In advance of the state’s smoking ban on July 5, the Brown County Tavern League is selling electronic cigarettes, battery-powered devices that use liquid nicotine to imitate a cigarette’s taste and effects. The league began selling the devices in March, and the demand from bars and taverns around the state has been “crazy,” said Brown County Tavern League President Sue Robinson. Made to look like cigarettes, electronic ci ... Jump to full article >>

Cigarette brands produced by U.S. tobacco companies provide higher levels of toxic chemicals, which cause cancer, than cigarettes brands made in other countries, deduced a study carried out by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). According to the study conducted by CDC research team, the tobacco for U.S.-made tobacco products is blended with more cancer-causing substances than cigarettes manufactured in such countries as Canada ... Jump to full article >>

Smoking bans have made the air healthier in bars and restaurants, but may have made the air just outside the establishments more hazardous, University of Georgia researchers have found. Nonsmoking diners and imbibers sitting in outdoor patios or sidewalk seating areas connected to the bars or restaurants are picking up doses of secondhand smoke, the scientists found. In fact, nonsmokers who volunteered to sit in the outdoor seating areas had lev ... Jump to full article >>

THE City Council this week voted 46-1 to ban many flavorings in a variety of tobacco products, and Mayor Bloomberg is likely to sign it into law. Speaker Christine Quinn justified it as an effort to protect children — but the main effect will be to make it harder for adult smokers to quit. The ban also covers many flavors of snus — a smokeless, and thus far less harmful, tobacco. Snus is a pouch of tobacco that goes between cheek and ... Jump to full article >>

Imperial Tobacco Canada destroyed up to 60 early studies that linked cigarettes to addiction and carcinogens, according to a review published Wednesday in the online Canadian Medical Association Journal. The internal studies, done from 1967 to 1984, were destroyed in 1992 on orders from head office at British American Tobacco in the United Kingdom to avoid “exposing the company to liability or embarrassment,” the authors of the revi ... Jump to full article >>

If you are addicted to various electronic gizmos, and used to carry a cell phone, PDA, laptop and iPod, you should bear in mind that there is one electronic device that you should not use: an electronic cigarette. The recent laboratory tests performed by FDA experts, who analyzed 19 samples of electronic cigarettes, which have been found to contain carcinogens, including nitrosamines and even diethylene glycol, the toxic component in antifreeze ... Jump to full article >>