Tobacco industry makes inroads into Himachal

A labour-intensive bidi-making project that is expected to generate around 40,000 jobs in chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal's home district - Hamirpur - was cleared on Saturday by a high powered single window authority chaired by the CM.
The project proposal of West End Tobacco Pvt Ltd, along with eight other new proposals and 21 expansion plans, was given a clearance today, said a spokesman of the industry department.

Will plain packaging of cigarettes work? A look at the current evidence

Earlier this week an article announced that the UK is to bring in legislation that will force tobacco companies to sell their products in standardised plain packaging. This is similar to legislation Australia brought in last year.

Although there has been no official confirmation from the Department of Health (in fact, David Cameron stated the decision has not been made yet), the public consultation on plain packaging closed a while ago, so an official decision is likely to be reached soon.

At last glance there were more than 800 comments on the Guardian article. People are arguing strongly on both sides of the debate: is plain packaging another chip at our free will, undermining our freedom of choice, or a move to protect the most vulnerable in our society from a highly addictive, deadly habit?

Let's look at the evidence. What research has been conducted to assess whether plain packaging will make any difference to the uptake and maintenance of smoking habits, and indeed on shopkeepers who will be selling these non-branded packets?

I'll start with the money.

Tumorous cigarettes – and the rest of the year in shockvertising

What's bulbous, comically gruesome, and worth around £2.7m? The answer is not, in fact, Boris Johnson, but the government's new anti-smoking campaign, unveiled last Friday. The "hard hitting" initiative is the first graphic anti-smoking government campaign to run in the UK since images of fat-dripping cigarettes made the nation feel uneasily queasy in 2004.

After an eight-year hiatus from grimagery you'd think the Department of Health bods might now have something really quite sickening up their sleeves.