[nukkad] An article on Ghutkha

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  You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
		--John Viscount Morley
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Hi

Is it true that the Government of Maharashtra has enforced ban on the sale
of
Tobacco ??? Can anyone clarify ????

Thanks
Harish

Hope the following article appeared in today's International Herald Tribune
will be of the interest of the members:

Sweet as Candy, deadly as tobacco, by Amy Waldman, The New York Times

BOMBAY: Promoted by a slick and many-tentacled advertising campaign, gutka,
an indigenous form of smokeless tobacco, has become a fixture in the mouths
of millions of Indians over the last two decades. It has spread through the
subcontinent, and even to South Asians in England.
.
But what has prompted particular concern here is the way that gutka - as
portable as chewing gum and sometimes as sweet as candy - has found its way
into the mouths of Indian children over the last 10 years.
.
Young people have become gutka consumers in large numbers, and they have
become an alarming avant-garde in what Indian doctors describe as an
epidemic of oral cancer.
.
That, among other factors, has prompted the state of Maharashtra, which
includes Bombay, to take an unusual step. It enacted a five-year ban, the
longest permitted by law, on the production, sale, transport and possession
of gutka, a $30 million business in the state, effective Aug. 1.
.
Several other states have undertaken similar bans, although some have been
stayed by the courts.
.
It is easy, on the streets of Bombay, to find young men like Raga Vendra,
now 19, a railway worker who began taking gutka at age 11. It is also easy
to find gutka sellers, like Ahmed Maqsood, who say they have had customers
as young as 6.
.
Dr. Surendra Shastri, the head of preventive oncology at Tata Memorial
Hospital, noticed about five years ago that his patients were getting
younger, by about eight to 10 years.
.
"High school and college students were coming in with precancerous
lesions," he said. "Usage was starting much earlier."
.
India has 75,000 to 80,000 new cases of oral cancer a year - the world's
highest incidence, and an estimated 2,200 deaths a day are tobacco related.

.
A 1998 survey of 1,800 boys ages 13 to 15 from a wide range of
socioeconomic groups found that up to 20 percent were already using three
to five packets of gutka daily. The contents, a mixture of ingredients
including tobacco, are usually placed in the cheek lining, savored, then
expelled.
.
Gutka was the product of a packaging revolution that made an Indian
tradition portable and cheap. Many Indians have long chewed paan, a betel
leaf wrapped around a mixture of lime paste, spices, areca nut and often
tobacco. But obtaining paan required a visit to a paanwallah - it was too
messy to be transported.
.
All of that changed with gutka, a dried version of the concoction, but
without the betel leaf, preserved and perfumed with chemicals and sealed in
a plastic or foil pack.
.
Gutka could be used at will, at work or at home or at school, and it was
used, in very large quantities. Sales of gutka and its non-tobacco
counterpart, paan masala, are now more than $1 billion a year, having
quintupled during the 1990s.
.
"What caused this boom of oral cancers was this packaging of tobacco," said
Dr. A.K. D'Cruz, the lead head-and-neck surgeon at Tata Memorial Hospital.
"Convenience got them hooked."
.
Many consumers say they welcome the ban, since they see no other way to
curb their addiction. Even some vendors like Maqsood have embraced it,
saying they felt they were trading in toxins. "The chemicals used in gutka
were poisonous," he said. "I have seen some customers who can't open their
mouth."
.
The ban's critics, gutka manufacturers among them, argue that the ban is
like using a finger to plug a leaking dam. Countless other tobacco
products, ranging from cigarettes to mishri, a tobacco paste that many poor
women here believe is good for the teeth, remain on the market.
.
While vendors, fearing large fines, are largely observing the ban for now,
gutka can easily be bought just a state away.
.
Gutka manufacturers contend that the ban stemmed less from concern about
children than from a desire to protect cigarette makers, who are fighting
for market share. The gutka makers have begun running an ad that argues
that if gutka is banned, cigarettes should be as well.
.
"No government in the world has been able to stop cigarettes," Shastri
countered. The gutka ban, he noted, is possible only because of a law
allowing the state to ban harmful foodstuffs.
.
"The gutka makers say the ban will have spurious effects," he continued. "I
don't care - 70 to 80 percent of children won't have access to the black
market, or to smugglers. We will prevent children from taking it up."
.
Gutka is seen by doctors as particularly insidious because it contains many
unhealthy additives, like magnesium carbonate, but also because it is
cheap: sometimes less than two cents a packet.
.
While gutka makers argue that tobacco is a much smaller percentage of the
content of their product than of a cigarette, Shastri said a single gutka
packet could contain three to four times as much nicotine, at much less
cost.
.
For children and teenagers, smoking cigarettes remains taboo - stigmatized
by peers, frowned on by parents. Gutka has no such social stigma among
peers, and it is easy to hide from parents.


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