Lushes. But!

Cigarette smoking amongst Mad Men fans is almost exactly in line with the national average! Unless the national average is "four packs of Luckies, chain-smoked on an office couch," that's astounding.

A Lehman Brothers employee who, for now, has kept his job with new owner Barclays, is smoking "20, 30% more," in part because "we don’t really have much work to do these days, so we just sit around and talk to people."

Nearby, a woman named Liz, who has been let go from Lehman along with her boss, says that stress at the company in the past six months led her to start smoking for the first time in her life—at the age of 61.

"Everybody could tell that Lehman was falling apart the end of last year," she says. "I was under a tremendous amount of pressure, so I picked up a cigarette." It didn’t help matters that she lived with her daughter and her daughter’s fiancé, both of whom smoke.

[Health.com]

Lorillard doesn't have to market disproportionately to African-Americans, because the market share of menthols in the black community is already massive. Look at Orlowsky's own math:

The truth is that there are twice as many Caucasian menthol cigarette smokers as there are African-American menthol cigarette smokers.

African-Americans are about 13% of the US population. Whites are about 74%. There are roughly six times more whites than blacks in the US, but only two times more white menthol smokers. Disparity? Duh.

Targeting the youth?

Heavily-advertised Marlboro, Camel and Newport cigarettes dominated the teen smoking market between 1989 and 1996, according to a new study, which found that the percentage of teen Newport smokers doubled during those years.

Newport made its most significant inroads with the white and Hispanic teen market, say Karen Gerlach, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and colleagues. Their study appears in the American Journal of Health Behavior.

Newport cigarettes contain menthol, which may make them less harsh-tasting and easier for experimenting teens to smoke, Gerlach and colleagues say. They also suggest that expanded advertising campaigns may have helped increase the brand’s popularity.

Nobody has to target underage smokers. Target 18-year-old smokers! Their kid brothers will totally pick it up.

[CAOH; letter via Multicult Classics]

The current bill in Congress would ban "flavored" cigarettes, but exempt menthols. The Black Caucus is an important player because they stand for the black community—the most enthusiastic consumers of menthols—and they've been wooed big time by tobacco companies.

Philip Morris over the years has been one of the biggest contributors to the caucus’s nonprofit Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. That financial support, in some years exceeding $250,000, and lesser amounts at times from other cigarette makers, has been the reason some critics perceived an alliance between big tobacco and African-American members of Congress, some of whom were willing to help fend off antitobacco efforts.

Among them, some critics have said, was Charles B. Rangel of New York. Although he supported some antitobacco initiatives, until the last few years Mr. Rangel staunchly opposed federal tobacco tax increases. He has said his stand was based on the disproportionate effect of excise taxes on the poor, not the thousands of dollars he received in tobacco industry political action committee donations.

Way to use logic in order to help your constituents into an early grave, Charlie Rangel! But a lot of CBC members are in fact in favor of banning menthol, many because of the fact that it disproportionately kills black people. Tobacco companies that currently support the bill, though, would probably oppose it if menthols got added.

It looks like menthols will stay legal, for now. Awesome for the black community as well as race car drivers!

[NYT]

[via Modern Mechanix]

The guy is Jeff Stier of The American Council on Science and Health. ACSH is a scientific health nonprofit sponsored in large part by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and much of their research is dedicated to proving that consumer products, drugs, and chemicals will not kill you. But tobacco companies don't sponsor them, so they tend to be pretty anti-smoking. Also, as de facto "scientific" representatives of big industry, they lean a bit conservative, politically.

Barack Obama is a smoker. Well, maybe a former smoker, but probably still a sometimes smoker. Because christ, no one is strong enough to make it through a presidential campaign without a cigarette here and there. Obama was up to half a pack a day at some point during his 26 years as a smoker. (Lightweight.) Though usually more like a quarter-pack a day. He also says he quit in February of 2007.

Stier would like you to know that while everyone is running around worried about how the 71-year-old cancer survivor might not be able to stand up to the stresses of the Oval Office, the 46-year-old maybe former smoker poses a much greater risk. Because he's smoked 55,000-70,000 cigarettes in his life! Stier never really uses his fancy medical math to say what Obama's precise risk factor is for stroke or heart problems, but it must be pretty bad, because that is a lot of cigarettes.

"My recollection is that we were able to eliminate the use of flavored cigarettes, strawberry, mocha, and all this stuff that is clearly targeted at young kids and to start them smoking tobacco," Mike DeWine, the former Ohio senator [said].

It's about time we got rid of those mocha cigarettes that all the kids are smoking these days. Of course, we'll still have this problem:

Scientists who study smoking have identified various disparities in the health of black and white smokers. National Cancer Institute data shows that African-American men get lung cancer at a rate 50 percent higher than white men — a gap that most scientists say cannot be fully explained by historically higher rates of smoking by black men.

One theory suggests that menthol in cigarettes, by providing an additional pleasurable sensory cue, reinforces addiction.

[NYT]

But let's be fair, those crying racial discrimination in advertising: how do you explain THIS?

Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems for alcoholics, and Mores for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't. One should never lend money to a Marlboro-menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular-Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultra-lights not only threw a wrench in the works but made it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight. All that, however, came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.

Researchers "found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the equivalent of 2.5 fatal accidents (equivalent to approximately six deaths). Furthermore, drunk-driving smokers have not changed their ways over time. In areas where the ban has been in place for longer than 18 months, the increased accident rate is 19%."

Accidents in one Pennsylvania county have gone up 26% since neighboring Delaware instituted its own smoking ban in 2002. The county between non-smoking Boulder and smoky Denver? Up 40%. Clearly we should reinstitute smoking everywhere and then ban cars, nationwide. [Economist]

Megan Lane, 17, called it "ridiculous" and vowed to find ways to avoid paying the tax rather than quit.

"If you're a true smoker, you'll pay anything. I'll never quit. Never," said the East Quogue, L.I., teen, who was chain-smoking Parliaments outside Madison Square Garden as she waited with her dad for an autograph from Rangers forward Sean Avery.

"Nine dollars is stupid," she said. "I'm going to go to the Indian reservation and get them for $3. They don't check ID."

[pic via Gotham Gazette; quote via NYDN]

You'd think maybe there'd be a little traffic; there is after all that mosque on 1st and 11th. But even though Sahara East (the most successful hookah bar and on the same block as the Madina Masjid) prospers, tens of other ones remain barren. Try the new one on First Ave that popped up as soon as the ill-fated health food store Prana Foods shuttered. Or the recently opened hookah lounge on E. 3rd Street, in which never a soul has been seen.

Perhaps the most tragic and illustrative of all hookah bars is Maradona on Allen Street. Granted, that block has been, with the exception of Pal , the bane of any commercial enterprise—but Maradona was around for seriously a matter of days before the owners simply gave up and posted the world's saddest handwritten-on-posterboard sign in the window bidding adieu to its "many customer." And, so one hookah bar bit the dust. Soon, more will rise in its stead. —Josh

[Photo by Goldberg [Flickr]

For Kouyoumdjian, a sophomore who said she began smoking last year to fit in better with the college scene, kicking the habit was no big deal - no hypnosis, patch or nicotine gum, just old-fashioned willpower.

"I just quit," said the L.A. native, a poli-sci and foreign-relations major.

IT 'WORKS OUT' WELL FOR THIS FITNESS BUFF [NYP]

Yep, it's another one of those scared-smokeless anti-tobacco ads, and like most people, we suspect the shocked crowd reactions are all commercial extras. That said, a singing cowboy crooning through his tracheotomy voicebox while making "camp" in a New York street is a nice little tableau. Maybe this is what the Naked Cowboy needs to spice up his act.

1nfect Truth [via Adrants]

Smoker's Style [Japan Tobacco via Boing Boing]

The New York City Health Department issued long-awaited instructions to doctors Thursday for treating and detecting 9/11-related illnesses, including a warning that smoking worsens World Trade Center-related diseases.

Okay, Mike, we get it, smoking bad. Now how about fixing that gaping hole in the ground? Could we get started on that? Thanks!

Guidelines issued for treating WTC-related ills [AP]
[Illustration: David Chelsea]

Tom & Jerry Smoking Scenes to Be Cut [Reuters]

Just a year after Peter Jennings' death, a cloud of smoke hangs over ABC. Literally. Jennings passing away from lung cancer was tragic, and it is tragic that even that stark example of the dangers of smoking — and the renaming of the stretch of the street in Manhattan where ABC News's headquarters resides after the late newsman — is not enough to dissuade current smokers at ABC from continuing the addictive and deadly habit.

Nobody tell ACSH, but people are still walking their dogs on Jodie Lane Place, too.

ABC Employees Still Smoking at Peter Jennings Way [ASCH]

"Martinez could not be reached for comment yesterday."

Cig shock therapy [NYDN]

A deal with an Internet cigarette peddler could make 12,500 city smokers cough up $33 million in unpaid sales tax, city officials said yesterday.

A Virginia-based company, eSmokes Inc., agreed to settle a city suit by giving up detailed information on untaxed cigarette sales it made to city residents between 2002 and 2003.

If our math is right, that's $2,640 per person. Lovely.

Holy Smoke! Puffers Face $33M E-Cig Tax Bill [NYDN]

New York City's tax on cigarettes — already the highest in the nation — should be upped another 50 cents per pack, with the revenue going to public health efforts to stop smoking, Mayor Bloomberg proposed yesterday.

The hike would raise the combined city and state tax on cigarettes to $3.50 per pack, which would bring the price of a pack of smokes in some parts of the city to a staggering $8.

We have no further comment, as we're too busy looking for a good discount-cigarettes website.

Mayor Burning to Raise Cig Tax [NYDN]