use of tobacco is on rise in youth, women and girls that can have lethal effects specially on the health of women and subsequently affect the whole household.
She said that according to WHO statistics, women comprise 20% out of the one billion smokers in the world.
She called upon the health departments, NGOs and Media to initiate aggressive media campaign to raise awareness against the tobacco use.
The Speaker also asked the tobacco companies not to attempt, lure people into life time nicotine dependence.

LAWYERS for the two Chinese nationals arrested in last month’s multi-million dollar cigarette and currency bust in Beverly Hills, St Andrew will make another attempt at securing bail for the men in the Corporate Area Resident Magistrate’s Court today.

The attorneys yesterday renewed efforts to secure bail application from Resident Magistrate Georgianna Fraser, who asked them to reserve the petition for Senior Resident Magistrate Judith Pusey.

The application was scheduled to be made before Pusey yesterday but she was absent from court yesterday.

Pusey had denied the men bail last week, based on reports that the lead investigator in the matter, Superintendent Fitz Bailey, had been receiving death threats since the bust in the upscale community. There was also the issue of outstanding statements.

The accused, Jason Kong, 50, and Yun Feng Zhang, 30, were arrested following a raid of their 9 Shenstone Drive home by the Organised Crime Investigation Division and the Customs Enforcement Team.

More than 56 cases of assorted cigarettes, which the Customs Department valued at $12.9 million, millions of dollars in local and foreign currency, as well as several cases of expensive liquor were seized.

The men are charged with possession of uncustomed goods and breaches of the Trademark Act.

As more smokeless-tobacco products hit the market, scientists are calculating — and in some cases, revising — estimates of how dangerous these products are, both in and of themselves and in relation to smoking.

The Wall Street Journal reported April 24 that the American Cancer Society (ACS) recently announced that it would no longer cite a 50-times risk of oral cancer for smokeless tobacco users. The National Cancer Institute and the ACS have used that figure in the recent past, but critics have pointed out that the number is based on a study of use of inhaled dry snuff, which very few Americans use.

Other studies have estimated that smokeless tobacco increases the risk of oral cancer three to 10 times.

The American Association of Public Health Physicians claims that using smokeless tobacco increases the risk of premature death by only 2 percent of the increase associated with smoking. This group and others contend that many lives could be saved if smokers switched to smokeless tobacco, as seems to have happened in Sweden since the 1970s.

However, researchers note that the smoking rate is higher among smokeless-tobacco users than the general population.

Harare — ZIMBABWE’S tobacco industry was developed over several decades to cater for no more than a couple of thousand large scale growers, each able to perform on farm the full production cycle from seed planting to final grading and between them to finance basic and applied research.

The commercial banking sector created a system of financing this small group of large producers, with qualified technical bankers physically visiting every farmer who required loans and monitoring individual farmers throughout the growing and curing cycle.

Merchant bankers created an equally elaborate system that financed the purchase of the crop at the auction floors and gave merchants the flexibility to buy their annual requirements in a few weeks but make their sales throughout the year.

The systems set up by farmers, merchants and bankers worked exceptionally well and in turn, through dramatic expansion of export earnings, helped develop the country fairly swiftly.

The financial systems were expanded to develop and finance other sectors of the economy to the benefit of the whole nation.

With land reform at the end of the 1990s and spreading into the early 2000s, this highly developed and finely tuned machine could not cope. Its main foundation, an industry based on fewer than 2 000 large-scale producers, was removed.

Instead of a small group of large producers, we moved very rapidly towards tens to thousands of small producers. But the industry changed a lot more slowly, too slowly.

That is not to say that there was no change. Over a few years many changes were made. New technologies were introduced that allowed the production of seedlings, one of the trickiest parts of the production process, to be centralised. The tobacco merchants and their financial backers moved steadily towards contract growing, to replace the auction system.

But we still have many problems. Production financing is still a nightmare for most farmers; grading can be a serious problem as recent reports show; and even central marketing imposes intolerable costs on the more distant small growers.

Research has suffered seriously, and the effects of that will become apparent in time, as we need to develop new varieties and can no longer do so.

Yet it is not impossible to accelerate the rebuilding of the industry.

Brazil, the world’s largest exporter, switched from large-estate to small-scale production during land reform with far fewer problems largely because the required changes were worked out in advance.

Zimbabwe can do the same.

Already, we have learned that a small-scale producer cannot do everything on farm and that many farmers will require external providers for inputs and skills. Perhaps the most successful switch we have seen is the change from on-farm seedbeds to centralised production of seedlings. That shows the way forward in other areas.

Grading is fairly simple, in our opinion, to sort out. We would like to see “grading companies” set up near the auction floors. There is plenty of industrial land south of Harare for these. Here a farmer could take poorly graded or ungraded tobacco and have this professionally graded and repacked by skilled graders for a modest fee.

This would not only make unsaleable tobacco saleable, but also allow the average farmer to enhance earnings. In other words, the fee will be covered by the higher price the crop will fetch.

Even curing could be centralised to a degree. Barn complexes, some of them renovated barns from the old days of large-scale production, would be established under the control of an expert who would ensure maximum quality. Again there would be fees but many farmers might well find the higher prices obtainable would cover these fees, with a bit extra profit.

Contract farming, not just in financing but combining many of these production skills at the two ends of the process, is probably the way forward for many smaller farmers, allowing them to concentrate on what they do best, growing the actual leaf. A small-scale producer, adequately backed, will almost always produce better quality than a large farmer simply because of the attention he or she can give the crop.There are other solutions, such as the formation of input-output co-operatives that would perform similar functions and give a group of small producers the muscle to negotiate proper finance and share a small group of highly skilled technical staff for curing and grading.

Contract farming, either to individuals or co-operatives, would also allow some decentralisation of marketing, with crops delivered to points far from Harare for consolidation and trucking to Harare. At the same time the old research levies on tobacco need to be revamped, as must be the research council, so that the high-level research that did so much to create the industry in the first place can be restored.

Methods of recreating the industry can almost certainly be found, once it is understood that an industry based on tens of thousands of smaller producers has replaced an industry based on a couple of thousand large producers.

A local man was fined $49,500 Monday after being nabbed nearly three years ago with thousands of contraband cigarettes in the Township of Edwardsburgh-Cardinal.

Nicholas Hewson was charged on June 26, 2007 after RCMP officers stopped a rented vehicle on Highway 401 in eastern Ontario.

The Mounties had the 2007 GMC pickup under surveillance and followed it from Cornwall to Cardinal, Ont., where the stop was made.

The officers located 300,000 cigarettes in plastic baggies stuffed into 30 cardboard boxes, federal prosecutor Wayne Chorney told The Sault Star.

The charge was transferred to the Sault from Brockville.

Hewson, 29, pleaded guilty to possessing tobacco products not stamped under the federal Excise Act.

Lawyer Stacy Tijerina told the court his client was basically a mule.

Hewson was assessed a penalty of 1.65 cents per cigarette.

Ontario Court Justice Robert Villeneuve gave him 10 years to pay the fine.

Hewson must make a minimum payment of $5,000 a year beginning in a year.

Nearly 75 percent of Illinois voters support a $1-per-pack tax increase on cigarettes bought in the state, according to a poll released Thursday by the Illinois Coalition Against Tobacco.

Advocates from several anti-smoking organizations met with state senators and representatives Thursday to promote the tax increase and present data from the survey.

Currently, Illinois’ state tax on cigarettes is 98 cents per pack.

Kevin O’Flaherty, regional advocacy director for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said the $1 tax would bring in $297.6 million in revenue to the state. That revenue then could be funneled toward health care and human services – areas currently under the budget knife because of a $13 billion state deficit.

“I’m sure that voters in Illinois know that there are hard decisions that need to be made here in Springfield,” O’Flaherty said. “Increasing the cigarette tax by $1 is an easy choice.”

The State Senate approved legislation to increase taxes on cigarettes last year, but the House of Representatives still has to vote on the bill.

Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, said that while most residents in the state favor the tax on cigarettes, it has been a struggle to get lawmaker support. The bill just barely passed the state Senate, and he said the House is struggling to get the needed votes.

“It’s really kind of stunning when you think about it,” Cullerton said. “Why wouldn’t this be one of the most obvious bills to pass? Especially in light of the fact that it brings in so much money.”

Cullerton said the word “tax” is what he thinks is turning many lawmakers away, but he said the cigarette tax is a good idea in terms of public health.

“If this didn’t bring in any money, it would still be a good idea,” Cullerton said. “That’s the thing that’s so amazing. If it didn’t bring in money, it would keep all these young people from starting (smoking), and a lot of current smokers would stop.”

Along with producing nearly $300 million in new revenue for Illinois, the estimated health care cost savings to Illinois taxpayers with the $1 cigarette tax is $2.4 billion, according to the survey.

State Sen. Jeffrey Schoenberg, D-Evanston, believes many opponents of the cigarette tax forget how much money goes toward treating those with tobacco-related illness.

“Those who oppose an increase in the tobacco tax consistently fail to point out the tremendous financial toll that we all pay at hospitals and with physicians and health care providers in order to address the staggering costs of tobacco-related illness,” Schoenberg said.

State Rep. Karen Yarbrough, D-Broadview, said she has been working hard in the House to get the bill passed. She said Illinois is behind in cigarette taxes compared to most other states.

“More states are turning to tobacco taxes to help during this tough economic time,” Yarbrough said. “And at 98 cents a pack, Illinois falls far behind other states, ranking thirty-second in the nation in cigarette tax rates.”

The national average for state cigarette tax rates is $1.50, O’Flaherty said.

If approved by the General Assembly, the $1 tax increase for a pack of cigarettes would come on the heels of a federal tax increase of 62 cents implemented earlier this month.

The cigarette excise tax that tobacco companies must pay the federal government rose by 61.6 cents per pack in order to fund an expansion of the federal State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The tobacco companies simply passed the increase onto wholesalers, who passed it on to customers.

The current legislation only would increase taxes on cigarettes and would not apply to other tobacco products.

Lots of smokers, lots of racial overtones, lots of interest. There’s so much interest in menthol cigarettes and their regulation, in fact, that the Food and Drug Administration’s newly created scientific advisory committee on tobacco products will be webcasting its inaugural meeting — focusing entirely on menthol in tobacco — on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 30 and 31. The panel is expected to tackle the question of whether and how mentholation of cigarettes should be regulated by the FDA. You can check the meeting out here.

First, a few facts from a comprehensive collection of research on menthol and tobacco produced by the National Cancer Institute: Menthol cigarettes account for 26% of all cigarettes sold in the United States. Among adult African Americans who smoke, nearly 7 in 10 smoke menthols. Smoking menthols is biggest among black women and 18- to 30-year-olds. Latinos also appear to be drawn to the frosty taste and sensation of menthols: Among Latinos who smoke almost 3 in 10 smoke menthols, compared with about 22% of non-Latino whites.

Those facts mean that any regulation of menthol in cigarettes will weigh more heavily in minority communities — a sensitive subject for public policy. African Americans have the highest rates of lung cancer of any racial or ethnic group, and black men are far more likely than males of any other ethnic group to die of it.

Beyond those glaring demographic facts, there’s a lot of uncertainty about the role of menthol in cigarettes. Does menthol induce young people, and especially young African Americans, to take up the habit? Does it make it harder for those who smoke them to quit? Does the frosty flavoring prompt those who smoke menthols to drag harder or inhale more deeply? And are menthols any more cancer-causing than unmentholated cigarettes? These questions — to which research has provided contradictory and incomplete answers — will be discussed by the FDA’s advisory committee, the membership of which is listed here.

Menthol is derived from the oil of peppermint, and it’s also known as mint camphor. As luck would have it, it’s a compound that in used in embalming, and in masking the smell of decomposition. The first brand of menthol cigarettes, Salem, was introduced by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. on the American market in 1956, just as researchers outside the tobacco industry were beginning to collect evidence of cigarettes’ dangers.