Tobacco

Baltimore officials are aggressively going after smoking products they think are causing particular harm in the city. Their efforts - to regulate cigarettes that pose an enhanced risk of fire and reduce consumption of little cigars that have become popular among young African-Americans - are a justified and welcome response to a couple of related public health issues. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that cigarettes sold in Maryland are considerably more likely to cause fires than those sold in states such as New York and California that have stricter safety standards.

Maryland House leaders unveiled a plan yesterday that would extend medical coverage to nearly 250,000 uninsured residents, a proposal that immediately ignited a debate over the key funding mechanism - a doubling of the state's cigarette tax to $2 a pack. The $600 million health care proposal aims to provide coverage for every child in Maryland by expanding Medicaid, while requiring that higher-income individuals and families buy insurance or pay a fee. It also would give subsidies to small businesses to provide insurance to workers and require that private insurers allow adults up to age 25 to stay on their parents' plan.

They are small, prevalent and cheap, sometimes flavored and even sold individually. And they have fewer restrictions than cigarettes. Black & Mild cigars - found at most city convenience shops and drugstores - are smoked by nearly a quarter of 18- to 24-year-old African-Americans in Baltimore, according to a city Health Department report to be released today. Popular in urban centers across the country and featured in hip-hop music and TV shows, Black & Milds are taxed at a lower rate, carry fewer health warnings on their labels and can be sold as singles.

The American Lung Association issued a report this week grading states on how well they control tobacco. In most areas, Maryland received so-so marks. That's not surprising. While Maryland has banned smoking in the workplace, most bars and many restaurants across the state are exempted despite the growing national (and international) trend to the contrary. But in one troubling category, Maryland earned an outright failing grade: for not keeping tobacco out of the hands of children. The report criticizes state officials for not banning open displays of cigarettes , for not mandating that merchants request photo identification of any customer who appears to be a minor, and for not directing state police or any other state agency to enforce restrictions on tobacco vendors.

Choose the children over tobacco industry In his column defending Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett's misguided vote against the State Children's Health Insurance Program bill in Congress, Gregory Kane left out one of the main reasons Mr. Bartlett voted against the bill and President Bush vetoed it: The bill would have been funded by a 61-cent-per-pack increase in the federal tobacco tax ("Bartlett has plan to insure poor kids," Oct. 20). This funding mechanism would have deterred many children across the country from becoming addicted to tobacco and raised enough money to provide health care for 4 million children.

WASHINGTON -- If you click your way through cable TV land, you're bound to run across a World War II movie in which a soldier, dying for a smoke, smokes while he's dying.In such scenes, somebody nice, like William Bendix in "Wake Island," has been mauled by enemy fire and isn't going to make it. His last words to his squad are punctuated by puffs on a cigarette being held for him by a buddy.You have to wonder what President Clinton might be thinking when he watches such episodes.Can Mr. Clinton possibly see a link between smoking in wartime in years gone by and his rejuvenated war on the tobacco companies?

Warning that the billion-dollar fee dispute between lawyer Peter G. Angelos and Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. could produce a brutal "public bloodletting" in Maryland's legal community, a judge yesterday urged the two sides to try to reach agreement."

The House of Delegates approved a $17.5 billion state budget bill yesterday that would give lawmakers the option of accepting or refusing Gov. Parris N. Glendening's proposed tobacco tax increase.A majority of House Republicans joined all but one Democrat in passing the Glendening budget on a 127-12 vote. The bill, which would cut $173 million from the governor's proposed budget, moves to the Senate.Del. Howard P. Rawlings, the House Appropriations Committee chairman, said the budget is balanced whether or not they approve the governor's proposed $1-a-pack cigarette tax increase.

Media have ignored Conaway's campaign for Baltimore mayorThis letter concerns the bias The Sun and television channels Channels 2, 11, 13 and 45 have shown in covering the race for mayor of Baltimore and the candidacy of Mary W. Conaway,register of wills,The local media's myopic view of the race started with the coverage of the Kweisi Mfume draft campaign, or non-campaign, which proclaimed him the front-runner and all -but-elected mayor.Then the media proclaimed Lawrence A. Bell III the mayoral front-runner, with the most money -- which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Community policing is the strategy for BaltimoreThe Sun has done a good job following the fallout of "zero tolerance" police practices in New York City. This may help officials who have been pushing "zero tolerance" in Baltimore understand that such slogans are not strategies.Instead of drawing conclusions from a superficial look at the New York program, these officials would do well to take a closer look at their own city, where some communities are benefiting from the community policing programs initiated by Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier.

Earlier this year, the Baltimore County Health Department dispatched two 18-year-old police cadets to 80 local stores where cigarettes are sold. Want to guess how often the teenagers were asked to show some form of identification? A miserable four out of 10 times. When county officials surveyed stores close to county middle and high schools, the results weren't much better: ID was requested less than half the time. Whenever the sole female cadet purchased cigarettes from male store clerks, the results were even more troubling - not once was she asked to show her driver's license or any other form of identification.

Tobacco tax is a success Between 2007 and 2008, there were 74 million fewer packs of cigarettes sold in Maryland, which will save thousands of Marylanders from the horrors of tobacco-caused illness and death and which will save Maryland many millions of dollars in health care costs. This public health success happened because Maryland's cigarette tax went up by $1 per pack on Jan. 1, 2008. We commend Gov. Martin O'Malley and the Maryland General Assembly for enacting this lifesaving measure during the 2007 special legislative session.

Holliday H. Obrecht Jr., a retired executive of his family's wholesale tobacco and candy business who was active in service organizations, died Aug. 29 at the Levindale Center of complications of a fall he suffered in April outside his home. The Timonium resident was 83. Born in Baltimore and raised on Kentucky Avenue and in Guilford, he attended McDonogh School. He and fellow students talked its headmaster into letting them complete their final graduation studies early so they could enlist in the Army's Air Forces before they were drafted.

The U.S. Senate may vote as early as Tuesday on legislation that would, for the first time, give the Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco products. Numerous anti-smoking and health groups support the legislation. So does this mean Congress is finally on the verge of stepping up to take on Big Tobacco? Hardly. The bill in question was crafted, in part, by the nation's leading cigarette company, Philip Morris, as part of a deal worked out between the tobacco giant and an anti-smoking group - the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

WASHINGTON - -In a historic shift in public health policy almost half a century after the U.S. surgeon general first warned of the lethal dangers of smoking, Congress is poised to give the federal government sweeping new authority to regulate the manufacturing of cigarettes and other tobacco products. The legislation, long resisted by the tobacco industry, could allow consumers to see for the first time what chemicals and other additives tobacco companies put in their products. It would empower the Food and Drug Administration to put new limits on harmful ingredients and prohibit tobacco companies from marketing "light" cigarettes.

If Maryland is going to tax cigarette smokers and say it's for their health, isn't the state obligated to spend some minimum amount to help them quit or prevent others from starting the habit in the first place? That was the argument heard in the State House a decade ago when the tax on cigarettes was raised to $1 a pack and lawmakers set a relatively modest mandate for anti-smoking programs. Now, Gov. Martin O'Malley is looking to cut the state's $21 million minimum for tobacco prevention and cessation programs to a mere $7 million a year.

In 1964, when the U.S. surgeon general's office published the famed report that officially confirmed the link between smoking and cancer, nearly half of American adults smoked. To understand just how smoky life was back then, watch any episode of Mad Men, the TV series set on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s. Without a second thought, almost every character lights up regularly, at the office, at home, in restaurants, bars, cars, even at the dinner table in front of the kids. Happily, those days are over.

Pam Wahbe and her family have a primary-care physician. But lately they've been skipping the traditional doctor's office for minor ailments and instead using a walk-in clinic at a Towson CVS drugstore. "Going to the doctor takes a lot of time," says Wahbe, who has been using the store's MinuteClinic for a couple of years. "You have to wait until they're open, and then you have to call. And then you have to wait until they call you back. By the time you get in there, you've wasted at least half a day."

In his column "Up in smoke" (Commentary, July 28), Patrick Basham grossly mischaracterized the National Cancer Institute's American Stop Smoking Intervention Study for Cancer Prevention (ASSIST). I was the senior scientific editor for the National Cancer Institute's monograph that evaluated the study, and I know that, contrary to Mr. Basham's assertions, ASSIST was found to be effective. The 17 states that implemented ASSIST policy interventions had significantly lower smoking rates at the end of the program than states that did not implement the program had. Indeed, if all states had implemented such interventions, the National Cancer Institute estimates that there would be 1.2 million fewer smokers nationally today.

NEW YORK - Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that they will spend $500 million to stop people around the world from smoking. The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco will kill up to a billion people in the 21st century, most of them in poor and middle-income countries. In an effort to cut that number, Bloomberg's foundation plans to commit $250 million over four years on top of $125 million he announced two years ago. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is allocating $125 million over five years.