Like many nonprofits that depend on government funding, the Florida Association of Healthy Start Coalitions is facing cuts. The organization that focuses on prenatal and infant health may have 22 percent trimmed from its 2009 budget. Unlike other nonprofits, however, the organization has proposed a solution. Healthy Start recently wrote to Governor Crist asking him to start charging a 40-cent-per-pack tax on cigarettes made by small tobacco companies. The country's three biggest
A guy who smoked two packs a day died because he was addicted to cigarettes, a Broward County jury has found, and the ruling could clear the way for 8,000 more identical trials. The ruling comes as news to me, not only because I could quit smoking at any time but because I believed Joe Camel when he said smoking wouldn't hurt me and would instead make me as cool as a dick-shaped camel. The attorney representing the man's widow ended the trial by Big Tobacco lost the trial but wins the youth vote
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While cigarette smokers will now pay a dollar per pack more, the legislature gave the cigar industry a break.
A new state-wide dollar-per-pack tax on cigarettes and smokeless and pipe tobacco starts today. The stated goal from the legislature is to encourage smokers to stop. If not for their own health, for the health of bank account. T
he tax will also raise an estimated $950 million for health care, according to Sen. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, sponsor of the bill.
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