Tweet KOTA KINABALU: City Marine Operations Force (MOF) personnel have seized 176,000 packets of smuggled cigarette worth some RM2 million. A driver of a lorry transporting the contraband cigarettes was detained while another managed to escape during the separate raids at about 9pm on Tuesday in Menggatal. Acting city police chief Supt Ramli Ali Amat told reporters at a news conference here yesterday that during the first raid, a team of MOF per ... Jump to full article >>

Tweet New Delhi: Even as India waits for harsher pictorial warnings on all tobacco products – a new ban is put in place for plastic packaging of gutka. The Supreme Court’s landmark decision to ban the use of plastic in sachets for storing or selling tobacco, gutka and pan masala came into effect across the country from March 1 this year. “This is basically a part of the environment ministry’s revised plastic waste managem ... Jump to full article >>

Tweet Lorillard Inc., maker of the U.S.’s leading menthol cigarette brand, is engaged in a fierce battle to prevent the Food and Drug Administration from banning a product that accounts for roughly 90% of its sales. Among the company’s tactics: buying up a host of menthol-bashing Internet domain names, including MentholKillsMinorities.com, MentholAddictsYouth.com and FDAMustBanMenthol.com. Keeping those names out of the hands of criti ... Jump to full article >>

Tweet SPRINGFIELD — A report said the state would gain $377 million in revenue by raising the cigarette tax $1 per pack. The Illinois Senate passed a $1 per pack cigarette tax increase in April 2009, but since then the House has not taken up the legislation. In light of the report by economist Frank Chaloupka at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Senate President John Cullerton said in a statement that “a cigarette tax is one of ... Jump to full article >>

Tweet Tobacco production is booming in Zimbabwe as small farmers attempt to cash in on high prices worldwide. Farmers have also been spurred on by Zimbabwe’s adoption of the US dollar following the collapse of its own currency, with 99 per cent of all tobacco grown in the country now exported. Operators of a farm outside Zimbabwe’s capital Harare are harvesting a fine crop of lush 16 leaf plants to be smoked dry – the Virginia m ... Jump to full article >>

Tweet ANTI-SMOKING campaigners are hopeful that last week’s 20 per cent increase in the price of cigarettes will finally push the 29 per cent of the population who smoke regularly into quitting. The bill that was rushed through parliament on December 10 may have been motivated by the need to increase annual revenue by an estimated €31 million, but Stelios Sikallides, executive secretary of the anti-smoking lobby of the Anti-Cancer Association ... Jump to full article >>

Tweet As he watched his 850-pound bales of flue-cured tobacco move through the grading and sales process at Philip Morris USA’s tobacco receiving station here, Donnie Clayton summed up the 2010 season. “It was a tough, hot year,” said Clayton, a Person County, N.C., farmer and one of more than 200 tobacco growers in North Carolina and Virginia who deliver their cured leaf to the Danville receiving station, a former tobacco aucti ... Jump to full article >>