Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Singapore have demonstrated, tough laws and peer pressure can fast reduce the smoker from a sophisticate to a social pariah. Throughout Europe and Asia, a growing body of laws, policies and guidelines is confining smokers to ever smaller zones. In January, France will prohibit all tobacco advertising. And in the developing countries of Asia, a mounting awareness of the ill effects of smoking is prodding governments...
...surprisingly, Singapore is striving to become the world's first smoke- free city. In this socially engineered ministate, where smoking has been under assault for two decades, cigarettes are strictly banned in nearly every public place, vending machines are outlawed, and tobacco companies are not allowed to sponsor public events. To tame the 16% of the adult population that still smokes, the government may even end the practice in bars...
...attention to their health and pushing for tougher smoking restrictions. "They're doing a lot of things at once, not small steps over 30 years as in the West," says Dr. Judith Mackay, the region's leading antismoking crusader. Even China, the world's largest producer and consumer of tobacco, now restricts smoking in public places and bans advertising...
None of this means that smokers need fear extinction anytime soon. Cigarettes are still highly profitable, as the governments of France, Italy and Japan know, since they monopolize or control state tobacco industries. France's SEITA earned $2.3 billion in sales revenues last year. Cigarette consumption generated $6.1 billion in tax revenues -- a clear disincentive for enforcing the new ban too zealously...
...tobacco companies are making up for dwindling domestic sales by expanding sales abroad. Asian health officials complain that the influx of fancy foreign brands hurts their efforts to control the habit, particularly among the young. The most fertile ground for new exports is Eastern Europe and Russia, where Marlboro and other brands are relatively expensive -- and often smuggled -- status symbols. In these former communist countries, the idea of state control over private lives is decidedly more ambivalent these days, and the antismoking crusade is just beginning...