When it comes to suffering the costs of a tobacco habit, a cancer patient might know best.
“I can barely pay for my smokes,” a man with kidney cancer once told me after I explained to him how often he’d have to come in for chemotherapy (twice a month). He lived in a motel, almost one hundred miles away from our clinic. There was no way he could afford the drive, even though public insurance was picking up his treatment bill.
Given the financial burdens many smokers face, some argue that upping the tobacco tax isn’t fair. Oregon recently defeated an 84¢ per pack tax increase; the funds from this proposal would have been used to pay for children’s health insurance. Similarly, President Bush vetoed the hotly debated State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), primarily because it was to be funded by a 61¢ increase on the federal tobacco tax.
Increasing any type of tax may cause a knee-jerk reaction for most, but after reading online comments for and against the tobacco tax, I realized this one is seriously misunderstood. Increasing the price of tobacco products does much more than just raise funds for the short term. The most important outcome is the long-term effect: raising the price of tobacco products significantly decreases the number of adolescents and young adults that start smoking.
In fact, increasing the price of cigarettes is the best way to prevent a completely new generation of smokers from entering the marketplace. In their book Tobacco Control in Developing Countries, the health economists Jha and Chaloupka state that “tax increases are the single most effective policy measure for reducing children’s consumption of tobacco products.”
This is the fundamental reason why the tobacco industry spent twelve million dollars in Oregon to defeat the tobacco tax and is lobbying to prevent the passage of the SCHIP bill. The industry needs young people. As old customers die off or quit, new consumers need to be recruited, or profits decrease. Targeting teenagers and young adults has been the backbone of this strategy, since most people start their lifelong addiction around the same time they are able to vote.
