How Big Tobacco Is Ripping off the Poor in Addition to Killing Them

[madokie]

Tobacco companies are spending huge sums to fight cigarette tax hikes—and lying about their motivations.

The early 2000s marked the end of a golden age for New York City smokers. Michael Bloomberg came into office with an objective to improve public health, and he made reducing smoking rates one of his primary channels for doing so. Over the course of his three-term administration, Bloomberg and the City Council made New York the first major city to ban smoking in bars and restaurants, abolished smoking in outdoor public spaces, raised the legal age to purchase tobacco from 18 to 21, banned the use of electronic cigarettes indoors, and raised municipal cigarette taxes to $1.50 per pack. A pack of Marlboros that cost $7 in 2002 now goes for around $14, and the city has the second-highest combined state and local cigarette tax in the nation.

As Audrey Silk, founder of NYC CLASH, a smokers’ rights group, put it in a telephone interview, “His entire policy platform was not about creating a smoke-free society, it was about creating a smoker-free society. Bloomberg led a crusade to demonize smokers in the city.”

Yet these policies were not just some aberrant nanny state-ism. They were part of a concerted national effort, based on growing reams of evidence, to use high cigarette taxes as a means of driving down smoking rates. The most widely cited statistic claims that every 10% increase in cigarette prices reduces youth smoking by about 7% and total cigarette use by about 4%. According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a DC-based nonprofit, “Raising cigarette prices is one of the most effective ways to prevent and reduce smoking, particularly among kids.”

Besides the dramatic health benefits for individuals who stop smoking, reducing tobacco use creates a wealth of other positive effects. Smoking-related illnesses like emphysema, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease result in healthcare costs totaling some $96 billion per year, much of which is paid for with taxpayer money through government health programs. And because a relatively small percentage (around 20%) of the U.S. population smokes, raising cigarette taxes provides government officials in cash-strapped states and cities a relatively painless way to garner a new, reliable source of revenue.

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Tobacco is one of the monkeys I got off my back years ago.
You see I was a poor kid in a poor neighborhood where most everyone smoked. My dad smoked, All my brothers smoked. None of the girls including my mother used tobacco at all but many of the neighborhood moms dipped snuff. Some denied it as the juice made it way down the chin in the creases of an aged overworked woman. I never did figure that one out. Why deny something when everyone can see that it's not true, the denial that is. Anyways my brother and I would pick up our dads hand rolled Prince Albert butts and when we had about three of them we'd roll one up and smoke it. By the time I started the first grade I could roll a cigarette as good as the old seasoned cigarette rollers could. That talent paid off big for me when I picked up the habit of pot smoking. I was in the navy at the time and the early on when I'd try pot someone would already have a joint rolled but finally the time came where I could show off my talents. One of the guys was rolling a joint and taking the longest time to where I finally said here give that to me and let me roll one, he was having a time of it so he gladly gave me the bag of weed and the paper. I whipped that joint out in record time and from that day on whether or not I was a seasoned pot smoker or not never entered anyones mind as I had proven that I had been toking a long time LOL.
Anyways August 14, 1977 8:05 AM I smoked my last cigarette. Kept a package with me at all times so that if I got the urged that I just couldn't get past I would have a ready cigarette handy. After a while I finally took them out of my shirt pocket and put them over the sun visor on my old VW beetle and then at some point they made it to the glove box. A couple years later a friend an I was out tending to our Plants and he said I sure need a cigarette, the same friend who had told me that if I stayed off the tobacco for a year he would quite too, still smokes today last I seen, anyways I say well there should be a pack in the glove box and sure enough there they were, At some point I had opened the pack but there was still 20 cigarettes in it so I hadn't fell of the wagon. He got the pack out and lit one up and coughed his head off. They were so dried out that they were almost impossible to smoke. I threw the rest of them away and at that point in time realized that I had had been successful in quiting.
Sunday I'm preparing to put down new flooring in our kitchen and dinning room and while I'm getting all ready my wife is cleaning out under the sink, yup you guessed it. There was a bottle of whisky under there that I had stashed that I wanted to keep just in case I just had to have a drink when I decided to quite drinking. While typing this I realize that I've gotten that monkey off my back too.