FROM NORTH Carolina comes news that cigarette tax revenue was up $110 million and cigarette sales were down 18 percent last year, after the state excise tax was increased from 5 cents to 30 cents a pack.

That’s no surprise: This is what happens anywhere cigarette taxes go up. That’s why cigarette companies oppose the tax increases. It’s why public health advocates support them — and why everybody else should as well.

Fewer people buying cigarettes means fewer people smoking, which means fewer people getting emphysema and lung cancer and other expensive (not to mention painful, and often deadly) diseases, which means fewer tax dollars being spent to treat poor (Medicaid) or old (Medicare) smokers. This inverse connection between price and smoking is particularly important in deterring kids from taking those first puffs that can lead to a lifetime of addiction; they have less disposable income and are less likely than already-addicted grown-ups to order their smokes from the Internet or buy them from smugglers. We know that demonstrate that every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes cuts youth smoking by 6.5 percent.

So why is it that South Carolina still charges just 7 cents a pack? Well, there are those cigarette companies, which are mighty generous with their campaign contributions and which apparently have a tighter grip on our legislators than they have even in North Carolina. Then there’s the legislators who swore a blood oath to their creepy Washington puppetmaster, Grover Norquist, to never, ever raise any kind of tax, even if it has a demonstrated ability to save lives and reduce overall government spending.

Mostly, though, we charge the lowest cigarette tax in the nation because too few S.C. voters have let their legislators know that this is unacceptable. Sad, but true.