Why Tanning Beds Are the Cigarettes of Our Age

When we first launched Cosmopolitan's Practice Safe Sun (PSS) campaign in 2006, it was in response to some shocking statistics I'd just learned: Melanoma had become the second most frequently reported cancer in women in their 20s. It was only later, though, that I began to hear the stories behind the stats, and they've been heartbreaking: Women in their 20s and 30s having multiple and disfiguring surgeries to remove the cancer and many dying of the disease. I learned this week about a young mother who died of melanoma five months after her twins were born. So often the common denominator among these women is that they loved to be tan--from the sun and often from tanning beds as well.
These stories have kept us highly motivated at Cosmo to make women aware of the dangers of both outdoor and indoor tanning. This week we took Cosmo's PSS initiative to a new level. We hosted a press conference in our offices at which Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Congressman Charlie Dent (R-PA) announced their plans to introduce The Tanning Bed Cancer Control Act, a key piece of bipartisan legislation that would expand federal regulation of tanning beds with the aim of limiting the strength of the UV rays emitted by tanning beds and the time consumers may be exposed to harmful radiation.
If you have any doubts about how dangerous beds are, consider the announcement made in July by the World Health Organization. They described tanning beds as definitely carcinogenic--putting them in the same category as cigarettes, asbestos, and uranium. If you tan indoors before age 30, your skin cancer risk rises by 75 percent (and nearly 70 percent of customers are young women). When we did an undercover report with ABC's 20/20, we found tanning salons routinely misrepresented the risks.
But at the same time that the evidence against tanning has become more clear, we've seen the continuing glorification of the tan in popular culture. Just check out the pervasive reality series, Jersey Shore. The daily routine is "GTL"--gym, tanning, laundry.
As Representative Maloney said when she introduced this new bill, tanning beds are the cigarettes of our age. We owe it to everyone, particularly to young women, to make sure that the risks of tanning are clearly communicated and understood and that tanning beds are regulated as tightly as devices with their risk-profile merit. Please write your congressperson and let him or her know you support this legislation.
And if you use a tanning bed, please stop. Now.

Cigarette Makers Ask to Block Ruling in 4,000 Cases

Altria Group Inc.’s Philip Morris USA unit and other U.S. cigarette makers asked a federal appeals court to block federal trial courts from applying a 2006 Florida decision they claim would deprive them of a fair trial in thousands of death and injury suits in the state.
The companies argue that a series of factual findings endorsed by the Florida Supreme Court in a 2006 decision - including that the companies sold defective products, that they conspired to hide information about the health effects of smoking and that they made false statements about their products - can’t fairly be applied in any of 4,000 cases against them in Florida federal court.
The companies claim that applying the 2006 ruling, which came in the Florida’s “Engle” tobacco class action, ‘would compromise an arbitrary deprivation of the defendants’ federal due process rights,” as a lower judge ruled in August 2008.
The plaintiffs, smokers and their families who are suing the cigarette makers individually, claim the findings are based on ample evidence. They argue that the federal courts are required to apply state law in the cases and can’t review the state supreme court’s decision. A decision in the smokers’ favor would make it easier for smokers to win verdicts in the cases.
In Florida state courts, which instruct jurors on the factual findings endorsed by the state Supreme Court, smokers have won several of the post-Engle cases that have gone to trial. These include a $30 million verdict against Reynolds and an $8 million verdict against Philip Morris. The cases are being appealed.
Florida Smoker
The Engle case was filed in 1994 and named after a Florida smoker named Howard Engle who was the lead plaintiff. After more than a decade of litigation in the Florida courts, the Florida Supreme Court in 2006 rejected a $145 billion punitive damage verdict in the case and ruled that it couldn’t continue as a class action on behalf of smokers statewide who were addicted to nicotine and developed cancer or other smoking-related illnesses.
At the same time, Florida’s high court upheld a series of factual findings made by a Miami jury in the case, and said they would apply in all of the individual suits filed by smokers who had been part of the Engle class. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case.
Specify the Defects
In the appeal today in Atlanta federal court, the companies aren’t challenging findings by the Engle jury, upheld by the Florida Supreme Court, that smoking is addictive and that it can cause illnesses including cancer, emphysema and heart disease.
“The complaints allege that the defendants were negligent and that they sold defective cigarettes,” said Andrew Frey, a lawyer for the cigarette makers. “Our position is that you have to specify the particular respect in which the product was defective, the particular respect in which the defendant was negligent.” Samuel Issacharoff, who argued the smokers’ case, told the judges that the Florida federal courts should follow the state supreme court and permit the findings to be used as they apply in individual cases. “Some of them may be useless,” said Issacharoff. “Some of them may simply streamline the cases.”
The three judges on the panel questioned the lawyers about the extent to which the Engle findings can be used by federal courts trying the cases. Each of the judges suggested the findings may be used to some extent.
Reynolds, Lorillard
“I promise you, you’re not going to get an opinion that says ‘the district court opinion is affirmed for the reasons set out in the opinion below,’” said Circuit Judge Ed Carnes.
The judges didn’t say when they will rule in the case.
In addition to Richmond, Virginia-based Phillip Morris, the biggest U.S. cigarette maker, the companies in the case include No. 2 R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., a unit of Reynolds American Inc. and No. 3 Lorillard Tobacco, a unit of Lorillard Inc.
The 4,000 cases, along with about 4,000 in Florida state courts, were filed after the 2006 ruling. In August, U.S. District Judge Harvey Schlesinger in Jacksonville, Florida, ruled that the factual findings can’t be used in the federal trials and certified the case for immediate appeal.

Lift cigarette prices to $20 a packet to help tackle health funding crisis: Quit

KEVIN Rudd is being urged to increase the price of cigarettes to $20 a packet and raise an extra $2 billion in taxes if he is serious about tackling a health funding crisis in Australia.

The Prime Minister last night outlined the looming threat of an ageing population, warning that the rising cost of health would outstrip the states' ability to raise taxes within two decades.

Quit Victoria executive director Fiona Sharkey told The Australian Online today that lifting the price of cigarettes would save lives.

“It is the single biggest thing we can do to bring smoking down. It cuts consumption and it cuts the number of people who smoke,” she said.

“What the tobacco industry says is the tax is regressive and it hurts poorer people. In fact we find that low socio-economic (people) are more likely to quit.

“As Health Minister Nicola Roxon said, if we don't act on what we know works then we are effectively killing people.”Raising the cost of cigarettes and alcohol is a serious option before the Rudd government. It was one of the main recommendations of the recent National Health Taskforce that also suggested a volumetric tax on alcohol to reflect alcohol content, a push believed to be also backed in Treasury secretary Ken Henry's tax review for the Rudd government.

The Rudd government's big reform options for health also include spending a lot more money on preventative health such as Quit smoking measures to help out the budget in the future.

An increase in the price of cigarettes to $16.50 would raise about $1 billion and an increase to $20 a packet would raise an extra $2 billion a year.

“We haven't had a real price rise here for 10 years and if we had followed the World Health Organisation recommendation we would be at around $16.50 a packet now and we are about $13,” Ms Sharkey said.

“The Taskforce suggested a two phased increase to $16.50 and second one to $20 a pack.

“And the reason they talked about a two-phased increase was to support programs to help low-income people to quit. So that could be subsidy on nicotine replacement therapy. The cost to do that is so minimal.

“It's the single biggest thing you can do. So don't delay.”

ATF stings put 250M illegal cigarettes on streets

Undercover ATF agents in Virginia have funneled more than 250 million cigarettes onto the nation's streets in the past three years through black market sales targeting smugglers, an Associated Press review has found.
Authorities say the flood of government-provided smokes -- a pack and a half for every man, woman and child in New York City, the smugglers' main destination -- leads them to organized crime rings and can even cut off financing for terrorists. The stings by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have yielded about five dozen federal arrests, albeit none on terror charges.
Many of those cigarettes undoubtedly wind up in the mouths of minors, since black market vendors have no reason to turn away teenage purchasers.
Despite that, government auditors and anti-tobacco groups want the ATF to do even more.
"Smuggling reduces prices, so it increases use, especially among kids, who are more price-sensitive" in their purchases, said Eric Lindblom, director of policy research for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
The Department of Justice, the ATF's parent agency, estimates that federal, state and local governments lose out on $5 billion annually in tax revenue from cigarettes sold through illegitimate channels.
In the biggest and most recent prosecution, federal authorities charged 14 people in November with paying more than $8 million in cash, supplemented by guns and drugs, for 77 million cigarettes over the course of a year. Two are accused of paying an undercover agent posing as a hitman to kill a couple over missing cigarettes.
In September, the Justice Department's inspector general found that tobacco diversion cases account for just 1 percent of ATF's caseload and 2 percent of its budget. In large swaths of the country, ATF has not conducted any investigations of cigarette smuggling for at least five years, the audit determined.
A notable exception, the AP found, was the Eastern District of Virginia, which includes Richmond, northern Virginia and the Interstate 95 corridor. The area is a hotbed for the crime because while 42 states and the District of Columbia have collectively passed more than 80 tax hikes on cigarettes since 2002, Virginia and North Carolina, the heart of tobacco country, still tax tobacco at only pennies per pack.
"The profit margin on this is ridiculous," said Ashan Benedict, resident agent in charge of the bureau's office in Falls Church, Va. "It's not that hard to find a customer who wants to save $40 a carton."
All told, the AP found undercover sales of more than 250 million cigarettes in the last few years. The AP review did not include state charges -- authorities said that the vast majority of cases brought in state courts involve relatively small quantities of cigarettes.
While 250 million is a large number, it pales to the 469 million cigarettes produced every day by Philip Morris USA at its two plants in Virginia and North Carolina last year.
The Virginia agents say they focus on cigarette smuggling in large part because the investigations often turn up other crimes. The ATF's Richmond office went so far as to set up its own store in King George, Va., called KG Wholesale, which advertised in Arabic-language newspapers and elsewhere. The store was set up with audio and video surveillance to record the transactions, all of which were illegal undercover sales.
By the time ATF pulled the plug on KG Wholesale in 2008, 27 people had been arrested and roughly 60 million contraband cigarettes had been sold.
The planners of the storefront sting were aware that cigarette smuggling has been a source of terrorist funding in the past -- in 2002 a federal jury in North Carolina convicted two Lebanese citizens of diverting millions of dollars in cigarette smuggling proceeds to the radical Islamic group Hezbollah -- and were anxious to disrupt other similar money trails.
Agent Ken Mosley is confident that investigations like the KG case disrupt terror financing, but he acknowledged evidence was insufficient to bring terrorism charges.
"There is no doubt in my mind that we have arrested people involved in terrorism," Mosley said.
The focus on Arabic-speaking smugglers in the KG Wholesale investigation -- the store did not run ads in other foreign-language papers -- smacks of profiling, said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group.
"Obviously it would be a concern if they targeted only Muslims and/or Arab-Americans," Hooper said.
While there have been terrorists who have made money through cigarette smuggling, it's far more common to find smugglers linked to organized crime, said John W. Colledge III, a Nevada-based consultant who once ran large-scale cigarette smuggling investigations for the U.S. Customs Service.
"Unfortunately, terrorism has become a sort of a buzzword," he said. "That's what gets you funding."
Smuggled cigarettes end up in legitimate retail establishments as well as on street corners, where they're often sold for $5 a pack -- several dollars below retail. The cheap cigarettes are especially alluring to minors, experts say, since black market sellers are less likely to card.
A tractor-trailer filled with untaxed or low-tax cigarettes can hold a potential profit of $1 million if they're trucked to New York City, where each pack faces $2.75 in state taxes plus a $1.50 levy from the city itself. A single vanload can turn a $115,000 profit.
By their nature, the undercover investigations require agents to act convincingly as criminals. Benedict and Fairfax County Police Lt. David Smith had the Korean smugglers convinced they were Italian mobsters. In the KG case, Mosley said agents would get angry or cagey if their customers asked where all the cigarettes were coming from.
"We'd tell them, 'It's none of your business,'" Mosley said.
In fact, the cigarettes come from the same places the legitimate ones do: Big Tobacco. Under an ATF program, tobacco corporations supply cigarettes for stings and are repaid with the proceeds from the sales.

Court Reverses Ohio Victory Over Cigarette Ad

An Ohio appeals court has reversed a decision that a cigarette company's advertisement in Rolling Stone magazine violated a tobacco industry settlement.
Ohio and several other states brought lawsuits over an R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. ad in Rolling Stone that ran alongside a November 2007 feature story illustrated with drawings.
Ohio officials and the lower court said the ad's placement amounted to using cartoons to sell cigarettes, violating a promise in the industry's 1998 settlement with multiple states.
The appeals court in Columbus ruled Thursday that Reynolds had no say in the content that Rolling Stone chose to run next to the ad.
The ruling overturns a 2008 decision in the state's favor. Ohio attorney general's office spokeswoman Kim Kowalski says the office has not yet decided whether to appeal.