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ASH Daily News

Thursday 9 December, 1999

Headlines

Case against Seita allowed to proceed
Montenegrin Foreign Minister charged with smuggling
Gitane Blondes hires Minale Tattersfield & Partners
BAA Duty-Free Shop opens
Addiction Report: Study of how best to research the effectiveness of
smoking cessation

Full Text

Case against Seita allowed to proceed

In the first anti-smoking lawsuit brought in France, a provincial
court yesterday found against the cigarette makers Seita. Lawyers for
Seita, the former state tobacco monopoly that is currently merging
with Spain’s Tabacalera, said they would appeal.

The Wall Street Journal Europe reports that, Clive Bates, of ASH,
said, “It’s a first step. It shows that the kind of arguments being
used in the U.S can be successful in other legal systems.”

Source: Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, Daily
Telegraph, Wall St Journal Europe, 9 December 1999

Montenegrin Foreign Minister charged with smuggling

The Montengrin Foreign Minister, Branko Perovic, is to be tried by a
Naples court on charges of involvement in an international cigarette
smuggling ring whilst he was an employee of the Yugoslav airline JAT,
in Rome. The trial date is set for November 2000.

Source: The Independent, 9 December 1999

BAA Duty-Free Shop opens

BAA have opened its first arrivals ‘duty-free’ shop for arriving
visitors at Gatwick’s South terminal.

Source: Daily Telegraph, 9 December 1999

Gitane Blondes hires Minale Tattersfield & Partners

Gitanes Blondes, the French cigarette brand, has hired Minale
Tattersfield & Partners to redesign its packaging as part of an
international relaunch. The new packaging will aim to break the
manufacturers traditional association with increasingly unpopular dark
tobacco.

Source: Marketing, 9 December 1999

Addiction Report: ‘A comparison of two measures of stage of change for
smoking cessation.’

In a study that aimed, ‘to compare two questionnaires used to identify
the stages of change of current and former smokers: a conventional
five-item questionnaire and an alternative one-item questionnaire.’
The findings included that ‘ only 62% of participants were classified
as being in the same stage by the two questionnaires. The five item
questionnaire produced more missing data (8%) than the one-item
questionnaire (2%).

The report concluded, ‘The single-item questionnaire was better at
avoiding missing responses. However, both staging questionnaires
classified smokers in heterogeneous groups, and both misclassified
many occasional smokers and ex-smokers, which suggests that a discrete
five-stage model does not fit reality well.’

Source: Journal of Addiction, 1999 94 (12) 1881-1889

Karl Brookes
Project Manager
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