Who Consumes The Most Tobacco and Alcohol

With spending habits waning amid soaring interestrates and rising gas prices, it is perhaps useful to note the trends in the stickiest of spending habits - tobacco, alcohol, and fast food...

Norway tops the heap in terms of alcohol and tobacco spend...

Happiness

“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”

― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Work as art

The Cultivation of Tobacco, the monumental artwork created in 1960 by the husband-and-wife Greek engravers, Tassos (Anastasios Alevizos), and Loukia Maggiorou, is returning to Stavroupouli in Thessaloniki, according to a story by Nicky Mariam Onti for the Greek Reporter
The masterpiece shows men and women engaged in the cultivation and processing of tobacco in all its stages.
Last April, the work was said to have been transferred to the National Gallery for ‘maintenance, storage and protection’.
With the maintenance completed, it will join the collection of the State Museum of Contemporary Art.

I heart smoke

Tell Reynolds Tobacco that farmworkers deserve basic rights!

If you are a farmworker in America, chances are you won’t live to be 50. That’s because the average life expectancy for a U.S. farmworker is 49 years. For an average citizen, it's 79. That’s a 30-year difference – and one that shouldn’t exist.

Farmworkers have been asking for years to meet with Reynolds Tobacco – to simply have a conversation about the state of their working conditions. But Reynolds has failed to sit down with farmworkers, leaving the conversation silent and workers struggling to get by.

This fight isn’t about more vacations or longer lunch breaks – it’s about making the work of farmworkers safe and sustainable.

Call on Reynolds Tobacco to stop the systematic abuse of farmworkers – and meet with them to ensure they have a safe and sustainable working environment.

Smoking Women Color

Types of Tobacco Use

Manufactured cigarettes consist of shredded or reconstituted tobacco processed with hundreds of chemicals. Often with a filter, they are manufactured by a machine, and are the predominant form of tobacco used worldwide.
Bidis consist of a small amount of tobacco, hand-wrapped in dried temburni leaf and tied with string. Despite their small size, their tar and carbon monoxide deliveries can be higher than manufactured cigarettes because of the need to puff harder to keep bidis lit.
Cigars are made of air-cured and fermented tobaccos with a tobacco wrapper, and come in many shapes and sizes, from cigarettesized cigarillos, double coronas, cheroots, stumpen, chuttas and dhumtis. In reverse chutta and dhumti smoking, the ignited end of the cigar is placed inside the mouth. There was a revival of cigar smoking at the end of the 20th century, among both men and women.
Kreteks are clove-flavoured cigarettes. They contain a wide range of exotic flavourings and eugenol, which has an anaesthetising effect, allowing for deeper smoke inhalation.
Pipes are made of briar, slate, clay or other substance – tobacco is placed in the bowl and inhaled through the stem, sometimes through water. Sticks are made from sun-cured tobacco known as brus and wrapped in cigarette paper.
Chewing tobacco is also known as plug, loose-leaf, and twist.
Pan masala, or betel quid consists of tobacco, areca nuts and staked lime wrapped in a betel leaf. They can also contain other sweetenings and flavouring agents.
Varieties of pan include kaddipudi,hogesoppu, gundi, kadapam, zarda, pattiwala, kiwam, mishri, and pills. Moist snuff is taken orally. A small amount of ground tobacco is held in the mouth between the cheek and gum. Increasingly manufacturers are pre-packaging moist snuff into small paper or cloth packets, to make the product easier to use.
Other products include khaini, shammaah and nass or naswa.
Dry snuff is powdered tobacco that is inhaled through the nose or taken by mouth. Once widespread, its use is now in decline. Cigars are smoked throughout the world. Regional variations include cheroots and stumpen (western and central Europe) and dhumtis (conical cheroots) used in India.
The water pipe, also known as shisha or hubbly bubbly, is commonly used in north Africa, the Mediterranean region and parts of Asia. Bidis are found thoughout south-east Asia, and are India’s most used type of tobacco.
Kreteks are clove flavoured cigarettes widely smoked in Indonesia. In Southeast Asia clay pipes known as suipa, chilum and hookli are widely used. Tobacco is used orally throughout the world, but principally in Southeast Asia. In Mumbai, India, 56% of women chew tobacco.
Cigarettes are available throughout the world. Filter-tipped cigarettes are usually more popular than unfiltered cigarettes. Hand rolled cigarettes are also widely smoked in many countries. Whether it is inhaled, sniffed, sucked or chewed, or whether it is mixed with other ingredients, there is no safe way of using tobacco.

The Bigger the Better

Although the above crave episode chart reflects averages of quitter data from a specific
study of a unique population, it shows two factors common to every recovery. It
evidences the fact that the number of daily crave episodes quickly peaks. It also shows
that the number then begins to gradually decline. I’d like to spend a moment focusing
upon natural consequences associated with the decline.
Unless following the bum advice portion of “Clearing the Air” and hiding in a closet in
order to avoid temptation, locked up in prison, or laid up in a hospital room, we have
no choice but to meet and extinguish the bulk of our subconscious feeding cues within
the first week. The number and frequency of early challenges kept us on our toes and
prepared to swing into action and confront challenge on a moment’s notice.
As the crave episode chart a few pages back shows, by the 10th day the average exuser
was experiencing just 1.4 crave episodes per day. That translates to less than five
minutes of significant challenge. But what about the days that follow? What would be
the natural and expected consequences of beginning to go entire days without once
encountering an un-reconditioned crave trigger? What will happen to anticipation, your
preparedness, your defenses and battle plans once you experience a day or two without
serious challenge?
For purposes of discussion only, let’s pretend that during recovery days 14, 15 and 16
that although you remained occupied in dealing with what at times seemed like a
steady stream of conscious thoughts about “wanting” to use nicotine, that you did not
encounter any un-extinguished feeding cues. Although unlikely you’d have noticed,
wouldn't it be normal to begin to relax a bit and slowly lower your defenses and guard?
And then it happens. Assume that on day 17 you encounter a subconscious crave
triggering cue that wasn’t part of normal daily life. It catches you totally unprepared,
off-guard and surprised. You scramble to muster your defenses but it’s as if you can’t
find them, that they too are being swallowed by a fast moving tsunami of rising
anxieties. You feel as if you’ve been sucker-punched hard by the most intense crave
ever. It feels endless. Your conscious thinking mind tells you that things are getting
worse, not better. The thought of throwing in the towel and giving-up suddenly begins
sloshing through a horrified mind.

Few tobacco users get the help they need to quit

Many tobacco users want to quit to save their own lives and to protect the health of their families, but are unable to because of their addiction to nicotine. The vast majority of countries do not help tobacco users who want to quit. Currently, only nine of 173 Member State respondents offer the highest assessed level of support, which includes a full range of treatment and at least partial financial subsidies. These countries account for a mere 5% of the world’s population – meaning that the remaining 95% do not have access to treatment for tobacco dependence.

There is a wide range of effective cessation services, including brief routine advice from health-care workers, quit lines, and medications made available through retail stores if not provided directly by either health-care or public health programmes. Currently, 22 countries offer tobacco users no help at all in the form of basic services such as counselling or pharmacotherapy. It is impossible for people to obtain nicotine replacement therapy at all in 39 countries, even if they have the means to pay for it themselves. Quit lines are fairly inexpensive and within the means of many countries, yet only 44 countries, covering less than two fifths of the world’s population, provide them.