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North Carolina  - By far, the leading U.S. export to Iran is Cigarettes. Also among the leading exports are Bra’s and Bull Semen. Bull Semen? This may explain Iranian women and those facial scarves.

When asked about the export of American Cigarettes to Iran an anonymous source at the Pentagon replied "can you think of an easier way to conquer Iran?" He paused momentarily and then continued "If we can’t send in Rambo we’ll send in the Marlboro Man. If we can’t send in Chuck Norris we’ll send in Joe Camel. Who needs Smith and Wesson when you have Benson & Hedges"?

Living in America, we all know that smoking cigarettes is probably the worst sin you can possibly take part in. I’m actually a long time smoker myself, but hopefully I’ll quit in the next month or so. The Japanese recently modified the Kool cigarette to help out smokers who simply aren’t getting enough flavor with every draw. The modification is a simple one where a tiny ball inside the filter can be squeezed to shoot extra flavor into the smoke you are inhaling. At first I thought it was a joke, but then I remembered that the Japanes introduce really odd things like this on a daily basis. The Kool “Boosts” were originally designed in 2007.

Imperial Tobacco Group Plc reported a 45 percent drop in first-half profit on costs for buying Altadis SA and said it will sell stock worth 4.9 billion pounds ($10 billion) to current investors to help fund the takeover. Net income dropped to 233 million pounds in the six months through March from 421 million pounds a year earlier, the Bristol, England-based company said today in a statement. That missed the 370 million-pound median estimate of five analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Imperial agreed to buy Madrid-based Altadis in July of last year, months after unveiling the acquisition of U.S. cigarettes maker Commonwealth Brands. Most of the Spanish company’s sales come from its domestic market and France, adding to its allure for Imperial, which is expanding in new locations because its main U.K. and German markets are shrinking.
“The focus will be to see how Altadis is performing,'’ Rogerio Fujimori, an analyst at Credit Suisse in London, said yesterday. The takeover gave Imperial, Europe’s second-largest cigarettes maker, cigarette brands including Gauloises and the world’s largest manufacturer of cigars.
Davidoff
Investors will have the right to buy one new share for every two held as of May 15, said Imperial, the maker of Lambert & Butler and Davidoff cigarettes. It will sell 338.7 million new shares for 1,475 pence each, 44 percent less than yesterday’s closing price in London trading.
Imperial rose 16 pence, or 0.6 percent, to 2,618 pence in London yesterday. The stock has slipped 3.5 percent in 2008, while larger competitor British American Tobacco Plc, the maker of Pall Mall cigarettes, is little changed. The cigarette maker had said costs related to the Altadis purchase would lop 110 million pounds from first-half profit. The drop in earnings is “all because of this exceptional charge,'’ Fujimori said.
Imperial had said it would sell as much as 5 billion pounds of stock by July to help finance the takeover and retain its investment-grade credit rating. The company has raised its stake in Logista, the Spanish cigarette distributor controlled by Altadis, to about 97 percent following an offer to minority investors this month.

The Federal Government’s top adviser on preventative health, Dr Rob Moodie, says increasing the tax on tobacco would be a very effective way to curb smoking.

The Government is set to reap $2 billion in extra revenue after it increased the tax on the sweet, ready-mixed alcoholic drinks which it says are responsible for a significant rise in binge drinking, particularly amongst young Australian women.

Dr Moodie, chairman of the National Preventative Health Task Force and professor of global health at Melbourne University’s Nossal Institute, says it is time to act as there has been little movement in the price of cigarettes in the past decade.

"One of the major successes, I guess, in Australia’s battle with tobacco over the last 10 to 20 years has been an increase in price - gradual - but it hasn’t increased over the last 10 years," he said.

"It’s now time we did increase the cost of cigarettes, [which are] after all, the major killer in Australia.

"We know that if for example we added an extra 2.5 cents to every cigarette stick, that would across the board drop consumption by nearly 3 per cent.

"It’s a major contribution to public health."

Dr Moodie says that increasing tax on cigarettes could be instituted relatively rapidly.

But a recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health questioned the effectiveness of price increases to cut consumption, and raised concerns about the burden placed on poorer smokers.

Dr Moodie says funding for quit smoking programs would address these concerns.

"Certainly the work that Quit Victoria have been doing on this, still shows that there is a very close relationship between price and consumption," Dr Moodie said.

He says money raised by this increased tax, suggested at the recent 2020 summit, should go towards a national preventative health agency.

You support taxing my cigarettes an additional $1 per pack for the benefit of two things you like: providing money to programs that help poor Floridians, and discouraging smoking.
I would prefer taxing the Orlando Sentinel $1 a copy, for the benefit of two things I like: reducing property taxes in Central Florida, and discouraging people from reading Orlando Sentinel editorials that propose raising my taxes.
Both ideas are crazy, because they advocate a funding source for a desired program that would cause income from that source to decline. In fact, both ideas will produce zero income for the first goal if the second goal is attained. But both ideas are politically viable because they tax a minority group of people for the benefit of a larger group of people.
If you truly want to achieve the dual benefits envisioned by your editorial, you should seek a reliable funding source for the government programs you like, and call for making cigarettes illegal. If your position really is that enough smokers will keep smoking to fund your desired program, then you are simply advocating a regressive tax, and should say so plainly.

A meeting of emergency services ministers in Canberra on Wednesday deliberated upon the need for introducing "fire-proof" cigarettes that get extinguished on their own as the smoker drops the butt, a measure that may help reduce the risk of fires in homes and the bush.
New South Wales (NSW) Emergency Services Minister Nathan Rees moved the resolution to make the reduced fire risk (RFR) cigarettes, which are already produced overseas in Canada and New York, mandatory under the Trade Practices Act as early as next year.
"We hope this will be law by early 2009, requiring all cigarettes manufactured and sold throughout Australia to be self-extinguishing," the Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying.
"Every day’s delay is another day we live with the risk that someone will be killed or injured or homes or bush land destroyed because cigarettes keep burning when they are dropped or thrown from a car window," he added.
Each year, around 4500 fires are caused by cigarette ignitions in Australia. Fires, directly attributed to cigarettes, claimed about 65 lives between 2000 and 2005.
A significant decline has resulted in fire deaths in New York since the introduction of RFR cigarettes in New York in 2004, according to preliminary data.
According to NSW Fire Brigades, a normal cigarette dropped on furnishings may start a fire in less than 18 minutes, whereas an RFR cigarette extinguishes on its own.
Rees said that some people in the industry had expressed non-acceptance to the introduction of the RFR cigarette, complaining about costs, difficulties in testing, and compliance and production lead times.
"NSW does not accept that the industry needs an 18-month to two-year time frame to introduce these cigarettes, which are already being produced and sold in Canada and a number of states in the US," he said.
The newspaper report says that the Australian tobacco industry is concerned that no testing has been done to ensure that the cigarettes do not pose a further risk to smokers’ health.