Tag: tobacco
Vinayak M Prasad (World Health Organization) – #BigTobacco should be taxed more to pay for the health costs of smoking
There are more than a 1.1 billion smokers in the world, and it’s estimated that 8 million people die every year as a result of their addiction to cigarettes. By any reasonable metric, smoking is perhaps the greatest and most salient public health emergency of our time. The scale of this crisis is magnified even […]
#EP Debate: We need to put the reins on Big Tobacco
As always, the devil is in the details. That was the overall conclusion of a public hearing on the illicit tobacco trade in Europe organized by MEP Cristian Silviu Bușoi in the European Parliament on January 29th. Bușoi has emerged as one of the most vocal MEPs in the on-going fight to decouple the European […]
The #Tobacco directive: how the European Commission side-lined the European Parliament
It’s not often that the European Parliament’s Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) committee makes the news. Yet the upcoming February 20th meeting is slated to be a tense showdown between advocates for more European transparency and those trying to keep the European Commission’s opaque regulatory processes in place. On the ordre du jour […]
#Tobacco ‘Track and Trace’: When the fox is guarding the hen house
When the European Commission (EC) published its final draft proposal on a cigarette track and trace (T&T) system, it was quickly criticized for leaving a backdoor for the tobacco industry. The EC sternly rejected the criticism, but condemnation continues to come in from all sides. The locus of the fiercest opprobrium is the fact that […]
#Cigarettes: MEPs oppose renewing EU anti-smuggling deals with tobacco firms
Under the tobacco deals the four largest tobacco firms together agreed to pay the EU and its member states a total of $2.15 billion, over the lifetime of the agreements, to drop legal proceedings against them to recover duties lost to illegal trade in cigarettes. Companies also agreed actively to combat smuggling and counterfeiting of […]
#Tobacco Ombudsman regrets Commission stance on UN tobacco lobbying rules
The European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, strongly regrets that the European Commission has chosen not to make its dealings with the tobacco industry more transparent in line with UN guidelines. The Commission was responding to the Ombudsman’s recommendation to extend the transparency policy of DG Health to all DGs through proactive online publication of all meetings […]
European Court to hear electronic cigarette challenge to Tobacco Products Directive
UK based Totally Wicked, the UK’s leading independent electronic cigarette manufacturer, will formally challenge the validity of Article 20 of the EU Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) at the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in Luxembourg on 1 October 2015 at 14h30 (CET). The CJEU’s decision, expected early next year, will determine whether Article […]