Marijuana: The next diabetes drug?

Toking up may help marijuana users to stay slim and lower their risk of developing diabetes, according to the latest study, which suggests that cannabis compounds may help in controlling blood sugar.

Although marijuana has a well-deserved reputation for increasing appetite via what stoners call "the munchies," the new research, which was published in the American Journal of Medicine, is not the first to find that the drug has a two-faced relationship to weight.

Three prior studies have shown that marijuana users are less likely to be obese, have a lower risk for diabetes and have lower body-mass-index measurements. And these trends occurred despite the fact that they seemed to take in more calories.

Why? "The most important

NY cigarette-smuggling ring may have terror link

A cigarette smuggling scheme that cost New York state millions of dollars in sales tax revenue may have raised funds for militant groups, authorities said.

Sixteen Palestinian men, some with ties to convicted terrorists, were indicted Thursday in the alleged scheme that spans New York, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and New Jersey states.

Investigators say they uncovered $55 million in illegal cigarette sales.
Study: Most NY cigarettes sold illegally
Bloomberg targets cigarettes in NYC

Although it is unclear where the illicit proceeds ended up, similar schemes have funded organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, according to Ray Kelly, commissioner of the New York Police Department.

"This case started because we were being vigilant about terrorism," Kelly said in a statement. "We discovered that individuals who were on our radar for links to known terrorists were engaged in a massive raid on the New York Treasury in the form of cigarette tax avoidance."

One of the suspects had financial ties to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind cleric serving a life sentence for a conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks.

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said authorities are still working to trace the "astounding profits" generated by the scheme.

A family affair

Electronic cigarettes Not FDA approved

In 2009, the FDA established the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act to regulate tobacco-related diseases. According to the FDA, tobacco-related deaths kill more than 440,000 people per year.

The FDA has been striving to categorize e-cigs as a “tobacco product” which will make them subject to registration, product, and ingredient listing, among many other requirements. They have said that laboratory analysis from e-cig samples showed the products contained carcinogens as well as toxic chemicals such as diethylene glycol, an ingredient used in antifreeze.

After observing e-cig labels, the FDA concluded that cartridges claiming not to have nicotine actually do. The study also showed that similar e-cigs emit different varieties of nicotine.

Physcians fear the unknown about e-cigs.

“The e-cigarette is not regulated by the FDA,” said Medical Director Victor Marchione, M.D. of Liberty Health’s Smoking Cessation Program at Jersey

Blue mold alert issued for east Kentucky tobacco

Growers located in the vicinity and east of the initial find, especially those with young plants, should scout their fields for the disease and apply a preventative fungicide, said Kenny Seebold, Extension plant pathologist in the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture.

The disease was present on nearly 100 percent of tobacco in two fields totaling about 15 acres, and significant levels of the disease were present in nearby fields. The disease likely arrived over the July 4 weekend. The find is significant because the disease is widespread in the infected areas, and recent weather conditions were favorable for the disease to spread.

"In many years, blue mold shows up in an isolated case or the weather is too dry to promote rapid spread,"

Tobacco board to begin asset sale

A different kind of auction sale will be held this week at the tobacco auction exchange in Delhi.

No tobacco will be tendered. Instead, it will be the tools, equipment and furnishings that were used in recent decades to bring the golden leaf to market.

The sale is a visible reminder that the Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers Marketing Board, as previously constituted, is no more. The board, as a marketer of tobacco, passed into history this spring. An interim board was installed June 1 whose major responsibility is getting a fair dollar for its assets.

Once the forklifts, pallet carts, roller tables, oak desks and office chairs are sold this Wednesday, the board will set its sights on its real estate.

"We plan to advertise for a request-for-proposals for the possible sale or lease of the Delhi Exchange," president Fred Neukamm of Aylmer said.

The assets of the tobacco board belong to former quota holders. A report tabled at last week's meeting estimates the board's net worth at $2.7 million.

This spring, the federal government bought out 271 million pounds of tobacco quota. At $1.05 a pound, the payout amounted to $285 million. Now that the money has been paid, the board has been dissolved as a marketing agency.

Once the board's assets are sold, former quota holders will be entitled to a share of the proceeds based on the total amount of their poundage. They will also have the option of pooling their share into a collective undertaking in some other area such as green energy.

Neukamm said the tobacco belt has great potential as a producer of biomass for the production of clean electricity. Ontario Power Generation is exploring the feasibility of converting the coal-fired generation station in Nanticoke to biomass.

The new tobacco board consists of five members. They were appointed this spring by the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission. The board has an interim operating budget of $220,000. The funds are derived from a penny-per-pound charge on the 22-million pound crop being grown this year by licencees under contract to manufacturers.

The interim board plans to hold a membership vote this fall on its future direction. It remains to be seen whether the 118 licensees are interested in having a trade group like the tobacco board represent their interests. There were strong indications that former quota holders don't want their interests entangled with those who continue to grow tobacco.

Oxford University won’t take funding from tobacco companies. But Shell’s OK

Those in the strongest position to challenge climate change are instead lending it their ‘moral prestige’. Illustration by Daniel Pudles

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published a piercing attack on the intellectuals of his day. They should, he argued in La Trahison des Clercs (the treason of the scholars), act as a check on popular passions. Civilisation, he claimed, is possible only if intellectuals stand in opposition to the demands of political “realism” by upholding universal principles. “Thanks to the scholars,” he said, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.” Europe might have been lying in the gutter, but it was looking at the stars.
Marlboro Red cigarette, Marlboro Gold cigarette best types in demand by most of the smokers worldwide.

But those ideals, Benda argued, had been lost. Europe was now lying in

Help Curb Your Smokers Cough by Switching to a Chemical Free Cigarette

If you're a smoker, the word cough can mean something entirely different to you that it does to others. For you, a cough is no simple "ahem." You can feel it start deep in your chest, and while you cough, it shakes your entire upper body. You sound something like a cross between a garbage disposal and a misfiring engine. If you've smoking for some time, the wet, wheezing noise of your own cough has probably given you cause for concern more than once. If that doesn't worry you, the chunks of diseased looking phlegm certainly should. Many smokers can tire their diaphragms by coughing too much. Some have even reported giving themselves pounding headaches, because they shake so violently when they cough. Truly, the smoker's cough is probably one of the most obvious and unavoidable signs that smoking is definitely having a negative effect on your health. After all, no matter how well you can turn a blind eye to the constant barrage of warning labels and anti-smoking ads, your own body is much harder to ignore.

Think of the children – but not just the children

One of ASH Scotland’s priorities is to raise awareness of the harm that tobacco smoke causes to others, and to find the best ways of protecting people from that harm.
Now that we have smoke-free enclosed public spaces, children’s exposure to second hand smoke most often happens in the car or at home. The health risks from second hand smoke, particularly to children, are well known – so the question is what are we going to do about it?
Ideally we would create a smoke-free “bubble” around our children – starting with a smoke-free house and smoke-free car. We know from our involvement in the REFRESH project that parents who smoke want to protect their children but often don’t know enough about the harm caused by second hand smoke or what they can do about it. The REFRESH “How To” guide provides a wealth of information on this. We do not want to see legislation regarding how parents or carers smoke in the house, but we do believe that a strong and ongoing public awareness campaign about smoke free homes could reap real benefits. The Scottish Government has recently announced that it will set a target for reducing children’s exposure to second hand smoke, and it is difficult to see how such a target could be achieved otherwise.
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The evidence for plain, standardised packaging

Japan Tobacco International (makers of Silk Cut and Benson and Hedges) are up to their old tricks again. Just weeks after the Advertising Standards Authority ruled their last advertising campaign to be misleading and in breach of the advertising code of practice, they are throwing money at a (no doubt grateful) newspaper industry again.

Over the weekend rumours started to spread of a new tobacco industry advertising campaign, trailed in the Scotsman and Independent. To the great excitement of tobacco industry supporters on Twitter we heard this would reveal civil servants admitting there is “no hard evidence” for plain packs. But when it arrived it was a bit of damp squib.Marlboro Red cigarette, Marlboro Gold cigarette best types in demand by most of the smokers worldwide.

Use economic incentives to help people quit smoking

While I recommend we stop providing taxpayer-funded health care services for people who smoke, I think we should also offer health care service incentives to help people quit smoking. For example, stop-smoking seminars, hypnosis programs, and other educational efforts should be offered for free (paid for with taxpayer dollars), and anyone who quits smoking should be openly accepted back onto government-funded health care programs. (There are blood tests that can easily detect nicotine and other cigarette chemicals in the blood...)

We should provide economic incentives for people to stop smoking while putting in place severe economic penalties for those who continue to smoke. That's the smarter way to keep individual liberty intact while encouraging consumers to take responsibility for their own behaviors. Education programs combined with appropriately-structured economic incentives will drive millions of Americans away from cigarettes without taking away consumer freedoms.

Should the FDA Regulate Tobacco? Health Freedom Advocate Says Criminalizing Cigarettes is a Mistake

The U.S. Congress has just voted to categorize tobacco as a drug, handing the FDA regulatory authority to control the advertising, marketing and sales of cigarettes. This hilarious move, if approved by the Senate and signed by the President, would put the FDA in the position of approving the sale of a "drug" that the entire medical community openly admits kills millions of people. According to the CDC, tobacco kills 438,000 people each year in the United States alone (1). Now, thanks to the U.S. Congress, the FDA could soon be the government office responsible for allowing these 438,000 deaths each year!

Think about it: Right now, FDA-approved drugs kill around 100,000 Americans a year, and that's if you believe the conservative figures from the American Medical Association (the real numbers are at least double that). Add tobacco deaths to that list, and you come to the startling realization that if tobacco is considered an FDA-approved "drug," then FDA-approved drugs will kill well over half a million Americans each year! (538,000 fatalities a year due to FDA-approved drugs, using government statistics.)

That's a level of fatalities that terrorists haven't even come close to approaching.

Why the FDA doesn't want to regulate tobacco
Obviously, the FDA does not want to find itself in this position, because if regulatory authority over tobacco is shoved onto the FDA, it would be forced to declare tobacco an unapproved, unsafe drug and ban its sale.

Why? Because there have been no clinical

Despite all the anti-smoking campaigns, cigarette taxes, novel smoking alternatives, and even smoking bans in some areas, millions of people still smoke cigarettes both out of habit and for pleasure. Sadly, many these people, if asked, would say they do not actually like smoking cigarettes

but feel as though they are hopelessly addicted with no effective way to quit. But if you or someone you know is serious about quitting smoking, there is hope apart from trying to quit cold turkey, wearing nicotine patches, and taking anti-smoking drugs. Here are five natural approaches to kicking the smoking habit for good:

1) Lobelia. Also known as "Indian tobacco," Lobelia inflata has long been used as a folk remedy to treat asthma and certain bronchial disorders. In fact, American Indians actually smoked lobelia in pipes for the purpose of healing these and other respiratory conditions. But lobelia can also be taken in the form of a tincture or supplement to discourage the smoking habit. Lobelia contains 14 unique alkaloids including lobeline, which has been shown to stimulate the nerve cells that would normally respond to nicotine. This mode of action not only reduces nicotine cravings, but also minimizes the effect of nicotine when it is smoked, which has helped many people kick the habit.