For the week of November 19-23, 2007

HEARD IN THE HUMIDOR Highlights of the week in cigars and smoking from CigarCyclopedia.com.

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Los Angeles – "Depressing" is one word used to describe the cigar-smoking situation in England, where a ban in indoor smoking – except for tobacco shops – went into effect in June.

Neil Clark, writing in the London Spectator, however, found that elements within the 800,000-strong cigar-smoking population are not only not resigned to defeat, but beginning an offensive:

"The fightback against New Labour’s particularly noxious brand of killjoy illiberalism is being led by the charismatic figure of Ranald Macdonald, elder son of the 24th Captain of Clanranald. Macdonald has worked tirelessly, over 19 years, to build his wonderfully cosy Belgravia club/restaurant Boisdale into an oasis for cigar smokers. Boisdale has the largest selection of Cuban cigars you’ll find in such an establishment (19 brands and over 120 different sizes and vintages). But the ban has hit business hard. ‘My sales were 15 per cent down in September,’ Macdonald told me over a Hoyo de Monterrey smoked on the little seated area outside his restaurant. ‘The evening trade has been badly affected. We have live jazz every night and jazz and cigars go together. You can listen to jazz without a cigar, but it’s somehow not quite the same.’

"Macdonald’s assault is two-pronged. On 1 November, Boisdale opened Britain’s first cigar terrace, a 6 x 9 metre roof area, where patrons will, once again, be able to smoke their Havanas legally. At the same time, Macdonald, together with fellow cigar aficionado Jemma Freeman, managing director of Hunters & Frankau, Britain’s exclusive distributor for Cuban cigars, is launching a new single-purpose campaign to gain exemptions from the ban for bars, pubs and clubs. ‘Seventy-four per cent of the population in Scotland favour exemptions,’ says Macdonald."

>> "The cake for Kinky Friedman's 63rd birthday, which he celebrated at a cigar store in Greenville, N.C., was decorated with one of the Kinkster's newest slogans: ‘Cigarettes bad, cigars good.’

"Only a man with a trunk full of cigars to unload would be that politically incorrect."

So wrote Mark Rutledge of The Daily Reflector of Greenville, who spoke to Friedman at the smokeshop. The former Texas gubernatorial candidate was in Greenville to participate in a local humor festival being held at East Carolina University.

Although Friedman is only the latest in a long line of well-known personalities to have a line of cigars named for them and then promoted by them, he says he’s serious about the venture. "It looks like I might become the next George Foreman, Famous Amos or Jimmy Dean of the cigar world," he told the reporter. "That would be great." Friedman’s cigars are made by the Habana Cuba Cigar Co., best known for its Oliveros lines.

>> The anti-smoking forces in the U.S. suffered a bad shock in early November with the 59-41 percent defeat of Oregon’s Measure 50, which would have imposed an additional 84 1/2-cent tax on cigarettes and another 30 percent tax on other tobacco products to fund health-care insurance for uninsured children in the state. More surprising news came from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which reported that for the first time since the Federal government has been keeping records, smoking rates have stalled and are not going down.

The CDC estimates that 20.8 percent of American adults are smokers, with about 45.3 million adults consuming cigarettes (the study did not include cigar or pipe smokers). Of this population, about 80.1 percent (36.3 million) smoked at least one cigarette a day.

It’s worth noting that the CDC, which is generally quite careful about its language, states plainly that more than four-fifths of what cigarette companies spend is on discounts since advertising of almost every kind has been banned. That the smoking rates have not gone down significantly without the addition of continuous, heavy suppression efforts such as giant tax increases and anti-smoking ad campaigns by states tells you something about the inherent popularity of tobacco products.

The CDC said that of the current 45.3 million cigarette smokers, 44.2 percent (20 million) had tried to quit, meaning that 25.3 million didn’t try to quit, an even more revealing figure. But the figures also showed that of the 91 million U.S. adults who had smoked 100 or more cigarettes in their lifetimes, 50.2% (45.7 million) had quit.

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Rich Perelman

11/19/07

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