Turkey Reports “Smoking – Ban Murder”

A restaurant owner in southwest Turkey was shot dead after he tried to prevent his customers from smoking to comply with a new law on the use of tobacco indoors, Hurriyet daily said Thursday.

A fight broke out after Hidir Karayigit, 46, ordered a group of customers to extinguish their cigarettes when they began smoking at his “meyhane,” a traditional restaurant that serves alcohol, in the town of Saruhanli, Hurriyet said.

One of the customers shot Karayigit four times after he took away the group’s cigarettes, said witness Hamza Havutcu, Karayigit’s business partner who was also shot and wounded.

Turkey’s government on July 19 introduced a nationwide ban on indoor smoking, including bars and restaurants, despite the fact that half of Turks aged between the ages of 15 and 49 smoke; one of the highest rates in the world.

Its really saddened that the first smoking-ban murder occurred at Turkey that taken action against smoking and creating a law to restricts public smoking, said by Saruhanli Mayor Veli Yalcin. “They either shouldn’t have outlawed smoking or they should have outlawed alcohol along with smoking.”

Smoking Banned Around Hospitals in New York

The New York City Council unanimously approved a bill on Wednesday to prohibit smoking within 15 feet of the entrance or exit to any hospital. Lawmakers said the measure was a logical and necessary extension of an existing ban on smoking in hospitals, in place since 1988, and the ban on workplace smoking, one of the Bloomberg administration’s key initiatives, which took effect in 2003.

Smoking Banned Around Hospitals in New York

“When visiting a hospital, the last thing patients should have to worry about avoiding second hand smoke,” the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said before the vote. “Patients should not have to walk through plumes of smoke on their way to seeing their doctor.”

The legislation, introduced by Councilwoman Inez E. Dickens, a Manhattan Democrat, applies to general hospitals, diagnostic and treatment centers and residential health care facilities. The measure not only bans smoking within 15 feet of hospital entrances or exits, but also smoking within 15 feet of the entrance to or exit from a hospital’s outdoor grounds.

A coalition of antitobacco groups — including the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids — supported the legislation.

The city’s 1988 Smoke-Free Air Act already bans smoking in hospitals, clinics, psychiatric facilities, residential health care facilities, physical therapy facilities, convalescent homes and homes for the aged.

In a Monday hearing on the measure, staff members for the City Council reported that several states — Arkansas, Colorado and Hawaii — and municipalities — Buffalo; Duluth, Minn.; and Sioux City, Iowa — had passed similar measures restricting smoking around hospital entrances.

Smokeless Delite Welcome Video showing Electronic Cigarettes and Personal Vapor Accessories

Its a great idea by smokers that addicted to smoking and could not leave after suffering health problems. Smokeless Delite introducing you to a revolutionary new way to ’smoke’ healthy and stay within the law. These electronic cigarettes are a healthy alternative towards traditional cigarettes, same cigarette taste, still with nicotine but with none of the 4000 toxins usually found in a electronic cigarette.

Persons those are new to electronic cigarettes let us explain exactly what they are: An e-cigarette consists of a battery an atomiser and a cartridge chamber that holds a small amount of nicotine and water.

When you draw on an electronic cigarette a smokers cravings are satisfied due to the taste of tobacco, the smoke like vapour emitted, the actual holding of a cigarette, the glow at the end and an intake of nicotine so it can be used as an alternative to a cigarette.

The Electronic Cigarettes can be used legally anywhere as there is no passive smoke, no health concerns and of course nothing flammable.

The renewable cartridges are available in 4 strengths, Normal, Medium, Low and no nicotine, a cartridge will last approximately the same time as 15 normal cigarettes so you will also save aprox 80% of your costs as a bonus.

Smokeless Delite - Electronic Cigarettes

Take a look at the benefits of using electronic cigarettes over normal tobacco cigarettes.

Please taek a view to Video Tutorial for how to start using Electronic Cigarettes. This includes instructions on how to install a cartridge and how to charge the battery with the help of a video of Electronic Cigarette by Smokeless Delite.

Pentagon Considering Smoking Ban for Military

The U.S. military’s long, storied love affair with tobacco may be doomed.

The Pentagon, which actively promoted smoking during the two world wars and still subsidizes tobacco at PXs and commissaries, is considering a ban.

Pentagon Considering Smoking Ban for Military

That’s one recommendation from a panel led by a former dean of the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill that was asked by the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs how to reduce tobacco use in the military.

If Secretary of Defense Robert Gates accepts the group’s suggestions, it would be a historic about-face for the likes of Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, where tens of thousands of young men and women learned to smoke amid a culture that regarded cigarettes as much a part of being a soldier or Marine as carrying a rifle.

“It’s all I see on the bases,” said Staff Sgt. Maritza Hunt, a squad leader at Fort Bragg.

Hunt, although not a smoker, was skeptical of how successful efforts to curb tobacco use would be.

“You have colonels and generals and all kinds of people who smoke,” she said.

The military could end tobacco use within 20 years by gradually refusing entry to users, said Stuart Bondurant, dean emeritus of the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“If the services take the full 20 years, practically everyone now in the military would be retired,” he said.

The panel that Bondurant led issued a report in June that found that 22 percent of VA patients and 33 percent of active-duty troops use tobacco, compared with 20 percent of the U.S. population. Use is even higher among deployed troops.

Racetrack asks health board for smoking ban exemption

Dan Adkins asks Health Board For Racetrack Smoking Ban

Representatives from the Tri-State Racetrack and Gaming Center asked the Kanawha-Charleston Board of Health to reconsider the county’s smoking ban at the racetrack, but health officials weren’t sympathetic.

Dan Adkins, the racetrack’s vice president, asked the health board to allow a partial exemption for the “one-of-a-kind” establishment that would designate smoking and nonsmoking areas within the casino and gaming area.

“We can handle smokers and nonsmokers. We have had total separation in the past and are asking for consideration again since we are a unique destination within the state,” Adkins said.

He said the racetrack has lost $15 million in revenue in the past year, more than half of which officials blame on the smoking ban.

“Nine million of that can be attributed to nonsmoking,” he said. “Yes, we’ve had an economic downturn but that can’t account for a full 24 percent drop in revenue.”

Members of the health board weren’t inclined to reconsider the ban.

“It’s hard in one year to make any determination on if the smoking ban has affected losses, especially because of the economic downturn,” said Brenda Isaac, the board’s president. “It will be discussed, but I would not be inclined to make an exception.”

Other board members felt the same, saying the racetrack was welcome to ask to be reconsidered, but the board shouldn’t go back on what it passed.

“It’s first and foremost a health issue. We are doing this because of the evidence against [smoking],” said board member Dr. Shannon Snodgrass.

The smoking ban has caused tourism revenue in the county and state to shrink, Adkins said.

“We track our players like any other casino and we know that our dollars are going out of state where people can smoke,” he said.

According to Adkins, Tri-State is the only one of the state’s three racetracks with table games to have a smoking ban, which he said makes the restriction to his business unfair.

“As long as the ban is fair and equal, we’ll cooperate,” he said. “We aren’t being treated fairly. We’re asking for a level playing field.”

Learn how to Quit Smoking

“I constantly struggle with it [smoking]. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes.”

– President Obama, June 23, 2009

Learn How To Quit Smoking

I started smoking when I was 16, pilfering cigarettes from my mother’s purse or swiping unfiltered Pall Malls whenever my dad left his opened pack untended. Then I got a job that summer and began buying my own — Newports with menthol and filters, a brand preferred by all the young tobacco initiates I had begun to share my habit with.

The rituals of smoking were many, and we adopted them all, along with the identity they gave us, the new sense of ourselves as grown-ups, even if we were faking it, aping our elders as a means of proclaiming our difference from them — a neat trick.

We’d all strike poses learned from the movies, or practice smooth moves in the art of lighting up. We studied how to flip away a cigarette butt in a gesture of defiant insouciance, or how to cup a cigarette against the wind. We learned how to light one cigarette from another, or to light one from a gas stove without singeing our hair. We taught ourselves how to blow smoke rings.

Some of us made a fashion statement by enfolding a cigarette pack in the sleeve of a T-shirt, and others thought it a mark of adolescent elegance to cock a cigarette behind one’s ear.

We also picked up courting practices that included the touch of a hand as we lighted cigarettes for our girlfriends. We attempted to look sensitive in the way we pulled smoke into our lungs ever so contemplatively, then exhaling slowly, desperately trying to impress.

Those first cigarettes I smoked would lead to a couple hundred thousand more, consumed over more than 30 years, long after any of it seemed cool, and much past the time when smoking was a choice. What began as a desire for acceptance and admission to adulthood became the mark of a pariah, bearing the stamp of loserdom, as smokers huddled near the entrances to our workplaces. We’d take quick drags on our illicit smokes while colleagues exited and entered the buildings with looks of disdain or beleaguered tolerance for our pathetic need.

The arc of American tobacco addiction began during World War I, when doughboys fresh off the farms were given tobacco and rolling papers as part of their ration kits, an explicit government endorsement of a practice that I’m sure killed more of those young soldiers than enemy bullets ever would. My grandfather picked up the habit in uniform and passed it down to me — as did guys such as Humphrey Bogart and a legion of other actors and writers of my granddad’s generation who enshrined the practice as the hallmark of toughness or sophistication.

Women were taught to smoke largely as a means of weight control (perhaps that benefit is why our president is so elegantly slim). Thousands of ads from the 1920s through the ’50s promised glamour and trim silhouettes to our grandmothers and mothers. Those ads helped persuade my mom to start smoking before she conceived me when she was 16, by which time she was already a nicotine addict. Even doctors joined in the campaign to get women to smoke, endorsing some brands over others and promising menstrual mood control and suppression of “nerves.”

The social pressure to start smoking is less today than it was in Mom’s day — or mine — but, every day, 3,500 Americans under 18 try their first cigarette, and 1,100 make it a habit, according to the American Cancer Society. Some are enticed by flavorings designed to attract the young. The tobacco bill passed last month bans most flavorings, though a political compromise exempted the one — menthol — that helped hook me. But overall, giving the federal government new powers to regulate tobacco is a good thing, likely to save lives.

Mark Twain famously said that quitting smoking was easy, that he’d “done it hundreds of times.” I found it equally “easy,” swearing off cancer sticks on an almost daily basis until I finally managed to smoke my last cigarette 15 years ago.

My mother quit a few months ago. It was “easy” for her too. She has lung cancer.

Anti Smoking Drugs Linked to Increase in Mental Side Effects

Two prescription drugs that are used to quit smoking have been linked to an increase in mental side effects. The mood changes are prevalent and the FDA has instructed manufacturers of both Chantix (Varenicline) and Zyban (Bupropion) to place boxed warning labels on the packaging inserts and prescription drug information. Some of the changes in mood or mental side effects experienced include:

Depression
Anger or Hostility
Behavioral Changes
Suicidal Thoughts or thoughts of dying

The mental or mood disorders were determined through the use of the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System or AERS. Both consumers and health care professionals can use AERS to submit reports of adverse reactions to medications to the FDA. The tool helps identify reactions that were not identified during clinical trials or studies, but might have been identified after a medication has been approved for general use. Consumers can fill out forms for the AERS program with their health care provider, or they can submit their own reports through MedWatch.

After receiving multiple reports submitted by consumers and health care providers, the FDA has determined that the warning must be placed on both Chantix and Zyban. Zyban, or Bupropion, is also marketed as the anti-depressant drug, Wellbutrin. Patients using Wellbutrin have also experienced similar mood changes and found their mental disorders increased. Wellbutrin will also receive the boxed warning label. Generic versions of the drug will also receive the box warnings.

The new warnings will be in ‘boxed’ form. This means that the paper inserts that accompany the medication will have a black box with the warning information listed. Those using Chantix or Zyban should report any changes in mood or their mental well-being to their health care provider immediately.

In addition to the box warning, manufacturers of smoking cessation products will need to conduct clinical trials to determine how frequently the mental disorders, or neuropsychiatric symptoms occur. They will also need to determine whether the symptoms are more prone to occurring in patients with a previous history of mental disorders. Pfizer Inc manufacturers Chantix and GlaxoSmithKilne manufacturers Zyban.

Greek’s new law restricts public smoking

Europe’s most nicotine-dependent nation adopt a new public smoking ban Wednesday, launching a stub out of the Greek custom of lighting up virtually everywhere. Exceptions were made for mentally ill and players.

Greek's new law restricts public smoking

Unrestricted indoor smoking in restaurants, bars, cafes and workplaces is now against the law, the third is trying to impose prohibition Greece over the last decade.

“We want to change the minds of many years and adjust our daily habits … to the current practice in all civilized countries,” Health Minister Dimitris AVRAMOPOULOS said. “Greek society is prepared for that.”

EU figures show that 37.6 percent of Greeks aged over 15 smoke on a daily basis – the highest level in the EU-27 nation. According to the Ministry of Health, the habit kills 20,000 Greek smokers every year, and another 700 die as a result of passive smoking.

But the government has stopped shy of imposing a total ban, and critics say it will do with the new law as ineffective as the previous two – which were generally ignored by smokers and related entities.

Small establishments will be able to choose whether they will be smoking or nonsmoking only, and may cancel more smoking areas.

And all hospitals and health facilities will be smoke free – in addition to the mental institution where the patient will be able to smoke on prescription “for purely curative,” according to the new law.

Offenders will face fines that vary euro50 smoking for up euro20,000 for owners of bars, restaurants and cafes caught for various infractions.

A poll earlier this year found that 95 percent of nonsmokers and 62 percent of smokers support a public smoking ban.

“It is a positive step,” said kiosk Athens Pavlos Giannopoulos work. “It’s all a matter of habit, since that (the law) is enforced.”

Popular Stop-Smoking Drugs Needs To Indicating Mental Health Risk Warnings

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it will immediately require boxed warnings about the risk of serious neuropsychiatric symptoms on the packaging of two popular smoking cessation drugs — varenicline (Chantix) and buproprion (Zyban, Wellbutrin and generics).

U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Reports of behavioral changes, depressed mood, agitation, hostility and suicidal thoughts and behavior associated with use of the drugs have been submitted to the FDA’s adverse event reporting system.

Throughout the marketing history of the drugs, there have been 98 suicides and 188 attempted suicides in varenicline users and 14 suicides and 17 attempted suicides in buproprion users, the agency reported.

Obama, the first president to smoke cigarettes

Yes, President Obama says, he occasionally sneaks a cigarette.

Obama Smoking Cigarette

This is, perhaps, one of the worst-kept secret around the White House. Weeks, the president of the advisers have declined to say whether he whipped his smoking. And one day after signing the landmark tobacco legislation, Mr. Obama conceded as many have surmised.

“If I fell from the train sometimes Yes,” said Mr. Obama on Tuesday, White House news conference. “Am I a smoker a day, a constant smoker? No.”

Between denouncing the crackdown on protests in Iran and explaining his health care plan in Congress, Mr. Obama was asked whether he still smoked. Expression on his face – a dismissive of, some of the bother – foretold his answer.

“I do not do it in front of my children,” he said. “I do not do it in front of my family. I would say that I am 95 percent cured, but there are times where I mess up.”

Mr. Obama, of course, is hardly the first president to smoke cigarettes. But, this is a new era, when tobacco was banned, the improvement of health care is at the top of the president’s agenda and tough anti-tobacco legislation is passed his table.

“First of all, the new law was put into place is not for me,” said Mr. Obama, speaking tersely to a reporter who asked the question, Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers. “It’s about the next generation of kids is published.”

Mr. Obama’s answer May did little to add to public debate about smoking, but he illustrates his testiness on the subject. His wife, Michelle, told him to stop when he started his campaign, saying: “He can not be President of smoking.”

But now, it seems, he is – at least occasionally.

I make this question one every month or so, “said Mr. Obama.” You know, I do not know what to say to you, except the fact that you know, like people who go to AA, you know, once you’ve gone down this time, then you know that is something I constantly struggle with. “

Mr. Obama is not seen smoking in public for years. In 2005, on his first day in Washington as a freshman senator, he has removed a number of the window as the SUV and lit up cigarettes as they rode on Capitol Hill in a meeting at the White House. And now that he lives in the White House, the testing is far greater.

So where is he smoking? Wooded grove White House around the swimming pool and tennis courts is one place, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who are not authorized to speak about it.