Nottingham: Smoking ban leads to car crime fall in Gedling

The smoking ban has helped reduce car offences in Gedling, says a crime expert.

Smokers who go outside for a cigarette are acting as "extra pairs of eyes" and deterring criminals, says Bob Vaughan-Newton, crime reduction manager for Gedling Borough Council.

Since the ban came into force in July 2007, there has been an 80% drop in auto crime in the borough.

Latest figures for Gedling North, which includes Arnold, Daybrook, Woodborough and Ravenshead, show it has dropped by nearly a quarter in the last year, with 287 recorded crimes between April 2009 and this January compared to 378 in the same period the previous year.

Mr Vaughan-Newton, said: "We used to have big problems in Gedling North, and Gedling South as well, with people breaking into cars in public car parks down Mansfield Road and the rural pubs in Lambley and Stoke Bardolph. It was all along the A60 corridor.

"Suddenly, with the smoking ban, there were all these extra pairs of eyes on the car park. We've actually reduced car crime in the whole of Gedling Borough since the smoking ban in July 2007 by about 80%. Now it's very rare that car crime happens in a car park. It tends to happen sporadically outside people's homes."

Neighbourhood Policing Inspector Andy Crouch said he believed the decrease was down to police targeting problem areas with CCTV and more patrols, as well as moves to make car parks more secure.

"I think it's been down to good problem solving and good visibility," said Insp Crouch. "Car parks are safer now, we've covered them with CCTV.
"And we've looked at public car parks and smoking areas, putting them next to car parks so that they are in view and people can see what is going on."

Insp Crouch said police had been educating people about the dangers of leaving valuables in their cars, and used signs to make people think twice about leaving items on display.

Mr Vaughan-Newton said the integrated offender team management project, where police keep tabs on known offenders when they are released and try and help them get jobs, had also helped.

He said that CCTV coverage had also contributed to the reduction in car crime and that a camera used by Sainsbury's in Daybrook had had a knock-on effect, reducing car crime in the Premier Travel Inn opposite, which also came within its line of vision.

Source: thisisnottingham, 04 March 2010
Link: http://bit.ly/bgCBEW

Japan: Wind of change blows in smokers' paradise 

The street-front patio of the A971 bar in Tokyo’s Midtown centre confronts smokers with an odd demand: “No cigarettes outside, please smoke indoors.” Burly security guards are employed to enforce the rule, politely but firmly ushering smokers out of the brisk evening breeze and back into the bar, where their fumes swirl thick and suffocating. In a few months’ time, their job may be reversed. 

The A971 owners are merely protecting their business: they cannot be seen to encourage lawbreaking. The Minato ward of Tokyo is one of the few boroughs that have banned smoking on the streets – a measure primarily designed to protect pedestrians from having their suit cuffs and handbags singed by cigarettes held at waist level on crowded pavements.

But like everywhere else in Tokyo, there is absolute freedom to smoke indoors and only grudging perception of health risks. Among developed countries, Japan is a true smokers’ paradise. The nation’s 30 million smokers are waited-on by nearly 600,000 cigarette vending machines. Health advice on packets is more friendly recommendation than doom-laden warning. The dangers of passive smoking are treated as if they have only been identified by cranky foreign science. A rich variety of public buildings – including hospitals and schools – allow smoking.

Tokyo may be the gourmet capital of the world, with more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other city, but most eateries serve their prized creations through a stinking haze of tobacco combustion. Most small and medium sized companies will allow people to smoke at their desks. Meetings with executives tend to be held over imposing crystal ashtrays. Japan’s Fair Trade Commissioner is among a number of senior political figures who chain smokes through meetings but wheels a mobile extractor fan up to the table out of consideration for his guests. 

But all that may be about to change. Next month, a panel of health ministry experts will present a report that seems destined to call for a ban on smoking in public places. There will be exemptions of course: restaurants and bars are already lobbying hard to be left out of the ban, for fear of losing custom. There has been much talk – chiefly from Japan Tobacco – of “smokers’ rights”. Companies may get away with creating special smoking rooms. 

But the extraordinary step is that a ban is being discussed at all. And it is a feature, say political analysts, of the new Democratic Party of Japan government and its stated aim of overturning much of the Japanese status quo. The right to smoke anywhere and everywhere in Japan has historically been defended by the old guard of Japanese politics – the cantankerous veterans of the Liberal Democratic Party which held on to power for more than five decades. While they were in charge, there was never any chance of a ban – not least because most of them were smokers and because the government remains a 50.01 per cent shareholder of Japan Tobacco.

The DPJ, though is much younger – both as a party and in its constituent members. It has fewer historical ties to big business and, for the moment at least, can afford to set policy without seemingly caring too much about the old vested interest that once gripped Japanese politics so remorselessly. DPJ MPs are, in the main, drawn from an age-stratum of Japanese society that began to shun smoking some years ago. 82 per cent of Japanese men were smokers in the 1960s, but that has fallen to less than one third of the male population.

Many have already written off the scale of political revolution implied by the election of the DPJ last year. Policy execution has been disappointing. Clear ideas have been hard to identify. The party’s leaders have already seen their popularity falling in what pass for opinion polls in Japan. But a smoking ban, should it come about, deserves recognition that the country did take a significant step away from old Japan last autumn.

 

Source: The Times, 4 March 2010
Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/world_agenda/article7047823.ece

Cigarette smoking may raise prostate cancer risk

Cigarette smoking may increase a man's risk for developing and dying from prostate cancer, pooled data from 24 studies involving 21,600 men with the disease indicates.

This study "provides good evidence that prostate cancer is likely a smoking-related tumor," Dr. Michael Huncharek, at Meta-Analysis Research Group in Columbia, South Carolina, said.

Prostate cancer is the most common of all cancers striking U.S. men. Estimates from 2008 show 186,000 new prostate cancer cases and 28,000 deaths, yet the cause remains elusive.

In the American Journal of Public Health, Huncharek and colleagues report results of their "meta-analysis" - a research method that pools findings from numerous studies to better illuminate risks not clearly shown in previous individual studies.

They found "surprisingly consistent evidence," Huncharek said, that both the chance of developing prostate cancer and dying from prostate cancer increases with smoking, even though many of the studies analyzed used crude smoking classifications.

For example, they calculated smoking status as ever versus never rather than by packs smoked per day, or did not define changes in smoking or disease status over time in American, Norwegian, Japanese, Swedish, and British men with prostate cancer.

In eight studies that did provide more in-depth number of cigarettes smoked per day in nearly 8,700 men, Huncharek's team estimates 30 percent greater risk of dying from prostate cancer in the heaviest smokers versus nonsmokers.

They likewise estimate 22 percent greater chance for developing prostate cancer in the heaviest smokers, based on pooled information from four studies of about 2,100 men.

However, Huncharek noted, even these studies do not firmly establish an individual smoker's chance for developing or dying from prostate cancer when compared with their nonsmoking counterparts.

He and colleagues, therefore, call for additional research that quantifies how the number of packs and duration of smoking affects risk for developing the disease and its progression.

Source: Reuters, 03 March 2010
Link: http://bit.ly/9mkwW5

West Midlands tobacco smuggling gang is jailed

Three members of a "highly professional" criminal gang who smuggled about 11 million cigarettes to the UK have been jailed.

Donald Southall, 55, from Sedgley, and Robert Horton, 43, from Cannock in Staffordshire both pleaded guilty to evading £1.7m in duty.

Horton's partner, Julie Henworth, 42, also from Cannock, pleaded guilty to laundering the proceeds of their crime.

They imported cigarettes from Eastern Europe, Northampton Crown Court heard.

Southall and Sedgley were both sentenced to four years and eight months, while Henworth was jailed for two.

Sentencing, Judge Ian Alexander said: "This was a highly professional operation.

"You [Southall and Horton] joined together for the mutual benefits you derived from tobacco smuggling."

The trio amassed a collection of luxury items, including a motor yacht, properties in the West Midlands and Spain, an E-type Jaguar, a Norton Commando motorbike and Rolex jewellery.

The court heard HM Revenue and Customs investigators trailed Southall and Horton for two years.

Horton, based in Hungary, bought cheap cigarettes and arranged for them to be hidden in lorries heading for the UK.

Southall would arrange for onward distribution in the West Midlands for sale on the black market.

Henworth acted as the "travel agent," arranging meetings and administration.

Source: BBC News, 03 March 2010
Link: http://bit.ly/9yNBqX

Teens drawn by cigarette adverts

Researchers have found in a new study that cigarette ads are extremely fine-tuned to capture the attention of teens. A direct correlation was established between the number of tobacco-related ads teens see, and the chances of them actually taking a puff from a cigarette. Experts say that the main reason why these advertisements are so effective is the fact that they promote a wide array of vivid images, which resonate with teens. In fact, cigarette ads are very well designed to capture all ages, genders and ethnicities, scientists say. Each subgroup of the population is targeted by one or more brands of type of cigarettes.

“Cigarettes have created a brand for every personality trait. If you are looking to project independence and masculinity, think of the lonely cowboy in the Marlboro ads. On the other hand, if you’re looking to project a desire for romantic relationships, and friendships are playing a role, then you will choose Lucky Strike if you are a man and Virginia Slims if you are a woman,” says the director of the Kiel, Germany-based Institute for Therapy and Health Research, Reiner Hanewinkel, PhD. The expert, who is also the lead author of the new study, collaborated with colleagues from the Dartmouth Medical Center for this investigation.

In a paper already available online, and also scheduled for publication in the April issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the experts explain that children who were determined to be watching many cigarette ads were twice more likely than their peers to be interested in these products. Additionally, they were also found to be about three times more likely to have smoked in the past month than kids their age who did not watch these ads. But the worrying conclusion of the study is that children who get a lot of exposure to cigarette ads say that they will pick up smoking more often than others. This means that they form an opinion on the habit even before they pick it up, experts say.

“We were amazed at how often they had seen the images and could correctly recall the cigarette brand. For example, 55 percent had seen the Lucky Strike image and almost one quarter correctly decoded the brand,” says Dartmouth pediatrics professor James Sargent, MD, a collaborator on the research. “This is a well-done study. They controlled for all the things they needed to control for. It’s a nice contribution to the literature showing that cigarette advertising is very powerful,” says of the new work the director of the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) Center for Tobacco Control Research & Education, Stanton Glantz, PhD.

Source: Softpedia Health, 03 March 2010
Link: http://bit.ly/bKhAnY