Candy cigarettes: The root of all evil?

Seems likely that if you smoke now you ate those candy cigarettes as a child. At least that’s the conclusion of a study  of almost 26,000 adults in the US released today. The research found that 22% of smokers said they had regularly had candy cigarettes as kids, while 14% of nonsmokers said the same. Some 12% of smokers said they had never tried the candy, while 22% of non-smokers hadn’t. The study, published in July’s Preventive Medicine says make-believe cigarette smoking may be considered illicit and mature by some children, but research suggests that playing with these edible “toys” cannot be considered as a benign parody of cigarette smoking. This new research is built on past research, such as focus groups in the US with 4 to 11 year-old children and a survey of 7th graders which indicated that playing with candy cigarettes may actually desensitize children to the harm of real smoking.Candy cigarettes have a long and dark history.  The two largest U.S. manufacturers of candy cigarettes, Necco and World Candies, have voluntarily renamed their products to “Candy Stix” and just “Candy,” respectively, according to multiple Web sites.  They are made of candy or gum, and sold in rectangular boxes roughly the size of cigarette packs. In the US they are typically displayed next to the bubble gum and the trading cards commonly sold in supermarkets and convenience stores. The U.S. did not ban candy cigarettes but other countries including the UK, Australia, and Canada restrict candy cigarette sales. According to the press release, US federal and all but one state legislative efforts at banning candy cigarettes have been unsuccessful (the one exception was later repealed). Ironically, it appears that the responsibility for restricting candy cigarette sales in the US has been left up to large national retailers such as the Wal-Mart chain, which has a company-wide policy banning the sale of cigarette look-alike products to minors in all 50 states. “Candy and gum look-alike products allow children to respond to tobacco marketing and advertising long before they are old enough to smoke a cigarette, said one of the study’s authors Jonathan Klein, an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Rochester in a statement.   “The continued existence of these products helps promote smoking as a culturally or socially acceptable activity.”. Candy cigarettes cannot be considered simply as candy. And we all know that smokers are the bane of the IT industry.  You may recall a U.K. security company recently  warned that smokers may impact IT security, leaving open doors that could let in intruders who could abuse a company’s network.  It may sound slightly far-fetched. But a penetration tester from NTA Monitor, a company based in Rochester, England, gained access to a professional services company outside London that way. The company hired NTA to test if it was possible to get inside the premises without proper identification, Hills said. The penetration tester waited until the smokers finished their break, then slipped in through the unlocked door and ultimately hooked up his laptop to the company’s VOIP network. The tester could have launched a denial-of-service attack or intercepted phone calls. Add that to the fact that smoking can now determine movie ratings and you can see where we are heading.  The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) last month said it  ill now take into account film depictions of cigarette smoking among criteria used to rate films.