Tuesday, Dec. 02, 2008

State must get serious about fighting smoking

DEAD LAST. AGAIN. By nearly any measure, South Carolina drags the bottom when it comes to combating the scourge of smoking. Our laws to protect non-smokers are inadequate (though improving), our tax is embarrassingly low (no improvement there — in decades), our smoking rates are high, and now the annual report from a national coalition of public health groups finds that, once again, we’re doing the worst job in the nation of providing programs designed to keep people from starting to smoke or to help them stop once they start. And what little we do is funded with federal money; we’re the only state in the nation that isn’t spending a penny of state tax money on prevention.

The main reason legislators don’t put any effort — or dollars — into keeping kids from smoking is the same reason they maintain our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax: They just don’t consider it that important.

Never mind that more kids start smoking every day, ignorantly volunteering for a life sentence of addiction, illness and early death. Never mind that the taxpayers invariably end up paying some or all of the bill for the addicts’ medical care. Never mind that there are proven, effective prevention programs that cost exponentially less than those medical bills.

Ah, but it will be years before we reap the financial rewards of prevention, because the carcinogens packed inside the nicotine-enhanced delivery system don’t poison their victims immediately. By then the politicians who are making state policy today will be long gone. Someone else’s problem.

Short-sighted. Self-serving. Irresponsible. Deadly.

Smoking doesn’t hurt just the smokers. It hurts the infants and children who have to live with smokers, the low-skilled workers who can’t afford to quit the job where they must breathe other people’s smoke all day, the employers who have to deal with absenteeism and lose workers whose training they have invested in.

Tough luck, our Legislature says. There are more important things to spend tax dollars on: parades and festivals, local “tourism” efforts that won’t attract a single tourist, but might mollify folks back home.

You don’t even have to spend a dime to reduce smoking. One of the most effective anti-smoking tools is a high cigarette tax. It works particularly well on kids, who are easier than grown-ups to price out of the market; once they get old enough to afford an addiction, most of them have enough sense not to smoke.

“No new taxes ... ever ... so help me God ... take my first child if I break my pledge” comes the chorus from inside the State House. Never mind that the public overwhelmingly supports raising our pitiful cigarette tax; even smokers support it. Never mind that raising this tax is guaranteed to save lives. No new taxes.

It’s easy to get your priorities wrong when those nice people in the cigarette industry are always so generous in helping raise money for your re-election campaign.

Most legislators don’t buy the ridiculous never-any-taxes rhetoric, and don’t sell out to the industry. They want to deal with the problem. Want to keep kids from smoking. Want to protect non-smokers from smokers. Want to invest wisely in that ounce of prevention. But it’s the same old story: They don’t want to badly enough to overcome the loud and determined opposition of a few legislators (or a governor) who are fixated on an all-taxes-are-evil-no-matter-what philosophy, or who care more about the health of the tobacco industry than our kids. They’re well-intentioned, those legislators in the majority. But their inaction makes them culpable.

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