Cigars, Cigar Information and where to find Premium Cigars, Discounted Cigars and even Cheap Cigars

WHO IS TED?

Plus: A cigar a day can keep Parkinson’s Disease away?

Bulletin:
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) late Wednesday, 225-204, funded primarily by tobacco taxes. The cigar-related provisions of the tax increase were lower than originally proposed, as reported by the Tampa Tribune, to 33 percent of the wholesale price with a cap of $1 per cigar.

A move to lower the proposed Senate per-cigar cap of $10 to $3 is also apparently in the works and that bill may come to the Senate floor for a vote today.

Los Angeles, August 2 – Emprise Cigars is the company responsible for the unique Maker’s Mark and Courvoisier cigars that are among the highest-quality flavored cigars on the market.

Now Emprise is branching out with a serious, non-flavored, handmade cigar: Ted’s Made by Hand.

Who’s Ted? Emprise isn’t saying, but the cigars will do most of the talking. Made in the Dominican Republic, these are complex cigars with tobaccos from four nations. The filler includes Brazilian, Dominican and Nicaraguan leaves, with a Dominican-grown binder and an elegant Connecticut Shade wrapper.

The line is offered in three sizes: 5x50, 6x50 and 7x50. Simple! Suggested retail prices range from $7.00 for the 5x50 up to $9.25 for the 7x50 and all three sizes are offered in individual boxes inside lacquered boxes of 20.

The cigars should be in stores by the middle of August.

Newest health threat: printers!
A new study from the Queensland University of Technology maintains that some printers spew out microscopic toner particles so widely that the exposure is equivalent to secondhand smoke.

A news report from the BBC noted that “Conducted in an open-plan office, the test revealed that particle levels increased five-fold during working hours, a rise blamed on printer use. The problem was worse when new cartridges were used and when graphics and images required higher quantities of toner.”

But a note on the study on Environmental Science & Technology Online also included this comment: “ Erik Uhde of the Fraunhofer Institute for Wood Research (Wilhelm Klauditz Institute [Germany]) says that printers even within a manufacturer's series can vary, depending on where the parts were purchased, among other factors. ‘The sources of particulate matter in the printer are not completely clear," he says, and toner may not have as much impact as suspected.”

Just one question: where are the death certificates that state the cause of death as “secondhand toner”? There aren’t any, just as there aren’t any that say “secondhand smoke” either. Marijuana more dangerous than cigarettes!
Continuing with our science findings from Oceania, a team at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand published a study that “found” that smoking one marijuana joint can cause as much damage to the lungs as up to five cigarettes smoked quickly in succession.

The study was published in the medical journal Thorax and the authors noted that “The most important finding was that one joint of cannabis was similar to 2.5 to five tobacco cigarettes in terms of causing airflow obstruction. This pattern is likely to relate to the different characteristics of the cannabis joint and the way in which it is smoked. Cannabis is usually smoked without a filter and to a shorter butt length, and the smoke is a higher temperature.”

The study was designed to see if marijuana consumption caused emphysema, a potentially fatal disease of the lungs which has been linked to cigarette smokers. The results, from a pool of just 339 subjects (including the non-smoker control group), showed no emphysema signs in the marijuana smokers, but “other” issues including obstructed airways and hyperinflation.

So instead of saying the study found no signs of emphysema in marijuana users, could it be that the authors had to find something wrong so they could claim “victory” and apply for their next funding grant? Sorry to be so conspiracy-sensitive, but in the age of spin, this one’s another winner.

Tobacco saving lives:
Also in the medical field, tobacco is being increasingly used as an engine to create new drugs and treatments for existing diseases:

• At the University of Central Florida in Orlando, researchers “grew” insulin in specially-modified tobacco plants and cured diabetes in mice. The head of the study, Prof. Henry Daniell suggests using lettuce as the plant of choice to grow the insulin, as it can be produced without the “stigma” associated with tobacco. However, as tobacco farmers – and an increasing number of drug researchers know – tobacco can be grown in massive quantities in small plots of land and is quite easy to work with in manipulating its genetic code.

• Researchers at the University of Louisville who helped create the Merck-owned drug Gardasil to help fight cervical cancer, are now developing a similar drug using tobacco plants as the production engine that could reduce the cost of the drug from $120 per dose to $1 per dose!

• Perhaps most stunning of all is a UCLA study that appears in the July issue of Archives of Neurology that long-term smokers of cigarettes, cigars or pipes have half the risk of coming down with Parkinson’s Disease.

According to Science News Online, “Author Beate Ritz of the University of California, Los Angeles characterizes the amount of Parkinson’s protection by smoking as moderate. ‘Never-smokers have about a twofold higher risk of Parkinson’s disease than ever-smokers,’ she says.”

That’s hardly “moderate” if you compare the language used when researchers describe the unhealthful effects of smoking. And Ritz states, as you would expect, that because Parkinson’s is relatively rare, “nobody would ever recommend smoking in order to prevent Parkinson’s.” Well, why not recommend cigars or pipes? The risk of cancer and heart disease from cigar or pipe use is only a small fraction of that from cigarette smoking, but that’s a suggestion that would be unacceptable to the non-smoking scientific community, of course.

Brian Vastag’s report on Science News explained “As for how smoking may prevent the disease, ‘nicotine is the likely suspect,’ says study coauthor Harvey Checkoway of the University of Washington in Seattle.

“Robert L. Copeland Jr. Of the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. agrees. He points to studies in his lab and elsewhere showing that nicotine protects neurons that generate dopamine, a key signaling molecule in the brain.

“Parkinson’s symptoms appear after patients lost 70 to 80 percent of their dopamine-making neurons.”

Can we say . . . “A cigar a day helps keep Parkinson’s away.” Why not?
~ Rich Perelman

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