But Georgia did not. During the past 15 years, other states nearly tripled the average excise tax on cigarettes, from 14 cents a pack to almost 39 cents, hoping that higher prices would reduce smoking, especially among teenagers. Such a program, the CDC said, would discourage young people from starting to smoke, help current smokers stop, restrict non-smokers' exposure to secondhand smoke and fight disproportionate smoking rates among ethnic and racial minorities. Most states are spending nickels and dimes per capita. What our research is showing is there is a relationship between the level of investment and the impact on the health indicators of youth smoking rates and adult smoking rates and environmental smoke exposure.
Larger investment leads to larger changes.
The stakes are high, he said. One featured a group of teenage girls making harassing telephone calls to magazines that run tobacco ads. And they have been willing to put their names and efforts on the line to show us it can be done. In the campaign's first year, smoking rates dropped from 27.4 percent to 25.2 percent among Florida high school students and from 18.5 percent to 15 percent among middle-school students. Those figures represented the largest annual decline among those age groups in any state since 1980.