Tobacco

G ov. Martin O'Malley promotes entrepreneurship. Kyun Hong seems to have answered the call. According to comptroller's agents, he packed his Severna Park house with cigarettes and snuff bought across state lines and resold them to Baltimore retailers without paying Maryland's tobacco tax. If he is a tobacco smuggler - he hasn't been convicted and didn't respond to a detailed message left at his house - he has competition. The doubling of Maryland's cigarette tax two years ago has inspired uncounted numbers of small businessmen to do what comes naturally: Buy low and sell high.

2010 Tobacco-Free Kids Week Planning Kits can be reserved now. Schools and community groups can reserve Activity Planning Kits from the Anne Arundel County Department of Health. Kits will be mailed in December and can be requested from the Learn to Live Line at 410-222-7979 or ordered from the Tobacco-Free Kids Week page on the Smoking Stinks Web site, smokingstinks.org. The county's 15th annual Tobacco-Free Kids Week is Feb. 22 to 28.

Maryland tobacco farmers won't receive about $13 million in payments from cigarette manufacturers under a ruling Friday from the North Carolina Supreme Court. Officials with the Maryland Department of Agriculture said the state had sought to require that Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Lorillard Tobacco Co. honor an agreement to compensate farmers for the declining sales of tobacco expected from a settlement between the tobacco industry and states over the health care costs of smoking.

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.

Given the well-known health hazards associated with smoking, it should come as no surprise that most people who take up the habit do so at an early age. About 90 percent of smokers start before 18, and a significant number of those begin lighting up for the first time at 13 or under. That's obviously too young to make informed decisions about a potentially lethal, lifelong habit. That's why the Food and Drug Administration's first act as a regulator of tobacco was a good one: banning sweet, fruit- and candy-flavored cigarettes.

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.