Strong Tobacco Control Legislation

The DC Tobacco Free Coalition (DCTFC) and partners are marking the 36th Great American Smokeout today by calling on Mayor Vincent Gray and the City Council to protect the health of District residents by restoring local funding for cheap cigarettes prevention and cessation programs.

"Despite major advances in the past few years in the effort to ensure smoke-free workplaces and to discourage smoking cigarettes through higher cigarettes taxes, we've seen funding for proven programs dwindle even though they help smokers quit," said Peter Fisher, Chair of the DCTFC Policy Committee and Vice President, State Issues at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "Now is not the time to back down on buy cigarettes control. Since the Coalition's inception in 2005 we have successfully reduced local smoking cigarettes rates and the District must continue this positive trend. Failing to fund critical life-saving tobacco prevention and cessation programs is not an option."

The Coalition is working closely with members of the DC City Council to ensure that tobacco use is addressed through a comprehensive approach which will build upon the 2007 comprehensive smoke-free legislation and the current $2.50 per pack cigarette excise tax by increasing local funding for tobacco prevention and cessation programs. "A comprehensive approach to tobacco control -- including funding for these critical programs -- is proven effective in decreasing smoking cigarettes rates and the incidence of tobacco-related deaths," said Kimberly Williams, Manager, Advocacy and Communications at the American Lung Association in the District of Columbia.

In Fiscal Year 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that the District of Columbia spend $10.5 million on tobacco control including District-wide programs and media campaigns to prevent kids from starting to smoke cigarettes and help smokers quit. The District, however, only spent $3.2 million (36.4 percent of the recommended level) with $569,000 allocated from local DC funding and the remainder from Federal funding. The percentage for Fiscal Year 2012 is not expected to increase and local funding may be completely eliminated. This poses a serious threat to residents of the District of Columbia and puts at risk the strides the city has made in decreasing the overall smoking cigarettes rate and protecting children from exposure to tobacco products and smoking cigarettes initiation.

The use of tobacco products remains the nation's number one preventable cause of death, killing more than 443,000 Americans, of which more than 700 are DC residents and costing $96 billion in direct health care costs each year. According to the CDC's most recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on smoking cigarettes cessation, nearly 70 percent of current smokers say they want to completely stop smoking cigarettes and more than 52 percent say they have made a quit attempt in the past year. Unfortunately, only 6.2 percent say they were successful in quitting in the past year. Furthermore, Black, non-Hispanic smokers were only 3.3 percent successful in their quit attempts despite having the highest desire to quit among racial/ethnic groups.

States with comprehensive tobacco control programs experience faster declines in cigarette sales, smoking cigarettes prevalence, and lung cancer incidence and mortality than states that do not invest in these programs. The DC Tobacco Free Coalition is committed to continuing to address the District's level of funding for tobacco prevention and control programs and ensuring measures are in place to protect residents from the detrimental effects of tobacco use and exposure.

The American Cancer Society's Great American Smokeout began more than 30 years ago as a platform to encourage smokers to quit. Since then, the platform has expanded to not only encourage smokers to make a plan to quit, but also to encourage all Americans to advocate for comprehensive smoke-free laws, increased tobacco excise taxes and increased funding for tobacco cessation programs.

The DC Tobacco Free Coalition (DCTFC) is an alliance of community-based and national public health organizations working together to educate the District of Columbia about the harmful effects of tobacco and secondhand smoke. The Coalition's mission is to improve health and protect lives in the nation's capital, by decreasing tobacco use and exposure through education, advocacy and public policy.

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Health Groups Urge N.J. To Spend More On Smoking-cessation Programs

A coalition of health groups is urging New Jersey to dedicate more cigarette tax revenue to programs that help people quit smoking cigarettes.

The groups say less than 1 percent of the billion dollars a year New Jersey gets in cheap cigarettes revenue from taxes and as part of a national settlement with cigarettes store companies goes toward smoking cigarettes-cessation programs. They're pushing for funding for those programs to be increased by $30 million a year.

"We believe there's a moral obligation to the smokers," said Blair Horner, vice president of advocacy for the American Cancer Society in New Jersey. "It's simply not fair to keep asking them--15 percent of the public we're talking about roughly--to pay more and more and then offer them no way to quit."

Dr. Fred Jacobs, former state Health Commissioner who now chairs the anti-tobacco coalition NJ Breathes, said it's an easy choice.

"If the government won't act to protect the health and safety of the people it serves, than what exactly is the role of the government at all?" he said Wednesday.

If more of the current revenue is not directed to stop smoking cigarettes efforts, the health groups recommend increasing the state's cigarette tax by a dollar a pack to help fund those programs.

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Healthier, But Worth The Cost?

I think I understand the frustration behind what state Department of Health Services Secretary Dennis Smith said when asked why the department wouldn't support requests from UW-Madison's student health center and the Milwaukee Health Department for federal grants aimed at preventing obesity, smoking cigarettes and other public health risks.

"Why are we asking for taxpayers' money for stuff that we are already doing?" he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "How long have people been doing tobacco cessation, for heaven's sake? This is stuff that goes on all the time."

Indeed it does. Moreover, it's not like anyone with halfway functioning frontal lobes doesn't know that smoking cigarettes is bad for you, or that eating too much is bad for you, or not wearing a seat belt - and so on and so forth.

Still, the percentage of adults who smoke cigarettes cheap cigarettes in Wisconsin was about 19 last year, down only from about 24 percent in 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Weight problems were worse, with about 27 percent of our state's population officially overweight or obese, up from about 22 percent in 2001.

"We do have programs now that we're involved in that get at some of these chronic challenges," DHS spokeswoman Beth Kaplan told me, and pointed to three in particular that are funded to the tune of about $22.7 million to prevent smoking cigarettes, obesity, heart disease and other health problems.

Kaplan denied DHS refuses to support the additional federal grants because they are being offered through the federal health reform law - which Smith opposes and the state is suing to overturn. Rather it's "more a sense of not wanting to do what we're already doing," and to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars.

But it's not like Wisconsin's prevention programs have reached the point of diminishing returns, said Donna Friedsam, a researcher at UW-Madison's Population Health Institute, nor that the programming doesn't work.

There is a "range of research that's showing some very promising programs," she said. "They don't do these things because they say, ‘let's try it and see what happens.'"

I believe DHS could be eschewing the federal dollars to avoid the hypocrisy of taking money from an initiative state Republicans assail. But I also have doubts that a few million more will result in a healthier population 10 years from now.

What I do know is that consumption is probably the strongest cultural force in American society - and that we vary widely in willpower and in the genetic makeup and social backgrounds that partly determine our health.

Which brings to mind the obese man in the battered minivan who pulled up next to me at a stoplight a few days ago. He was smoking cigarettes a cigarette and I think there were a pair of empty children's car seats in the back. I looked at him and thought, with some disgust: "For God's sake, dude, get it together."

An hour later, after the kids were in bed and despite a full dinner and the extra five to 10 pounds around my midsection, I was headed to the local frozen custard shop.

I wanted a milkshake.

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Blowing Smoke In Columbus

Cigarette smoking cigarettes in Ohio is increasing again, after years of hard-won progress. That's alarming.

Politicians in Columbus are rushing to pass a budget that would spend no money to enforce the state's popular ban on indoor smoking cigarettes, and almost nothing on successful programs that help Ohioans quit smoking cigarettes and prevent young people from starting. That's unconscionable.

A new report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that 22.5 percent of Ohio adults smoked last year, up from 20.3 percent in 2009. Smokers make up more than 40 percent of people enrolled in the state's Medicaid program, which provides health insurance -- at a high cost to taxpayers -- to poor, sick, and disabled Ohioans.

Plenty of factors are at work in our state's rising rate of smoking cigarettes. But one of them surely is state government's chronic looting of money from the national cigarettes settlement that was intended to pay for smoking cigarettes cessation and prevention programs.

Various proposals for the next two-year budget that state lawmakers are working to pass this month allocate nothing for enforcement of the state's Smoke-Free Workplace Act, which bans smoking cigarettes at work sites and in bars and restaurants. If the state Health Department can't take and act on public complaints about violations of the law, and local health departments can't crack down on offenders, the law becomes virtually meaningless.

A big majority of voters approved the ban five years ago, and polls suggest that it has become even more popular over time. But Gov. John Kasich and the Republican majorities in the General Assembly appear to be listening harder to a handful of disgruntled bar owners who insist that polluted air is vital to the survival of their businesses.

At the same time, the governor and lawmakers propose spending only negligible amounts on such proven programs as the Ohio Tobacco Quit Line, which helps one of every three participants to stop smoking cigarettes, and on state, school, and community efforts to prevent young people from becoming addicted to tobacco.

Public-health groups such as the American Lung Association of Ohio make a compelling case that a big increase in the state's $1.25-a-pack cigarette tax would save state government lots of money on health-care costs -- and, by the way, save 61,500 Ohioans from premature deaths.

Greater worker productivity and reduced medical costs for employers are among the business-friendly values that Columbus routinely touts. But the knee-jerk no-taxers who now run state government have no interest in a higher cigarette tax, even though polls show Ohioans support it.

Short of that, lawmakers at least could eliminate senseless discrepancies in how Ohio taxes cigarettes and other tobacco products. They could crack down on illegal cigarette sales and tobacco tax evasion, and eliminate unneeded tobacco tax credits. Such things would raise money to pay for anti-smoking cigarettes programs and to enforce a law approved by voters.

Smoking costs Ohio $4.37 billion a year in health-care expenses. The burden on the state Medicaid program from smoking cigarettes-related illnesses is $1.4 billion.

GOP lawmakers and Mr. Kasich can take small but meaningful steps in the budget they enact to cut these costs. Or they can make clear that not even Ohioans' good health will get in the way of their narrow political ideology.

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