It will scarcely come as a surprise to readers of JAMA Internal Medicine, the house organ of this country's medical association, that a third of Arkansas' deaths from cancer can be attributed to smoking.
It's just as mama always told us. They don't call 'em coffin nails for nothing. Wouldn't you know it, when Arkansas finally takes the national lead in a statistical study, it would be one that no state would envy. It was certainly no surprise to Gary Wheeler, M.D., the state's chief medical officer. He's hoping this bit of old news repackaged as new would impel "state legislators to go to the revival tent and re-think" their priorities. Amen and Hallelujah, Dr. Wheeler, and more power to you and your allies in this fight.
"What we are seeing now," says Dr. Wheeler, "reflects what was happening for 20 or 30 years. Other states, like California, have been using known effective tools for limiting tobacco use and made stark progress." Which explains why he's such a staunch advocate of anti-tobacco campaigns. For, as newspapermen have long known, it pays to advertise. So let's broaden our Clean Indoor Air laws and ordinances to cover all public businesses. And while we're at it, raise the age required to buy cigarettes from 18 to 21. If young people are fated to die from cancer, let's see if the state can't encourage them to live without them, and without all the other sicknesses the demon tobacco carries with it.
"From a public-health point of view," Dr. Wheeler continues, "not using all these tools, or [using them] at a non-effective level is like taking birth control half the days. You really should do it right. We need to focus on this issue and how much it's costing us in terms of dollars and lives." Back in 2009, for example, it cost Arkansas more than a billion dollars, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Back then, it was costing Arkansas "only" 16,344 lives a year. Ask not for whom this bell tolls; it tolls for all those being led astray in the once good names of private enterprise and open competition.
The tobacco industry isn't about to give up this mortal combat without throwing all the money and lobbyists it can command into the fight. In 2014 alone, the death-by-smoking industry pumped more than $160,000 into the campaigns of this state's politicians. That's according to the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in State Politics, which keeps its eye on such disgusting details. For in the years between 2000 and '08, it invested from $34,000 to $42,000 in this state's political campaigners, then raised the ante to $78,850 in 2010 and to $123,225 in 2012. These people mean business, specifically and only their own.
All of which helps explain why the American Lung Association gives Arkansas a D or F grade when it comes to preventing deaths associated with tobacco use. The association reports that Arkansas has been spending $16.6 million on programs to prevent deaths from tobacco use. But the tobacco lobby has had to report that the state's $1.15-a-pack cigarette tax puts Arkansas 33rd in the Union, well below the national average of $1.65 a pack. A modest price indeed for life.
Our legislators, it seems, are providing a less than sterling example of how to save lives. On the contrary, the message from entirely too many of them to the state's youth is simple enough: Cough and be damned. Which is what their pound-wise, life-foolish policies amount to. Here the genius of American advertising, which once made halitosis a disease to be feared and the latest car model a must-have, and convinced us that diamonds are for life, has been reduced to a subsidiary role in fighting a real threat.
Instead of dying for an unworthy bad cause, why not live for a good one?
Editorial on 10/27/2016