Cigarette

Here's something that should make feminists smile -- a real, like-mother-like-daughter story. The scene: Light Street, outside a bank, downtown Baltimore. Take Our Daughters To Work Day. Cigarette break. A group of smartly dressed women are smoking. One of the women has her daughter with her. The daughter smokes, too. Here's what we hear of the conversation:Mom: "I let her have one [cigarette] last year [on Take Our Daughters To Work Day], and on the way home she asked if she could smoke, too. I told her to think on it awhile.

He rubbed the tobacco-infused gel on his hands. Sniffed them, even licked them at one point. Then he tried another application. "I could definitely still smoke a cigarette now," Mark Hemmis said. That would make the score - lighting up: 1, rubbing it on: 0. Hemmis is a smoker who agreed to test Nicogel, a newly introduced product that is supposed to ease the craving for cigarettes, at least temporarily, until you can get to one of the fewer and fewer places where smoking is still allowed.

In regard to your editorial recommending Congress raise the cigarette tax ("Where there's smoke…" July 9), just observe how motorists have limited their auto use when gas was almost $4 per gallon - none at all. Or just look in Baltimore's alleys, streets and sidewalks to see how cigarettes are now smoked right down to the filter to save money, making the experience more toxic than ever. Or see how more and more people smoke outdoors and in their homes because smoking is not allowed indoors in all places.

Smoking may be increasingly unwelcome in the real world, but not at the movies, where cigarettes are almost as prevalent as Demi Moore's cleavage. Some movies, in fact, couldn't exist without them.Take "Smoke," the engrossing new drama by director Wayne Wang and novelist Paul Auster. Largely set in a New York tobacco shop and told as a series of overlappingshort stories, "Smoke" features a cast of characters -- a widowed writer, a one-armed auto mechanic, a teen-age runaway -- all of whom, at one point or another, light up. The shop owner (played by Harvey Keitel)

Two months after a top executive of Philip Morris Cos. testified in 1994 before Congress that the cigarette maker did not "manipulate or independently control" nicotine in its products, company scientists reported on experiments that indicated that they could produce "enhanced" nicotine effects on a smoker's nervous system, an internal company document shows.The June 1994 research report also found that altering the nicotine's chemical form likely "increased the rapidity" at which nicotine, the addictive substance in cigarettes, entered a smoker's bloodstream, the document shows.

Against the shades-of-gray backdrop of television studios, elevators, bars and sober suits, smoke spirals ominously through the biopic Good Night, and Good Luck. The smoke, and the countless cigarettes it emanates from, animate the anger that glows within Edward R. Murrow, as played by David Strathairn. As the legendary CBS newscaster challenges Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunt, the cigarettes become an extension of his laconic determination in the face of mass hysteria.

WASHINGTON -- Baltimore's ordinances that restrict cigarette and liquor billboards, under attack in the courts since their passage three years ago and never enforced, face a new round of challenges in the Supreme Court.In two separate appeals filed this week, advertisers and marketers of cigarettes and liquor argued that the Baltimore ordinances are unconstitutional. The challengers lambasted a federal appeals court for upholding them without looking into whether the city had a real need for the billboard limits.

"I gained weight, all of it on television, but it was more important to me to not smoke. I can always lose the weight or forget about it. I think I look cute anyway." -- S. Epatha Merkerson of Law and Order, telling Associated Press Radio that she quit her 23-year, three-pack-a-day cigarette habit shortly after joining the show in 1993.

Aberdeen Proving Ground has modified security at most of its entrances now that the Persian Gulf war is over, base administrators say.On Jan. 16, the start of the war, APG officials closed some gates, posted guards at other entrances and registered all visitors at the post to prevent terrorism.The Route 22 gate is now open 24 hours a day; the Route 40 gate is open 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.; and the Bel Air Avenue gate is open 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.APG will maintain security at the gates serving the Edgewood Area.

NEW YORK -- RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., the No. 2 U.S. cigarette maker, said its first-quarter profit fell 54 percent on falling domestic sales, bigger discounts and a payment tied to the tobacco industry's $206 billion settlement.Profit from operations at the maker of Winston, Salem and Camel cigarettes fell to $83 million, or 24 cents a share, from $179 million, or 52 cents, a year earlier. Analysts had expected the company to earn 28 cents a share.RJR and industry leader Philip Morris Cos., the maker of best-selling Marlboro cigarettes, offered a 55-cent-a-pack discount on their major U.S. brands to try to keep smokers after prices were raised by 70 cents last year to pay for the industry's $206 billion legal settlement with the states, but that helped RJR's rival more, analysts said.