Recognizing the reality of today’s anti-tobacco environment, the board of directors of the Retail Tobacco Dealers of America changed the name of the organization to the IPCPR: the International Premium Cigar and Pipe Retailers Association on Saturday.

Admittedly a mouthful, the new name is designed to better represent the focus of the organization and make clear its distance from cigarettes and even machine-made cigars. The change was announced to an enthusiastic reception from the Association’s retail members at the annual breakfast meeting on Sunday.

Against the background of the current challenges in the tobacco trade, especially the pending tobacco tax legislation in the U.S. Congress, the 75th annual national cigar and pipe convention opened in the massive George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. More than 300 exhibitors taking up more than 1,300 booth spaces were on hand.

The biggest “space-eaters” were the industry giants General Cigar and Altadis, U.S.A., respectively. General Cigar had a massive display that consumed 60 booth spaces and 8,000 square feet, while Altadis U.S.A. was close with 56 booth spots but 8,400 total square feet.

Third place in the space derby went to Ashton Distributors and Davidoff of Geneva with 40 booth spaces each. There were 11 companies with 20 booth spaces or more.

With a Sunday start to the four-day show, the normal finishing touches were being applied while everyone was talking about the proposed tobacco tax legislation in Congress. Among the more cogent points being made:

• The proposal to use tobacco taxes to fund the State Children’s Health Insurance Fund makes painfully little sense since the funding is based on a declining population base.

• The proposed action on cigars could have a devastating effect, not only on the U.S. cigar trade, but could impact an estimated 250,000 people in the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua who work in some aspects of the cigar trade. As one senior cigar company executive pointed out, these people and their families could lose their livelihoods if the cigar industry shrinks in the U.S. and while some will find other jobs, many will be very much tempted to try to come to the U.S. to find work.

• If the cigar industry is hard-hit by the new taxes, the impact will fall hardest on the state of Florida, which is not only a manufacturing center for cigars, but also the point of import for most of the premium cigars which enter the U.S.

A large-scale effort is being undertaken by cigar companies to marshall the interest and cooperation of elected officials in the three major cigar-making countries to explain the impact of the proposed cigar taxes.

The show will return to Las Vegas next year as planned, but a reported second consecutive year in Las Vegas will not materialize in 2009. Instead, the cigar trade will converge – as it did just weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 – in New Orleans.

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?

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