By targeting the young, tobacco companies create a generation of nicotine addicts. Once kids are smoking, it becomes much harder for them to quit. Four out of five adult smokers started as teenagers. We need a new, practical approach to combine with our educational efforts to reverse smoking trends among teens. That comes to an additional 5 cents a cigarette.
Young people are especially vulnerable to price increases.
They just need a simple deterrent from starting in the first place. We know that raising the cost of tobacco products has reduced adolescent smoking in Canada, Oregon and California, and it will work here. An increase in the cigarette tax is such good public health policy that we could literally burn up all the money that results from an increase in the cigarette tax and still do everyone a big favor. We would have fewer people dying from the devastating effects of nicotine addiction and at the same time decrease the huge health care costs associated with tobacco use. But an increase in the tax not only would save lives, it would also bring in millions of dollars of new revenues to expand basic health care coverage to the thousands who are uninsured in our state.