Cigarettes

When will we put as much effort into outlawing guns as we do into outlawing cigarettes? LINDA MANION Pasadena

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.

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.

As thoroughly awful as everyone knows cigarettes to be - still the No. 1 cause of premature death in this country - public officials walk a blurry line when they try to reduce smoking's terrible toll. As long as they lack the will to ban tobacco altogether, they face all sorts of ethical, legal and political problems in regulating a product that is, after all, perfectly legal. High tobacco taxes, critics say, unfairly punish smokers, who are disproportionately low income. Banning advertising of a legal product raises free-speech issues.

Your story, "U.S. Firms to Ship Soviets Billions of Cigarettes" (Sept. 14), prompted the following calculation: The 34 billion cigarettes that U.S. tobacco firms sell to the Soviet Union will cause the premature deaths of about 70,000 Russians. Perhaps President Bush will approach tobacco industry leaders and ask them to supply the Iraqi army with their wares as well. ANNIE WAN, M.D. Los Angeles

Health discussions about U.S. smokers usually revolve around numbers -- how many adults smoke (20.6%) and how many die each year (smoking accounts for 1 in 5 deaths),  according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Smoking & Tobacco Use . In September, the American Lung Assn. released a study by Penn State University that came up with a different kind of number: the "true" cost of a pack of cigarettes, state by state. The data show the average national cost of a pack at $5.51, but once factors like the loss of workplace productivity are factored in that number bloats to $18.05.

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.

LONDON — Britain's Department of Health announced a ban on displaying cigarettes in stores around the country on Thursday, the nation's annual "no smoking day. " The action relegates cigarettes to a product kept below the counter. The new law will be introduced gradually, according to a statement from the health agency. It says that in large stores and supermarkets, the visible display of cigarettes, cigars and tobacco products will be illegal from April 2012, while in smaller stores it goes into force in 2015, "except for temporary displays in certain limited circumstances.

Customs officers intercepted a Chinese-registered fishing vessel in Hong Kong waters and seized 4.8 million cigarettes worth $307,700 that were being smuggled into China, the Customs Department said last week.

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.

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.

While the lion's share of youth anti-smoking efforts has focused on cigarettes, a new report in the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease suggests more needs to be done to reduce the number of teens smoking flavored tobacco from hookahs. According to a recent survey cited in the report, 18.5% of 12th-grade students admitted to using a hookah in the previous year. And what's particularly concerning to the study authors, led by Daniel Morris of the Oregon Health Authority's public health division, is that many young people don't seem to recognize that hookah use carries serious health risks: Hookah smoke contains many of the same toxins as cigarettes and has been associated with a similar laundry list of diseases such as lung cancer and respiratory illness.