Up in smoke
Published December 19, 2014
Editorial by Greensboro News-Record, December 19, 2014.
North Carolina has plenty of money to pay for effective smoking-prevent programs. It just chooses to spend it on other things.
Our state slipped from 45th to 47th in the country this year in funding those programs, according to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.
What a sorry record. Worse, this negligence will take a heavy toll in medical costs and lost wages in the long run.
North Carolina will collect $422 million this year in tobacco taxes and payments from the 1998 tobacco settlement. That agreement with tobacco companies was supposed to compensate states for the harm done to their populations by smoking. Major portions of the money were meant to pay for health care and efforts to help people quit tobacco use or never start.
The federal Centers for Disease Control recommended that North Carolina devote $99 million this year to smoking prevention and cessation efforts. The state budgeted barely $1 million.
Is it that North Carolina doesn’t have a problem? No. Fifteen percent of high school students smoke. That’s a lower number than in the past — but until two years ago, North Carolina was spending $17 million a year on programs aimed to prevent teens from smoking. Remember the gruesome TV ads? There’s no money for them now.
The tobacco companies are still spending money for marketing their products — about $350 million this year in North Carolina, according to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. Although this is not marketing targeted at teenagers, they can still get the message.
Most states spend more and get better results. Florida is spending $66 million for smoking prevention this year, and only 7.5 percent of its high school students smoke. New York is spending $39 million, and fewer than 11 percent of its high school students smoke. But all can and should do better.
This has been a problem from the outset of the settlement program. Unfortunately, states weren’t legally obligated to spend the large amounts of money they received for anti-smoking purposes. Early on, North Carolina actually spent most of its money on tobacco production and marketing until a Charlotte Observer investigation blew the whistle.
Through the Golden Leaf Foundation, grants were made to help communities that were economically distressed from the decline of the tobacco industry. Yet some of those connections seemed tenuous at best.
Not all the money has to pay for scary ads meant to keep kids from smoking. But much more than $1 million a year ought to be spent for that purpose. If teenagers get hooked, they’ll likely become smokers for life — a life that may be shortened by lung cancer, heart disease, breathing disorders and other health problems that are costly to treat and rob families of sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters.
If North Carolina can cut its rate of high school smokers to Florida’s, it would save thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The money is available. North Carolina should invest it in a healthier, smoke-free future.
