Raising cigarette tax can help everyone breathe easier

e-mail this story discuss this issue in our forums Guest column • Cort Flint: County Council needs to pitch in on local projects (04/11/04) • Gary B. Melton: Communities must resolve to keep our children safe (04/11/04) • Thomas Ravenel: Here's how to cut $200 billion in federal spending (04/09/04) • Paul A. Barra: Vouchers will save good students from bad schools (04/07/04) • George Fletcher: Let's support the Braves in their last season here (04/06/04) More details Carol Reeves is executive director of Greenville Family Partnership, a private nonprofit tobacco, alcohol and drug prevention organization. She can be reached at 467-4099.

The start of this year's state legislative session coincided with a column in The Greenville News from House Speaker David Wilkins opposing any new tax increases, especially a cigarette tax increase. I've read letters to the editor since that argue against singling out any particular group for a tax increase (i.e., smokers). However, I believe underneath all the pomp and circumstance there's a very simple set of conditions that leaves our state no better solution than to raise this tax.

This tax increase puts our state into a "win, win, win" situation.

We'll have a health win. Tobacco use kills more people than alcohol, AIDS, car accidents, illegal drugs, murder and suicides combined. Reread that last sentence until you really grasp the magnitude of tobacco's burden.

People have argued with me that our agency should focus on other drugs that do more harm to people than tobacco. This is a common and unfortunate misconception. If you're not professionally or personally involved in the field of drug prevention, then you're probably getting your information through what you see and read in news reports: young and old victims of drunk driving and their grief-stricken families, meth lab crackdowns, I-85 marijuana/cocaine busts, and the intricate and sometimes glamorized world of illegal drug use and trafficking.

We never see or read about the number of people who die daily from smoking-related illness. It's the cause of lung cancer, and it's a major cause of coronary heart disease that leads to heart attacks. Yet our society still likes to "protect" tobacco. It's estimated that 44,000 smokers will quit if there's a tax increase. In the long run, this will save 9,100 current adult smokers from smoking-related deaths.

We'll have a youth win. Our youth smoking rate is already well over the national average: 36 percent (85,000) of our state's youth smoke, and 90 percent of adult smokers began before age 19. A tax increase will decrease youth smoking significantly and save 20,000 youth alive today from a smoking-caused death. Unfortunately, this win doesn't hold much in the eyes of most politicians.

A few weeks ago three state legislators admitted to me that it's much easier to cut out any legislation (beyond education) that has a youth spin to it since youth aren't a voting constituency. To that I would caution that even though they can't vote, our youth are paying attention to legislative decisions now that they'll remember when they do become voters, which in most instances will be when many of the current legislators will still be in office. But again, since the mentality to support youth isn't quite there yet for the legislators, I'll move to the next win, which should catch their attention.

We'll have an economic win. Who hasn't been affected by our state's recession? I've not seen where our government has been able to do more with less. Instead, I see a mad scramble for financial and other resources. Our state continues to fail in options to fund Medicaid. We were quick to grab that one-time federal assistance for Medicaid last year but are still back at square one.

And I must digress a bit here and say that some are making an incorrect link with Medicaid reform and a cigarette tax increase. This only serves as a powerful tool of distraction. Yes, a cigarette tax increase can help alleviate Medicaid costs, but it's more than that. It would generate more than $300 million in new revenue each year. We can focus on long-term, pro-business development, but what good is that if business owners continue to lose millions of dollars in productivity from smoking-related illnesses? And we'll still maintain the cycle of annual health-care cost increases.

These wins far surpass any other arguments. I'm tired of politicians hiding behind their "no-tax pledge" and failing to provide other alternatives. They automatically disqualify themselves as public servants with the responsibility of looking out for our state's best interest. And in the case of this tax, not everyone will be taxed. It is not unfair to do this, even though it's a personal choice issue.

If we choose to own a luxury car, we know we pay higher car taxes. If we choose to own a six-bedroom house, we pay more taxes. If we choose a habit that burdens every taxpayer in the state — regardless of if that taxpayer has that habit himself — then we should pay more taxes.

Can we as a state make a very logical leap from "lose, lose, lose" to "win, win, win"?