Smoking-Prevention Work Criticized in Most of U.S.

Washington Post - Tuesday, January 10, 2006

A handful of states are doing a commendable job in reducing smoking and harm from tobacco, but most are not and the federal government is failing almost completely, according to a review by the American Lung Association.

In its fourth annual state of tobacco control report, the association gave 40 states and the District an F for their use of billions of dollars paid by tobacco companies under a 1998 master settlement of their suits against the industry. The report said the states had not met minimum standards for spending on programs that prevent people from smoking and help smokers to stop.

The federal government earned largely failing grades from the group for its lagging efforts to control tobacco use. It earned F's for its low taxes on cigarettes, its failure to give the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco, and its minimal funding of anti-smoking efforts. The Bush administration got a D for signing an international treaty to curb tobacco use but declining to send it to the Senate for confirmation.

All was not bleak, however. In a first, the association granted one state -- Maine -- an A in all four categories of state tobacco control it graded: efforts to keep public places smoke-free, cigarette taxes, effectiveness of programs to keep cigarettes from young people and overall tobacco control spending.

"Some states are taking the initiative on reducing tobacco use, but I'd have to say there's a real lack of leadership and initiative on the federal level," said John L. Kirkwood, president of the organization. With even tobacco-growing states such as Kentucky raising their cigarette taxes, he said, the federal government's failure to raise the 39-cents-a-pack federal excise tax for almost a decade is noteworthy.

Most experts say raising the price of cigarettes is the quickest way to reduce smoking, although several state anti-smoking campaigns also have been effective.

Those campaigns were supposed to be increasingly well funded under the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the tobacco industry and the states and the District, under which the industry will pay more than $240 billion over 25 years to compensate for past and future health care costs stemming from its products. The companies already have distributed more than $55 billion, but less than 10 percent of that money has gone for smoking-prevention programs -- about one-third of the amount recommended as a minimum by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the report, only Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Mississippi and Wyoming have committed substantial amounts of settlement money to smoking prevention.

Tobacco control advocates, including those at the century-old American Lung Association, are particularly discouraged that President Bush has not sent to the Senate the international Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world's first public health treaty. The United States signed the treaty but, unlike the more than 100 nations that have ratified it, has made no effort to ratify and implement it.

-- Marc Kaufman

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