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Why do planes still have ashtrays?
Remember that time you had to use the bathroom on your last flight? You may have noticed a small lever for an ashtray right next to a large no-smoking sign, and wondered to yourself why there would be an ashtray there if people are clearly not allowed to smoke on airplanes anymore? No smoking on…
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Smokeless Tobacco Control Policy Lags Cigarette Policy Globally
Smokeless tobacco use remains a difficult issue in tobacco control policy circles. These products are harmful by any measure, but the level of hazard they pose to users varies widely according to how the products are prepared and used. Worldwide, the death toll from smokeless tobacco was 76,000 in 2017, but the death rate from…
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Summers-Bloomberg Report Emphasizes Role of Excise Taxes in Health Promotion
The father of free markets, Adam Smith, made the case in his seminal book The Wealth of Nations (written in 1776) that “Sugar, rum, and tobacco, are commodities which are no where necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.” Today, the Bloomberg…
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Cigarettes are becoming more affordable especially among younger and lower socioeconomic status smokers in China
China, one of the fastest growing upper-middle income countries in the world, is taking the brunt of the global tobacco epidemic which is gradually shifting to the low- and middle-income countries. China’s large population and high smoking prevalence are part of this scenario. The new millennium has seen rising per capita cigarette consumption in China…
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Webinar on using The Tobacco Atlas
If you are a student, teacher, researcher, journalist, advocate, or policymaker looking for facts and visuals about the most important and current issues in the evolving tobacco epidemic, The Tobacco Atlas will come in extremely handy. With interactive maps and graphs, shareable content and downloadable, ready-to-use Power Point slides, tobaccoatlas.org is one of the most…
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Mission Winnow Undermines Sports Sponsorship Bans in Auto Racing
Formula 1 (F1) auto-racing is one of the most watched sporting events on Earth. In 2018, over 490 million people tuned their televisions to watch. Auto racing’s history is deeply intertwined with tobacco company sponsorship. Tobacco branding often invokes sporting imagery to draw a connection between athletic achievement and a particular brand. The influence of…
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The Tobacco Industry is Not an Economic Development Partner
Recently, murmurs in the development community have posited that mainly because of its strong supply chains and high profitability, a re-tooled tobacco industry might be a suitable development partner. A recent article by tobacco farming researchers across six countries systematically debunks this notion by demonstrating why the tobacco industry has proven to be a mostly…
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Blog
A Case for Banning the Sale of Filtered Cigarettes
After the 1950s, the cigarette began to evolve from being a paper tube with shredded dried tobacco leaf into a product that also included an acetate tow filter. The filtered cigarette was marketed by tobacco companies as a healthier, milder option for the more image and health conscious smoker. Years after such marketing was stripped…
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Cigarette consumption has been increasing in Bangladesh even after a decade of tax and price increases: What went wrong?
Despite a high share of tax in price (greater than the WHO’s 75% benchmark) with periodic tax and price increases, cigarette consumption has been increasing in Bangladesh over the last decade. Between 2006-07 and 2016-17, the volume of tax-paid cigarette sales increased by 83%. At the same time, the share of low-price cigarette consumption increased…
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Differences in cigarette prices across EU Member States affect cross-border cigarette purchases
The European Union (EU) has been one of the world’s champions of high cigarette excise taxes. Thanks in part to its Tobacco Tax Directive, the EU is the region with the highest average cigarette prices in the world. As we wrote in a previous blog post, the European Commission is, encouragingly, working on a possible…