Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Single sticks go fast at 7 cents each - an especially good price point for kids. And while Yakubu says he doesn't sell to children, other shopkeepers do. About 25% of teens - some as young as 13 - use tobacco in some parts of Nigeria, double the smoking rate of Nigerian men, and many pick up the habit by age 11. That's a demographic powder keg, one that means big trouble if you're a health expert and big promise if you're a tobacco executive. Both sides agree on one thing, though: across all of Africa, cigarettes...
...recent years, the world has increasingly been cleaving into two zones: smoking and nonsmoking. In the U.S. and other developed countries, Big Tobacco is in retreat, chased to the curbs by a combination of lawsuits, smoking bans, rising taxes and advertising restrictions. Fewer than 20% of adult Americans now smoke - the lowest rate since reliable records have been kept - and a tobacco crackdown is under way in Europe, Canada and elsewhere. In April, Congress boosted federal cigarette taxes threefold, from 32 cents a pack to $1. In June, President Barack Obama signed a law giving the FDA the power...
...West is not the world, and elsewhere smoking is exploding. In China, 350 million adults are hooked on tobacco, which means the country has more smokers than the U.S. has people. Smoking rates in Indonesia have quintupled since 1970. In Russia, boys as young as 10 start lighting up. This year, tobacco companies will produce more than 5 trillion cigarettes - or 830 for every person on the planet...
...smoking rate (which in most places in the world is higher than the female rate) is only 8%; in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it's 14%; in Nigeria, it's 12%. Compare that with 31% in India, 56% in Malaysia and a whopping 61% in China. But the tobacco industry abhors a vacuum, and in recent years, industry players - principally London-based British American Tobacco, Switzerland-based Philip Morris International and the U.K.'s Imperial Tobacco - have been working hard to fill it. "We've done this before," says Allan Brandt, a professor of the history of science...
...Spreading the Scourge Big Tobacco's footprint in Africa has been hard to miss for a while. British American markets its wares - which include Dunhill and Pall Mall - in a vast crescent sweeping from South Africa to Congo and west to Ghana, as well as throughout North Africa. In 2003 the company planted its stakes deeper, building a $150 million factory in Nigeria. Philip Morris, whose brands include Marlboro and Chesterfield, has a smaller presence on the continent. "We are a minor, minor player," says spokesman Greg Prager. But that could change. The company does no business in Nigeria...