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Vietnam launches the inaugural National Non-Smoking Week today in an effort to raise awareness of the consequences of smoking and protect young people from such dangers.
  During National Non-Smoking Week, all forms of advertisement, trade promotion and sponsorship by tobacco companies will be prohibited.
  In addition, cigarettes retail prices and import taxes will see a hike and aban on selling cigarettes to people under 18 years of age will also go into effect.
  The week will end on Saturday.
  The Ministry of Health as well as the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism will work with the Health  Organization to implement the week to mark World Non-Smoking Day, May 31.
  The survey also showed that 56 percent of men and close to 1.8 percent of women in Vietnam smoke regular cigarettes, 31 percent of whom are young people.
  The number of tobacco-related deaths in Vietnam hits 40,000 on average annually.

PRAGUE  - Czech tobacco group Philip Morris CR sees no reason for further tax hikes on cigarettes in the next several years after the last rise at the start of the year, weekly Euro reported, citing the group's new CEO.
    'After a rise in the consumer in January 2008, the Czech Republic fulfilled and passed the minimum tax, and therefore we do not see a reason for raising the rate for several years,' Euro quoted Alvise Giustiniani as saying in an interview.
    The tobacco group's Czech has eroded in recent years amid fiercer competition and tax hikes on cigarettes, and analysts expect the company to face challenges in 2008 due to strong stockpiling from competitors.

How popular are menthol cigarettes? Popular enough to reverse logic. The government is set to pass a bill that will ban "flavored" cigarettes, but menthols will be excluded. Because menthol, of course, is not a flavor. What menthol is is close to $20 billion in sales for the tobacco industry. As well as an important part of African-American culture! Tobacco companies advertise menthol brands disproportionately to minority communities, and it obviously works, although nobody really knows why. What we do know is that this bill is perfect—it protects my precious Kools, while saving America from the strawberry menace:
  "My recollection is that we were able to eliminate the use of flavored cigarettes, strawberry, mocha, and all this stuff that is clearly targeted at young kids and to start them smoking tobacco," Mike DeWine, the former Ohio senator [said].
  It's about time we got rid of those mocha cigarettes that all the kids are smoking these days. Of course, we'll still have this problem:
  Scientists who study smoking have identified various disparities in the health of black and white smokers. National Cancer Institute data shows that African-American men is at a rate 50 percent higher than white men — a gap that most scientists say cannot be fully explained by historically higher rates of smoking by black men. One theory suggests that menthol in cigarettes, by providing an additional pleasurable sensory cue.
  But let's be fair, those crying racial discrimination in advertising: how do you explain THIS?

MADRID - Imperial Tobacco Group Plc. unit Altadis SA. has obtained an additional 37.30 percent of Cia de Distribucion Integral Logista SA., raising its stake in the unit to 96.92 percent, bourse regulator CNMV said.
    In January, Imperial Tobacco presented a full cash bid for the outstanding in Logista at 52.5 euros per share, following its acquisition of Altadis.
    The acceptance period for the takeover bid ended May 6.
    The UK tobacco cigarettes manufacturer has said it plans to keep Logista listed on the Spanish.  

Consumers can squeeze this blue capsule inside the filter of the new Camel Crush to release a menthol flavor. The brand is being test-marketed at local Quality Mart stores.
A tiny blue capsule is the key element in R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.'s latest attempt to woo smokers. The capsule is embedded into the filter of a regular Camel Lights cigarette.
When smokers squeeze and snap the capsule, it releases menthol to change the flavor. The cigarettes — packaged in a sleek black and blue box and called Camel Crush — is being test-marketed at local Quality Mart convenience stores, and beginning this month in Pennsylvania. "We're giving the adult smoker the ability to savor two distinct flavors with Camel Crush and customize the experience," said Brian Stebbins, the senior business-unit director for Camel. "They can crush it a little and get a slight flavor over the length of the smoke. They can crush it completely and get a fresh menthol blast."
Reynolds views product innovation as a positive and differentiating way to compete for adult smokers and market share. However, the capsule also has become the latest target of anti-smoking groups, which claim that product innovations such as Camel Crush and the marketing of cigarettes  are geared toward attracting young consumers.
"Tobacco companies have carefully designed their products to attract new users, almost all of whom are children," said The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids in a February report titled "Big Tobacco's Guinea Pigs."   "Tobacco products are far from simple tobacco leaf rolled in paper or other packaging. They are highly engineered nicotine-delivery devices, finely tuned to appeal to the taste, feel, smell, and other sensations of new and addicted smokers," the report says. Stebbins declined to say how much Reynolds has spent to develop Camel Crush, but it has been in the works for several years.
"We had to find the proper type of capsule," Stebbins said. "We also had to invent manufacturing machinery to put the capsule in the same place in the filter consistently without breaking it." Reynolds said it has obtained a patent on the machinery.