Cigarette

Which of the following TV programs depicts tobacco use most frequently? A. "Gossip Girl" B. "Heroes" C. "America’s Next Top Model" Before you guess, a little background. For the purposes of this pop quiz, a “depiction” of tobacco is defined as a single instance of a cigarette or cigar appearing onscreen. If two characters are smoking at the same time, that counts as two depictions. If a character takes a puff, moves the cigarette off-screen and then takes another puff, those count as separate depictions.

SACRAMENTO - Releasing his latest budget plan this week, Gov. Jerry Brown repeated his assurance that the tax hikes voters agreed to last fall were enough, that he won't ask them to dig deeper into their pockets any time soon. "We just got a nice tax," he said. "I think we ought to take a deep breath and show how we are spending it in a wise way before we start looking for more money. " But even before Brown spoke, lawmakers were testing him. They have been forging ahead with proposals to tax Californians more - on every can of soda, cigarette, plastic grocery store bag and bullet.

Let me understand this: Once the Philip Morris recall is completed, cigarettes will be safe to use. Did I miss something? H. M. NACHENBERG Ventura

Altria Group Inc., the largest U.S. tobacco company, said Thursday it will introduce an electronic cigarette this year amid a continuing slump in sales of its top-selling Marlboro brand. Some of Altria's competitors -- including Lorillard Inc., with its blue eCigs brand, as well as smaller rivals such as NJOY -- have been quicker to seize on the rising popularity of e-cigarettes. E- cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat liquid nicotine in a disposable cartridge and produce a vapor that's inhaled.

Cigarette packages in the U.S. are about to be emblazoned with graphic, bordering on gory, images highlighting the dangers of smoking. But what really irks one tobacco giant is the prospect of gory but plain (i.e. brandless) labels, an anti-smoking measure about to be launched in Australia. Philip Morris Asia has threatened to sue the Australian government, saying its plan would hinder the company’s ability to differentiate its products from other brands, according to media reports . The Australian government counters that taking away brand-name appeal would cut down on smoking rates in the country and save money on healthcare.  The proposed laws, which would take effect in January, would require packaging to be a drab, olive green color with standardized font and colors for brand and product names.

White House victories are rare these days, but President Obama can claim solid progress in his lonely battle to quit smoking. The president has gone nine months without sneaking a cigarette, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs reported Thursday. Every day is a struggle and there's no guarantee the president won't light up tomorrow, it seems. Still, for a president who has been trying to quit for years, the nine-month hiatus is a welcome sign that he's breaking the addiction.

Reporting from Sacramento -- The proposal is simple: Raise taxes on cigarettes to pay for cancer research. The push for it is quintessentially Californian, melding celebrity salesmanship and the whims of state voters, who have increasingly been called on to decide key policy questions. The pitchman for Proposition 29, which will appear on the June ballot, is seven-time Tour de France champion and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, who is asking voters to increase taxes on a pack of cigarettes by $1. On Wednesday, he announced a $1.5 million contribution from his Texas-based foundation to the Yes on 29 campaign.

Cigarette production last year dropped about 3% to 643 billion cigarettes, an Agriculture Department report said Wednesday. "Domestic use fell, but exports rose," the department's Economic Research Service said. "U.S. smokers consumed 584 billion cigarettes in 1986.

Teenagers might change their attitudes about cigarette smoking by what could be dubbed a "don't show, don't tell" policy that keeps tobacco products in stores out of sight, according to a new British study. Researchers in Ireland simply removed cigarette and tobacco items from store displays during a three-year survey that examined the effect on attitudes about smoking. The University of Nottingham's Centre for Tobacco Control Studies reports the number of teens who recalled the tobacco-driven ad displays dropped from 81% to 22%. Further, the study says, 38% of teens thought the coverup would make it easier to keep kids from smoking while 14% of adults thought it would make it easier to quit.

As a cigarette smoker, I want to commend David Lazarus for his article ("Fuming over cigarette butt litter," Nov. 30) regarding self-centered smokers who litter their butts wherever they feel like it. In public places, I make it a point to extinguish my cigarette and discard the butt in a trash can. The same applies to my automobile; my butts are never thrown out onto the highway. We smokers owe society cleanliness and courtesy. Aside from a hefty fine, a good punishment would be mandatory weekend litter cleanup in our parks and sidewalks for three months.

Cigarette smoking may have earned a reputation as an unhealthy, cancer-causing pastime, but water pipes seem to have largely evaded the stigma. Now, new research shows that water pipes may simply be dangerous in slightly different ways, according to a study in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. Water pipes, also known as hookah, shisha and a host of other aliases, are a common social activity in the Middle East and have been growing in popularity: a 2011 study found more than 40% of college students had used a hookah , and many of them appeared to believe it was safer than cigarette smoking.

Anyone with pets knows animals are just like us. They enjoy sleeping on our beds, detest going out in the rain and have a hard time losing weight. Now comes a scientific report that shows animals in the wild often do something we think of as distinctly human: They self-medicate. However unlike the destructive form that self-medication takes in the human world (too much drinking, drugs, smoking), for an array of animals it takes on the constructive form of ingesting or using plants and chemical substances to treat themselves therapeutically as well as prophylactically.

At this rate, New York City is going to run out of vices before it sees another mayor. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has announced new city legislation that would force retail stores to keep cigarettes out of customers' sight, hidden behind curtains or in drawers -- a see-no-evil, smoke-no-evil approach for the mayor known for making everyone else's health the government's business. “New York City has dramatically lowered our smoking rate, but even one new smoker is one too many - especially when it's a young person,” Bloomberg said in a statement Monday.

Debi Austin looked into the camera, swallowed - the hole in her throat as big as a half-dollar coin and as black as nothingness - and said she had her first cigarette when she was 13, that she had tried to quit but couldn't. And that "they" say nicotine is not addictive. Then she picked up a half-burned, still-lit cigarette from an ashtray, titled back her head and took a drag from the hole in her neck. She winced, and as the smoke wafted out of the hole she said: "How can they say that?"

Re "It pays to quit smoking at any age," Jan. 24 A comment in the article suggests the need to determine a relationship between the number of cigarettes smoked daily and the extent of disease that results. There is no safe use for any tobacco product. Tobacco use will result in either disease, disability or death. To parse the degree of damage by number of tobacco units may seem to imply that there might actually be a "safe" level. Such is not now and never will be the case.

DIEPSLOOT, South Africa - On the sunny side of a dusty township street, next to the metal gates of a school, Lucas Moyana's little shop is just a board propped on four plastic crates like a child's lemonade stand. For a couple of coins, he sells being cool, sells being free. A schoolboy in uniform hurries up, barely glancing at the cookie packets, lollipops and candies, grabs a Dunhill cigarette from a red box, puts a match to it and drops 22 cents on the table before hurrying away.

A cigarette was Nick Edenetti's trademark when he was working the clubs, a thin tendril of smoke curling up through the spotlight and into the darkness. He used it to create a mood as he sang, moving it in a kind of wavy motion to the rhythms of the music, its glowing tip zigzagging through the edges of the light. More than simply a prop, smoking was Nick's addiction as well as his trademark. He was a four-packs-a-day man, and you rarely saw him without Joe Camel lounging at his side.

You've been warned Re "Tobacco warnings take graphic turn," June 21 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is mandating graphic pictures on each pack of cigarettes showing the realities of smoking. Can we soon expect pictures of obese people placed on the front door of every fast-food restaurant? Or pictures of people dying of skin cancer at the entrance to the beach? We should mandate that the FDA change its name to the FNA (Frivolous Nanny Administration). David Green Long Beach Of course these new images will help smokers stop, even if the predicted expectation is for a paltry 300,000 quitters out of the more than 40 million smokers.

If you're one of the 1 in 5 American adults who still smokes, here's another reason to quit -- or at least scale back on days that are likely to end with several drinks: A new study finds that the likelihood of experiencing a hangover after a bout of heavy drinking is greater for those who smoke heavily on the day of their alcohol consumption. Worse still, the new research found that when a day of heavy cigarette smoking leads to a night of heavy drinking, the misery of the resulting hangover is intensified.

Army Pvt. Steve Spofford heard the news at a 6 a.m. roll call on the U.S. Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "Foraker!" the platoon sergeant called out. Silence. "Foraker!" Standing in formation, Spofford felt his mind racing. It was not at all like Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Foraker to be missing. Where could he be? No one disappears from Guantanamo, Spofford thought, least of all the soldiers in charge of guarding the captives taken during the war on terrorism. But after a search of the base and the bay that was launched that morning of Sept.