CNN “Social Smoke” Business Success Story by Iranian Born Hookah Entrepreneur: Ain’t a Dig at WHO Treaty on Tobacco Control (FCTC) ?

While the members of the United Nations Insecurity Council were endlessly talking about sanctions against Iran, here came an “innocent” story featured by CNN :

Booming hookah biz links China, Iran, Egypt - and Texas by Justin Martin, Aug 26, 2009

QUESTION: Ain't this open advertising and promotion of an unhealthy tobacco product targeting and killing US teenagers ? How can the Federal Authorities and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tolerate such things as “Social Smoke” when the US are a signatory party of the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) ?

Note: The FCTC is “an evidence-based treaty that reaffirms the right of all people to the highest standard of health”, developed “in response to the globalization of the tobacco epidemic. The spread of the tobacco epidemic is facilitated through a variety of complex factors with cross-border effects, including trade liberalization and direct foreign investment. Other factors such as global marketing, transnational tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and the international movement of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes have also contributed to the explosive increase in tobacco use”.

Article 13 (Tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship) and Article 16 (Sales to and by minors) of the Convention are very clear in this respect.

REFERENCES

WHO FCTC (Framework Convention for Tobacco Control) HERE

Download: HERE

Image: CNN story

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Hail Iranian President and his Anti-Prohibition Stance ! Support Iran’s Right to Maintain its Traditional Mass Entertainment Weapons !

What’s Cooking? This: Iran's Cafe Owners Demand Hookah Rights: "Dozens of cafe owners have staged a demonstration in front of the Iranian parliament (Majlis) to protest against a ban on their activities" to sell hookah to their customers, the report said. The demonstrators, who were from the Iran's central city of Isfahan [OBSERVATORY: Best world tobacco there !], said that their cafes had been closed by authorities despite an official order by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that they could be reopened […]”

(full wire via Xinhua Chinese Press Agency Dec 4, 2008, here).

So What ? A song for President Ahmadinejad:
- “Only You Can make All This Unfair World seem right !
- Only You Can Make the Prohibition Darkness Bright !
- Only You and You Alone
- Can Thrill Us Like you Do !” [comparison with Bush fully irrelevant, Joe !]

Sorry, we haven't got the Persian/Farsi lyrics. Watch 'n' list'n the original English song by The Platters HERE

Images (from left to right):

1. President Ahmadinejad, the hope of billions of Anti-Prohibitionists around the world.
2. The WHO (World Health Organization) “Smoke-free inside” Agenda: “Create and Enjoy” ? Really ? Can’t you see there's left no single spot on Earth for smoking ? This is hygienist Hell ! Send smokers to the Red Planet ? Is this what they eventually aim at ? This is totalitarism, globalinktarism ! This is a prison on the Globe scale. No Pasaran !
3. The WHO social formatting (minds and bodies) convention
4. The Platters

MOTTO

- Non-smokers, cigarette and hookah smokers, owners of hookah lounges of the world, Unite ! Stand up against the “Passive Smoking” Fraud in the name of which hypocritical ordinances are voted against social gatherings !

Go to the Presidency of Iran’s official site , congratulate the president and politely suggest that his country withdraw as soon as possible from the WHO FCTC (World Health Organization /Social Formatting and Liberty Killing Convention for Global Tobacco Kontrol).

Welcome President Ahmadinejad in Brussels for the 1st World Conference Against Prohibition: "Smoking Bans and Lies" (Brussels, European Parliament Building, 27/28 January, 2009) !

RELEVANT READINGS

EXPLOSIVE WORLD PREMIERE: Joint Egypt-Saudi-French Nuclear Study Establishes Hazards of Iran Mass Entertainment Weapon (Hookah Smoking)

Bury the Peace Pipe and Dig it Up Again: Iran Between US Prohibitionism and National Sovereignty, Freedom, Dignity and Persian Art de Vivre

Syria, Iran and the Threat Posed by Hookah Smoking to the Free Civilized World

Hookah Bars in Paris Fight Smoking ban. Abdelkader El-Ahmer, Owner of Houara Lounge, Is a World Hero in Tobacco Prohibition Times


YOU ARE NOT ON THE HOME PAGE of the OBSERVATORY on HOOKAH OR HEALTH (Narghile, "Waterpipe"™, Health, Risks, Dangers, Diseases, Tar, Nicotine, Cancer). CLICK HERE to go there !

EXPLOSIVE WORLD PREMIERE: Joint Egypt-Saudi-French Nuclear Study Establishes Hazards of Iran Mass Entertainment Weapon (Hookah Smoking)

IN MEMORY of the hundreds of thousands of people (200 000) and animals who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (*) under the nuclear fire of cowards and criminals in the US Army roaming these days in other parts of the world.

(*) Entire living cities with their children, women, men, cats and dogs, .... gardens, cafes and tea houses... have disappeared within a very short span of time…

Wasim MAZIAK, Thomas EISSENBERG, Kenneth WARD and Alan SHIHADEH: RESIGN ! Give Back the Money Now and Apologize to the World! Send now your troops to US campuses if you have the guts (story HERE) !

Figure (tables) above: Activity concentration of 210Po and tobacco content in cigarette, moassel and jurak (a), 210Po activity percentage released in smoke and remained in ash and filter (b), daily and annual intake of Po-210 activity, Bq, due to cigarette, moassel and jurak smoking (c) and annual committed effective dose due to 210Po and 210Pb intake via smoking. [all rights reserved]

Image: Don’t Forget Hiroshima by Takanori Matsumoto

TITLE OF THE STUDY: Radiological hazards of Narghile (hookah, shisha, goza) smoking: activity concentrations and dose assessment.

Published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity (1 September 2008)

Interviewed over the phone, one of the authors -who is by chance our consultant for international and scientific affairs- said he had no comment. However, we have received later this morning the following cryptical communiqué from his secretariat, apparently based on excerpts from the abstract of the study:

“The average concentrations of natural radionuclides in moassel tobacco pastes are comparable to their concentration in Greek cigarettes and tobacco leaves, and lower than that of Brazilian tobacco leaves.”

“Our study found a wide range in the radioactivity contents where the average (range) activity concentrations of 238U, 234Th, 226Ra, 210Pb, 210Po, 232Th and 40K, in Bq/kg dry weight were 55 (19–93), 11 (3–23), 3 (1.2–8), 14 (3–29), 13 (7–32), 7 (4–10) and 719 (437–1044) Bq/kg dry weight, respectively.”

So, if you are not struck by a cancer caused by hookah smoking, you will sure die of its radioactivity

However, the Observatory on Hookah or Health accessed the study and was first very impressed by the pioneering advance the work represents in the ““waterpipe””™ night. Then, we note that the study shows how the authors (*) of the erroneous Cochrane Review (the laundered recycled version of the erroneous World Health Organisation report , both supposed to be “peer-reviewed” and “gold standard” (sic) publications...) have actually invented (and published !), with others, the figure of 100 million daily hookah smokers in the word.

Nuclear study states: “It has been claimed and repeated in the open peer-reviewed scientific literature that more than 100 million people worldwide smoke narghile daily [HERE, the study refers to the erroneous Cochrane Review (*)]. However, the origin of such an estimate cannot be traced in any scientific database. As for the historical background of the narghile, it is not Indian as often stated but more probably African […]”

(*) Maziak, W., Ward, K., Eissenberg, T., 2007. Interventions for waterpipe smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. (4) CD005549.

Since the Cochrane Review is controlled by people linked to the intolerant die-hard anti-tobacco Globalink (or Global Lynch if you prefer) network, the public could not know before of the scandal of that document and to what extent the reputation of the Cochrane Reviews has been stained. The above example is only one out of many errors. Only pire-reviewers, puppets and parrots can gloss over such a repeated scientific misconduct. Then it is mere propaganda.

Chaud-Crâne Kamal ! We love you !


PREVIOUS RELEVANT READINGS :

Bury the Peace Pipe and Dig it Up Again: Iran Between US Prohibitionism and National Sovereignty, Freedom, Dignity and Persian Art de Vivre

Syria, Iran and the Threat Posed by Hookah Smoking to the Free Civilized World


YOU ARE NOT ON THE HOME PAGE of the OBSERVATORY on HOOKAH OR HEALTH (Narghile, "Waterpipe"™, Health, Risks, Dangers, Diseases, Tar, Nicotine, Cancer). CLICK HERE to go there !

Bury the Peace Pipe and Dig it Up Again: Iran Between US Prohibitionism and National Sovereignty, Freedom, Dignity and Persian Art de Vivre

Iranis are sensible people. The ban was once again lifted:

“Iran has allowed water pipes to reappear in tea houses, whose owners complained a recent ban on health grounds was putting them out of business, press reports said on Tuesday.
“Tea houses with a business permit can offer water pipes to their customers," the interior ministry said in directive to police published in the Tehran Emrouz newspaper.”
(Tehran, AFP: Feb 26, 2008. Iran Reverses Ban on Water Pipes)

In a previous step, the Iranian Authorities actually buried a still living being on the occasion of the “No-Tobacco week”:

“The No-Tobacco Week Taskforce in a statement hailed the approval of Iran’s membership in the International Convention on Tobacco Control, stressing that the parliament should speed up the second reading of the Comprehensive Plan on Tobacco Control, said ISNA. No-Tobacco Week kicked off last Wednesday with its theme selected as “Health Experts Against Tobacco.“ During the week-long event, 25 information centres and medical clinics will render free counselling to the public in cultural houses. In a symbolic move, cigarettes and hookah were buried at the Salamat Cultural House.”
(“Free Counselling During No-Tobacco Week”, The Iran Daily Newspaper, May 29, 2005).

Note the place where the contraptions were buried : a cultural house ! This first ban was eventually lifted by July 2005.

NOW, WHAT YOU US AMERICANS CAN DO for human rights in Iran: Go to the Presidency of Iran’s official site and politely suggest that Iran withdraw as soon as possible from the WHO FCTC (World Health Organization /Framework Convention on Tobacco Control) which is actually the source of such pressures, a catastrophe for civil liberties and much more on an economic level for many countries.

RELEVANT READINGS: Syria, Iran and the Threat Posed by Hookah Smoking to the Free Civilized World

Image: The Iran Daily Newspaper (29 May 2005)

YOU ARE NOT ON THE HOME PAGE of the OBSERVATORY on HOOKAH and HEALTH (Narghile, "Waterpipe"™, Health, Risks, Dangers, Diseases, Tar, Nicotine, Cancer). CLICK HERE to go there !

Syria, Iran and the Threat Posed by Hookah Smoking to the Free Civilized World

Just Published on the French side of the Observatory on Hookah and Health:

De la Perse, de l’Iran, DelaCroix et du croissant de lune… Comment la République assassine ici et maintenant le rêve du poète

>> Can't read French ? Go there: (automatic) ENGLISH version

Relevant Reading: The Power of Cuture and its Lancet : Ethnology. Hookah as a Globe-Trotter (La puissance de la culture et son bistouri: l’ethnologie. Le narguilé...)

Oh la la, la France, encore… Exhale now !

RELATED READING: Bury the Peace Pipe and Dig it Up Again: Iran Between US Prohibitionism and National Sovereignty, Freedom, Dignity and Persian Art de Vivre (April 19, 2008)

Image: Eugène Delacroix: Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1834)

YOU ARE NOT ON THE HOME PAGE of the OBSERVATORY on HOOKAH and HEALTH (Narghile, "Waterpipe"™, Health, Risks, Dangers, Diseases, Tar, Nicotine, Cancer). CLICK HERE to go there !