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North Dakota puts $2,500 in anti-smoking funds toward Fargo pride festival

By: Kyle Potter, The Forum, INFORUM
BISMARCK – A division of North Dakota’s health department that aims to help smokers quit is putting $2,500 toward a gay pride festival in Fargo later this summer.
Officials from North Dakota Quits and the health department say they’re trying to target populations with high smoking rates, but it’s raised a question of whether the state should put public dollars toward endorsing a cause – whether it’s a gay pride festival or just trying to get North Dakotans to kick the habit.
Krista Fremming, director of the Department of Health’s Tobacco Control Program, said their $2,500 contribution for this summer’s pride festival is not a simple sponsorship but a means to reach the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender population, which is 70 percent more likely to smoke than the general population, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
That contribution covers setting up a booth and handing out brochures, plus advertising in the F-M Pride’s guide and on their website.
“We have a limited budget,” she said. “What we want to do is reach the people who are most in need of our services. It’s not just the LGBT community.” She said other populations targeted include Native Americans, oil workers in the Bakken region and pregnant women who struggle with quitting.
Fremming said they attend 5 to 10 such events a year, such as the Women’s Health Conference in Fargo and an expo for oil workers in Minot.
North Dakota Quits spent about $854,000 on promotion over the last two years – 15 percent of its $3.5 million in expenditures, according to the agency’s budget. Three-quarters of that spending paid for TV, magazine and newspaper advertising to recruit people into quitting smoking.
The remainder of its promotional budget is split between attending events like Fargo-Moorhead Pride and printing informational brochures to hand out and put in doctors’ offices.
ND Quits specifically targets current smokers. A separate state agency focuses on smoking prevention programs and advertising. About $2.6 million of ND Quits’ expenditures cover the direct costs of smoking cessation programs, including the cost of medications.
The agency’s programming is funded with both state and federal money. About $2.3 million of its last two-year budget came from grants from the Centers for Disease Control, which is funded with federal taxpayer dollars. Fremming said the CDC encourages each state to direct some of that money toward outreach and advertising.
North Dakota’s $3.2 million share doesn’t come through general tax revenues, but from a state fund filled with money from North Dakota’s settlement with tobacco companies. The tobacco industry agreed to pay out $206 billion over 25 years to 46 states, including North Dakota, to cover some of the health care costs of smoking. To date, North Dakota has received about $360 million.
But whether they’re from a dedicated state fund or from federal coffers, those are public dollars and that’s the problem, the North Dakota Policy Council’s Zack Tiggelaar said.
Tiggelaar, the group’s executive director, said he supports efforts to encourage smokers to quit, “but is it something that the public and the taxpayers should be funding?” he asked.
“The government shouldn’t be using taxpayer dollars to support specific causes. If the money was completely private and there were no public dollars at all, there would be no issue,” he said.
Rep. Joshua Boschee, a Democrat who represents Fargo in the Legislature and is one of the organizers of this year’s pride festival, said the festival has partnered with other anti-smoking groups in the past. He calls it an “education partnership.”
The festival runs from Aug. 8 through Aug. 11.
“Would we rather the government pays for it on the front end?” to try to curb the negative health effects of smoking, Boschee asked.
“Or do we want to pay for it in the long run when Medicaid and Medicare are covering the costs?”
http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/406135/

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/