House rejects tobacco prevention budget

A narrow House majority voted down the budget for the North Dakota Center For Tobacco Prevention and Control Policy on Thursday.
“We’ll get that back and get that through tomorrow (Friday),” said Majority Leader Al Carlson, R-Fargo.
The House voted against Senate Bill 2024 Thursday morning by a 46-47 vote. A motion to reconsider the bill during the chamber’s afternoon floor session also failed.
SB2024 has a total budget of $15.8 million and calls for three new full-time employees.
Carlson said House members should have given it further review.
“Tomorrow it’ll come back,” Carlson said. “I think the biggest sticking point was the three new FTEs.”
Rep. Jon Nelson, R-Rugby, admitted being caught off-guard by the vote Thursday.
“There’s just some people that have had a hard time accepting the vote of the people on Measure 3,” Nelson said.
The Center for Tobacco Prevention and Control Policy was created through Measure 3, which got 54 percent of the vote in the 2008 general election. The agency is constitutionally mandated and is required to be funded.
Measure 3 created an advisory board that shaped policy for a statewide tobacco prevention program. The program is funded through the settlement of a 1998 multistate lawsuit against the country’s largest tobacco companies.
“There’s people that, every time it comes up, no matter what it is, they’ll vote no without even listening,” Nelson said.
He put the normal number of votes against bills relating to the agency at 25-30. “Never in God’s world would I’d think there’d be a majority,” he said.
Rep. Blair Thoreson, R-Fargo, said he thought lawmakers were trying to send a message. Thoreson had voted against SB2024 on Thursday morning but voted in favor of reconsideration.
“Part of my problem is there is a lot of money being spent on things such as advertising,” he said.
Thoreson has sponsored two smoking-related bills during the session. House Bill 1253, which passed, dealt with getting proper no-smoking signs
to comply with the state’s public smoking ban.
House Concurrent Resolution 3033, which failed, called for an interim study on alternatives to prevent smoking.
Jeanne Prom, executive director of the Center For Tobacco Prevention and Control Policy, said she was perplexed by the message the House was sending.
“It was in direct conflict with the voice of the people,” Prom said.
If there’s a philosophical issue with the concept of a state tobacco prevention agency, the state shouldn’t have been involved in the original tobacco lawsuit, she said.
“Because we’ve accepted the money, we’ve accepted that responsibility,” Prom said. “It’s time to maintain the funding of this program and move on.”
http://bismarcktribune.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/house-rejects-tobacco-prevention-budget/article_fe324be4-ade9-11e2-82b8-0019bb2963f4.html

How Obama’s tobacco tax would drive down smoking rates

By Sarah Kliff, Washington Post
President Obama’s proposal to nearly double the federal tobacco tax would help fund a universal pre-K program. And, if history is any guide, it would likely have a marked impact on driving down the country’s smoking rates.
“Increasing the price of tobacco is the single most effective way to discourage kids from smoking,” CDC director Tom Frieden told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “We estimate this would result in at least 230,000 fewer kids smoking than would have smoked if the tobacco tax does not go into effect.”
Researchers have conducted over 100 studies that have “clearly and consistently demonstrated that higher cigarette and other tobacco product prices reduce tobacco use,” Frank Chaloupka, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, writes. While tobacco is an addictive substance, demand tends to be surprisingly elastic: Price increases have reliably shown to decrease cigarette purchases.
The Congressional Budget Office recently looked at what would happen if the country implemented a 50-cent per pack tax on cigarettes. It estimates, given the research we have on tobacco taxes, that the price increase would lead to 1.4 million fewer smokers by 2021.
Many of those gains would be concentrated among younger Americans, who would take up smoking at lower rates:
A few years after the hypothetical tax increase took effect, the number of 12- to 17-year-olds who smoked cigarettes would be about 5 percent lower than it would be otherwise, the number of 18-year-old smokers would be 4.5 percent lower, the number of 19- to 39-year-old smokers would be almost 4 percent lower, and the number of smokers age 40 or older would be about 1.5 percent lower.
The CBO data suggests that a cigarette tax is more successful at reducing tobacco use among shorter-term smokers, vs. older Americans who may have been smokers for a longer period of time.
Even among those who don’t fully quit, tobacco taxes do appear to effect the intensity of smoking. A 2012 study in the journal Tobacco Control interviewed thousands of smokers over a time period where states increased their tobacco taxes. It found that the most intense smokers — those who smoked 40 or more cigarettes per day — saw the steepest decline in cigarette consumption.
“The dramatic reductions in daily smoking might be driven,at least in part, by heavier smokers’ desire to reduce the number of cigarettes they smoke per day,” lead study author Patricia A Cavazos-Rehg writes. “This could be because of their comorbid health problems and/or advice from influential persons (eg, doctors/friends/family) to try to quit and/or reduce smoking.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/11/how-obamas-tobacco-tax-would-drive-down-smoking-rates/