Ninety-three percent of Indonesian children are exposed to cigarette ads on television

Ninety-three percent of Indonesian children are exposed to cigarette ads on television, while 50 percent regularly see cigarette ads on outdoor billboards and banners, according to a survey conducted by the National Commission on Children Protection (Komnas Anak).
Tjandra Yoga Aditama, the Indonesian Health Ministry’s director general for disease control and environmental health, says the ads are designed to give impresionable youths the impression that smokers is “cool and confident.”

Tobacco Shops Online To Expand Tobacco

The most known health organizations expressed their alarm regarding how Internet is being used to promote the cigarettes and smoking. Tobacco companies say that they are not using the online world to promote their brands, but there are many concerns about the networking sites and how they are showing how glamorous smoking is and without risks. These concerns refer especially to young people. British American Tobacco, was forced to conduct a damage limitation exercise, because there was found out that on Facebook several of its employees had fan sites for the Lucky Strike and Dunhill brands, which are a production of BAT. The tobacco company didn’t have knowledge about that.

The smoke free group has also showed that BAT hired an online marketing firm, iKineo, to promote the Lucky Strike cigarettes in South Africa. iKineo wrote on its Web site that it had extended the Lucky Strike cigarette campaign into the digital space and using it to mobilize a powerful underground movement to advocate the brand.

 The research exercise in the tobacco market did not forbid advertising the tobacco, but Robin Hewings, Cancer Research UK’s tobacco control manager, said that the tobacco industry has an old history about searching for loopholes that allow its lethal products to target teens. There is not always clear who started with the pro-smoking sites. In 1997, RJR didn’t use any more Joe Camel cartoon in its Camel cigarette advertising, because there was a period when small kids were recognizing this character better than Mickey Mouse, reported the American Medical Association.

$200 Smokes at NYC Jails? What a Ripoff.

New York City officials have been waging all-out war on tobacco in recent years, pushing price hikes and proposing higher minimum purchase ages. But even at $10.50 for a single pack—the latest proposed citywide hike—you’re talking a steal of a deal compared to what some are reportedly paying for as many cigarettes behind bars.

Citing a Bronx District Attorney source, the New York Daily News says a pack of cigarettes now goes for up to $200 in New York City prisons. Not that a pack’s supposed to go for anything these days: New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration imposed a ban on smoking in city jails back in 2003.
But that’s apparently created a highly profitable black market for nicotine-laced contraband, culminating in 85 arrests since January 2012, and 20 so far this year. Just last Thursday, a deliveryman was apparently caught “sneaking” four bags of tobacco into the city’s primary jail complex, Rikers Island, on a truck loaded with produce — Freeman claims it was all his, but investigators say he was planning to sell it to inmates. Whatever the case, at $200 a pack, you’re talking $2,000 a carton, i.e. “nice work if you can get it.”
How much for a single smoke? Try $30, according to Daily News jail sources.
Correction officers have stepped up their game, despite the extra workload, employing dogs to locate contraband like tobacco and other drugs, but staffers are usually exempt from the searches, shielded by union arguments that they shouldn’t be subject to the same regulatory strictures as inmates.
That said, busts are up 40% since 2010, though tobacco accounts for just 16% of the total number.

Hotels that only maintain a partial smoking ban

Just because you choose the non-smoking hotel room doesn’t mean you’re completely protecting yourself from exposure.

A new study published in the journal, Tobacco Control, found hotels that only maintain a partial smoking ban still expose their occupants to cigarette smoke, and that compared to hotels with full smoking bans, nicotine levels on hotel room surfaces are two times higher.
The researchers studied the air quality and nicotine residue on the surfaces of smoking and non-smoking rooms in 30 hotels with partial smoking bans and 10 hotels with total smoking bans in California. They also took urine and finger swipe samples from non-smoking participants who spent the night in the hotels to assess their  exposure to nicotine.

Not surprisingly, levels of nicotine in the air were much higher in smoking than in non-smoking rooms, but levels in non-smoking rooms in hotels with partial bans were still 40% higher than in hotels with complete bans. The non-smokers who stayed in hotels with partial bans also had higher levels of nicotine and tobacco byproducts such as cotinine in their urine and finger residue samples. Rooms that previously housed smokers retained a legacy of nicotine and other potential cancer-causing compounds, known as third hand exposure, that were up to 35 times higher than levels found in hotels that enforced a complete ban on smoking.
The researchers suggest that non-smokers choose hotels that have full smoking bans, in order to truly reduce their exposure. As USA Today reports, the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation says that many large hotel chains like Marriott, Westin and Comfort Inn, are becoming smoke-free, and by law, hotels must be smoke-free in four states and 71 cities and counties in the U.S..