China Tells Its Officials: Buy Your Own Cigs - U. S. Senator Call For Tobacco Prohibition

20-year old Obama with cigarette

On both sides of the Pacific tobacco and taxes are subjects of government talk.

China’s corruption watchdog will clamp down on government officials who use public money to buy expensive cigarettes, the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday, after one county last month urged its officials to smoke more than a million local cigarettes a year.

Smoking is tightly woven into the fabric of daily life in China, the world’s largest tobacco market, where about 2 trillion cigarettes are sold every year. Offering cigarettes is an important part of official banquets, and expensive brands of cigarettes confer greater status.

After a public outcry, rural Gongan county in central Hubei province last month backed away from a proposed rule urging its officials to smoke more than 230,000 packs of locally produced cigarettes a year to boost tax income revenue.

“Previously, our main initiative was to reduce the consumption of low-end cigarettes by campaigning to raise the tobacco tax,” Zhang Jing, a publicity officer with the Chinese Association of Tobacco Control, told Xinhua.

“Now, we are looking to cut down demand for high-end cigarettes by banning officials to buy them with public funds,” Zhang said.

U. S. Sen. Tom Coburn, who is also a medical doctor, is calling for an outright ban on the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products.

“What we should be doing is banning tobacco,” Tom Coburn the Oklahoma Republican declared on the Senate floor during a debate on a tobacco regulation bill. “Nobody up here has the courage to do that. It is a big business. There are millions of Americans who are addicted to nicotine.”

The battle against tobacco use has been ongoing. Earlier this year Congress passed legislation that included an increase in the federal tax on cigarettes of more than 60 cents a pack.

Various taxes have brought the price of a pack to over $9 in New York City and to about $7 in Washington, D.C., The Hill newspaper reported.

The Senate is set to pass the Family Smoking Prevention Tobacco Control Act, which would authorize the Food and Drug Administration to restrict the manufacturing, marketing and sale of tobacco products.

“If we really want to make a difference in health and we want to eliminate dependence on tobacco, what we have to do is to stop the addiction,” he said.

Coburn said instead of putting tobacco products under the authority of the FDA, it would make more sense for the Drug Enforcement Administration or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to regulate.

Obama apparently is still a cigarette smoker despite smoking being banned in the White House.