Lexington Herald editorial 6/08
http://www.kentucky.com/591/story/436955.html
Smoking bans and the Bible
State’s inaction reaps disease, death
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Pulaski County is the latest Kentucky place to consider going smoke-free.
Last week, the fiscal court in Somerset received a petition from 36 local physicians supporting a smoke-free law, reports The Commonwealth Journal.
The county commissioners also heard from an opponent who said smoking bans are un-American and that the Bible is mum on the subject of tobacco use, which he takes as approval.
Any number of judicial bodies, including the Kentucky Supreme Court, have declared that protecting the public from secondhand smoke is a constitutional and proper use of government power.
And the Bible teaches that we reap what we sow. Right now, Kentucky’s tolerance for tobacco is reaping a bumper crop of disease, death and disability, along with billions of dollars in avoidable health care costs and lost productivity.
Consider findings by a team of researchers, including University of Kentucky nursing professor Ellen Hahn, who used a well-known computer-simulation model to predict effects of tobacco-control policies.
They concluded that 1,807 lives a year could be saved by 2026 if Kentucky made a stronger effort to prevent and discourage smoking.
The study was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and published last month in the Southern Medical Journal.
Of all the ways to discourage smoking, the study says, three would have the biggest immediate impact: price, smoke-free laws and media campaigns.
Kentucky has the 46th- lowest cigarette tax and some of America’s cheapest cigarettes.
The state has never had a statewide media campaign, and Kentucky youth receive little exposure to anti-smoking advertising.
Lexington, Louisville and a few other places have smoke-free laws. But there are no state-level clean-air laws.
Kentucky is No. 1 in smoking, lung cancer and lung cancer deaths, but 39th in tobacco-control activities.
In other words, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
The study used goals set by Healthy People 2010, an initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which include taxing cigarettes at $2 a pack.
The tax in Kentucky is 69 cents — 39 cents levied by the federal government and 30 cents by the state. The state Senate this year blocked a chance to ease the state budget crunch with a modest cigarette tax increase. There’s lots of room for improvement there, too.
Kentucky makes smoking cheap and easy and pays a high price as a result. More than 7,500 Kentuckians a year die directly from smoking. That doesn’t even count victims of secondhand smoke and smoking-related fires.
And the number of smoking-caused deaths will increase, the study predicts, if our tobacco-control policies stay the same. Â