A nation of smokers that won't turn over new leaf

(Donnybrook Mail) Each working day, as the sun rises, the streets and laneways of Kudus fill with tens of thousands of women. On bikes and buses, by foot and on the back of motorcycles, many resplendent in their company-issue hairnets, they head to work, some to vast, modern warehouses, others to old buildings no larger than a small house.
This is ''Kota Kretek'' - Kretek City - and the women work in hundreds of cigarette factories in this Central Java hub of tobacco manufacturing.
About 75 per cent of Kudus's population of 800,000 are employed by the cigarette industry, and there are almost a quarter of a million workers - almost all of them women - who handroll kreteks, Indonesia's distinctive clove cigarette. Continued

Photo: Djarum blacks, pack and cigarettes. A kretek cigarette. (Ari x, some rights reserved)